Sandra Day O'Connor Institute for American Democracy

Talking Revolution, with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Sandra Day O'Connor Institute for American Democracy

There is broad scholarly agreement that our current political world owes much to what Thomas Paine was the first to call the "age of revolutions"—that is, the several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century decades during which revolutions rocked the globe.

But what gave rise to the age of revolutions? Why, suddenly, were era-spanning monarchies being toppled? Were revolutionaries motivated by democratic ideals, as some have argued, or, as others believe, merely advancing a newer version of illiberalism? And in what ways, if any, was the American Revolution exceptional? Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, author of the new book The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, joins the Institute to discuss.

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