According to Brinton, while “we must not expect our revolutions to be identical” (p. 226), three of the four (the English, French and Russian) began “in hope and moderation”, reached “a crisis in a reign of terror,” and ended “in something like dictatorship — Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin”. The exception is the American Revolution, which “does not quite follow this pattern”. (p. 24)

Though I’ve been studying the bourgeois/liberal revolutions recently, I haven’t yet read “Conceived in Liberty.” I guess those 4 volumes have proven a little too daunting! But that interpretation basically fits with what else I’ve gathered. The revolution itself was engendered by some very radical theorists (I just read Bailyn’s “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” which illustrates this very well) & had a radical phase or ‘terror’ with the persecution of real & suspected Loyalists (the recent “Tories” by Thomas Allen is good), but ended up much more moderate/conservative. Crane Brinton also picks out the American Revolution as the outlier of the of the four (English, French, American & Russian) in a number of respects including this one.

What started e.g. with Sam Adams & Tom Paine ended with John Adams, Madison, Washington, Franklin (as well as assorted fruits and nuts like George Mason & Jefferson for spice!)

I’ll also add one reason I somewhat suspect the relevance of my reading about these older revolutions and neglect of more recent ones to situations like Tunisia & Egypt is the presence of a global mass media. I suspect this is a game changer in the course of political change as much as the ideology of nationalism at an earlier time.