Social scientists studying revolutions have increasingly argued that explanations of revolutions that do not include subjective factors, such as culture, are inadequate. The failure to explain the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 is forceful testimony to this inadequacy. But the way in which cultural aspects are being added to existing approaches tends to undermine past advances in studying revolutions. Recent historiography of the French Revolution provides an example of a more thorough-going approach to political culture. A productive synthesis that both preserves past advances and better explains the revolutions of 1989 is achieved by analyzing the effects of cultural change on state elites.

Rising per capita incomes generated by rural development helped make the industrialization of Europe possible. The current dominant approaches to rural development in European history stress the role of either local class relations or state institutions. Both approaches ignore the role of local institutions. Although class relations and state institutions were important in rural development in European history, the regional analysis presented here shows that these factors alone were not enough. Also important was a suitable institutional structure at the local level. Local institutions and associated class relations also shaped when enclosure occurred and what its effects were and thus need to be taken into account by those assessing the efficiency value of enclosure.

With original data from Mexico I argue that political divisions among capitalists are determined by their varying political relationships to other organized classes. I demonstrate that in 1975 a minority of agrarian capitalists formed a movement for organizational autonomy from the government to defend private property, free enterprise, and capitalism. The majority of capitalists, however, rejected this movement as “unpatriotic.” Neither the heterogeneity of the capitalists’ markets nor the various ways in which state policy impinged on their material interests explains this ideological divide. Rather, the data suggest that the agrarian capitalists’ variant experiences with peasant struggles from below (and the contingent outcomes of such struggles) significantly shaped their political agendas and, thus, their conflicts over organizational forms. Capitalist interests, I conclude, are not fixed by an iron law of profitability any more than intraclass differences are resolvable in the monologically simple manner commonly assumed. Rather, capitalist agendas emerge dialogically through the political and ideological conflicts engendered by organized challenges from below.

Progressive Era campaigns to establish juvenile courts maintained that police and criminal courts failed to distinguish between children and adults. They suggested that law enforcement agencies either sentenced juveniles as if they were adults, imposing excessive punishments, or let kids go, failing to discipline them and encouraging them to commit further crimes. However, this case study of juvenile arrests in turn-of-the-century Detroit indicates that, before the creation of juvenile court, criminal justice institutions had more complex interactions with delinquent youth than has been recognized previously. Boys typically were arrested for very different offenses than were adults, and the police and courts often segregated children and adolescents from the harshest elements of the criminal justice system. The police sought every opportunity to decide the outcome of juvenile arrests themselves, without a court hearing, particularly if boys had committed only status offenses such as truancy or if crime victims decided not to prosecute. When juveniles did appear in criminal courts, judges found ways to soften their experiences, rarely jailing younger boys and instead sentencing some to reform school for ostensible rehabilitation. After 1900, efforts to protect young offenders from criminal justice institutions expanded as specially assigned police officers increasingly sought to discipline delinquents prior to arrest and the courts introduced an unofficial form of probation. Rather than constituting a break from the past, the creation of Detroit’s juvenile court in 1907 mainly made official juvenile offenders’ growing separation from the criminal justice system.