Sociologist Jeffery M. Paige is the author of two important comparative works on revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century. The first examined cases of agrarian revolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, while the second focused on Central America. More than two decades later, he has produced a new comparative study that takes a surprising tack. Whereas in the past Paige deployed a structural economic and political framework for analyzing revolution, he now adopts a primarily cultural one. The cases that he takes up are “indigenous revolutions” at the turn of the twenty-first century in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian Andes, a region rarely considered in the global geography of revolution.
Paige's concept of revolution in the new book emphasizes subjective consciousness, as seen in the political actors' utopian imagination. The aspiration to “turn the world upside down” is indeed a classic feature of revolutions, but less often...
