The book concludes with a brief epilogue that recapitulates the exploration of cognition and the arts.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 describes the imagery and production of the murals of the Old Testament in the Camposanto of Pisa completed in by Benozzo Gozzoli in 1484. Archbishop Filippo de’ Medici’s (1426–74) role in the commission is placed in the expanded context of his patronage and diplomacy throughout a long, distinguished career. These murals, painted during Pisa’s subjection to Florence, enhanced an impressive locus of Pisan identity and pride, while signalling the political reality of Florentine control.

This chapter analyzes the popular dimensions of Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution, using an original dataset of protests during the post-revolutionary transition. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionaries were unable to consolidate the social support of the revolution, and that this failure allowed counterrevolutionaries to channel broad disaffections with revolutionary rule into a popular movement for restoration. The dataset covers the final eighteen months of the transition and includes approximately 7,500 contentious events sourced from the major Arabic-language newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal, first, the extent to which social mobilization persisted after the end of the eighteen-day uprising. The transition period was awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, infrastructure problems, and unmet labor demands. Second, statistical analyses show that this discontent came to be directed against Mohamed Morsi’s government. The earliest and most persistent anti-Morsi protests emerged in places where the population had long been highly mobilized over socio-economic grievances. Later, they also began to emerge in places with large numbers of old regime supporters. Ultimately, these two groups – discontented Egyptians and committed counterrevolutionaries – came together to provide the social base for the movement that swept the military back to power.

This chapter analyzes Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, one of the most prominent counterrevolutions of the 21st century. Drawing on approximately 100 original interviews with Egyptian politicians and activists, it argues that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented them with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support. Specifically, the chapter makes the following claims: (1) revolutionary forces began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (2) after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, his administration’s poor management of the post-revolutionary governance trilemma, particularly its decision to prioritize the concerns of old regime elements over those of his secularist allies, caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (3) these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a counterrevolutionary coup. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that, though the task facing Egypt’s revolutionary leaders was not easy, a counterrevolutionary end to the transition was far from a foregone conclusion.