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Some of Skocpol’s critics have raised questions about the structural argument of her thesis. This, they say, leaves little room for active agency on the part of people. How did peasant groups revolt? Did leaders not play a part in the revolutions? Could things have turned out differently if individual actors and groups had chosen alternative courses of action? Are individuals so powerless to influence change in the face of structural pressures?

A further criticism is of Skocpol’s notion of ‘cause’ in this context. Some contend that what her argument amounts to is really a set of sophisticated generalizations in relation to the cases she studied. And, though such generalizations work quite well for these specific cases, this is not the same thing as a general causal theory of social revolutions. Does the thesis hold for, say, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in (former) Czechoslovakia in 1989, or the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa during the ‘Arab Spring’ which spread from Tunisia in 2010–11? So, critics say, despite setting out to discover the underlying causes and nature of social revolutions, in the end, Skocpol’s study showed that each revolution has to be studied in its own right.