How did someone from your background come to write such a book?"
The questioner was Perry Anderson, and the query was directed at me, Theda Skocpol, as the two of us sat together on a wintry day in 1978, eating lunch at Grenders Den, down Boylston street from Harvard Square. I had just finished the manuscript for States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and ChinaJ Anderson and I knew one another by reputation, but this was our first personal discussion. I had described the arguments and the historical scope of my new book to him, and he had then asked me about my background. Where had I come from; and what was my education? Anderson was himself the author of a recently published two-volume masterpiece, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, a study that analyzed European civilization and European states over two thousand years of history. 2
The connections of Perry Anderson's comparative-historical work to his past were comprehensible, for Anderson had received an elite British education majoring in languages at Oxford, and was a non-professional leftist intellectual of independent means. But as I had explained to him, I was "nothing special" in American terms. I grew up in the Midwest, in Michigan, where both sets of grandparents had been farmers, my father a high school teacher, and my mother a homemaker and substitute teacher. Nor had I gone to an elite university. My undergraduate education, with a major in Sociology, was at a huge, state-supported "land-grant" institution, Michigan State University. Only after I married a physics major and completed my BA. degree there, did we make our way to Harvard for graduate study. At Harvard, I ended up studying with Barrington Moore, Jr., along with Seymour Martin