Except for America Revolutions Have Failed: The Introduction

Revolutions are born with poetry on their lips. They promise a hope filled dawn after a long night, justice after generations of abuse and neglect, a equality where none may trample the weak. But there is a stubborn pattern in the record: when the smoke clears, most revolutions yield something worse than what they overthrew or, after a fevered interval, they circle back to an all too familiar power. The names change; the methods harden as the dream gives way to tribunals, ration lines, and a just a different group of elite untouchables.

This book advances a simple, testable claim: since the fifteenth century, no revolution, apart from the American Revolution, has produced a long-term, stable government that is a clear improvement over its predecessor in both human rights and broad-based economic outcomes.

The American exception was not a lucky break; it is a guide. The American Revolution succeeded not because it was more radical, but because it was deliberately less anchored in ordered liberty, and institutional continuity, with a sober estimate of human nature that neither idolized nor despised the citizen.

I will admit that my thesis is controversial, and it should be. History worth reading should resist easy assumptions. In the chapters ahead I will attempt to make a sustained case, centering on a rigorous comparison of the two major revolutions, French and American, while also considering the “Springtime of the Peoples” in 1848 as a central demonstration of hope followed by reversion.

It is important that we take a hard look at the promises versus the outcomes; the declarations versus the prisons; the bread prices as well as the bills of rights; and the written constitutions versus the actual lived out reality of those constitutions. I will ask the questions many moderns avoid asking: what kind of freedom actually lasts? What counts as success?

Ambiguity hides in grand words. Before I proceed, here are the working definitions used throughout:

• Revolution: a rapid, extra-constitutional overthrow of a regime that attempts a wholesale remaking of political authority (and often society) rather than a negotiated transition or reform within established legal frameworks.

• Long-term: durable across multiple generations—institutions that persist and peacefully adapt through major shocks.

• Stable government: predictable rule of law, low political violence, and regular, peaceful transfers of power.

• Improvement: a sustained advance over the prior regime in human rights (speech, conscience, due process, protection from arbitrary imprisonment and execution; the gradual inclusion of previously excluded persons) and broad-based economic outcomes (growth, opportunity, property security, and rising living standards for the many, not just a vanguard).

By these criteria, many celebrated and historic upheavals falter upon inspection. They promise rights but suspend them “until the enemies of the people are purged.” They vow prosperity but destroy price stability and property confidence. They draft constitutions while consolidating power in committees of safety, vanguards, or cults of personality. Their famous first year, always hopeful, cannot stand for the fifth, tenth, twentieth, or fiftieth.

Method: History as Accountability

I will measure revolutions not by intentions, but by outcomes across three layers:

1) Institutional design (separation of powers, federal structure, checks and balances, independent courts).

2) Social preconditions (civil society, local self-government, religious and moral capital, habits of association).

3) Economic foundations (property rights, tax and debt regimes, openness to commerce, predictable currency).

Wherever possible, I will compare like with like: what a regime promised, what it delivered, and what endured. I will also separate reforms from revolutions. A constitution amended through established procedures is not the same as a midnight purge; a monarch constrained by law is not the same as a monarch in exile replaced by a committee with the power of life and death.

Why the American Revolution Stands Apart

The American Revolution was a paradox: a revolution to conserve liberties already claimed within the English constitutional tradition. Americans cast off imperial control, yes but they did so by appealing to law, not abolishing it. They argued that Parliament and Crown had violated the long-standing rights of Englishmen, rights rooted in common law, charters, and custom. The war was fought primarily to restore these rights under self-government, not to reinvent the man.

Three features followed:

1) Continuity with constraint. Colonies kept their legislatures, courts, and habits of local self-rule. The shift was from imperial oversight to federal union, not from law to will.

2) Distrust of concentrated power. The Constitution divided authority horizontally (separation of powers) and vertically (federalism), betting on structure over sincerity.

3) Realism about human nature. The founders assumed virtue would be mixed with vice; they built mechanisms to channel both.

I would warn the reader not to overly romanticize early America because it carried the grinding contradiction of slavery and other exclusions. And yet, the constitutional work of the American Revolution allowed for future expansion of rights without another revolution: through amendments, legislative reforms, and social movements working through law.

My claim is not that America began complete and perfect, but that it was organized to be repairable, and it has repaired itself again and again without recourse to a guillotine.

Why the French Revolution Failed on Its Own Terms

The French Revolution began with noble words amid starving peasants. It promised liberty, equality, and fraternity. But after a brief constitutional moment it embraced the logic of emergency: the Terror—where suspicion became guilt and “virtue” justified violence.

Property grew insecure, the currency collapsed, and factions devoured one another until Napoleon imposed stability by turning France into an empire. Order was restored under centralized, authoritarian rule backed by the army, censorship, and a tight bureaucracy, not the liberal, constitutional regime France had hoped for. The arc from the Estates-General to Napoleon did not vindicate the premise of the earlier revolutionaries, it refuted it.

What went wrong?

• Misconception regarding human nature. When the “new man” failed to appear, the scaffolds did.

• Institutional vacuum. Traditional checks such as nobility, Church, and parliaments were destroyed faster than replacements were found. With no counterweights, the emergency became permanent.

• Economic vandalism. Confiscations, price controls, and political money detached the economy from trust. Commerce needs predictability; the Revolution offered decrees.

1848: Springtime, Then Winter

Across Europe in 1848, crowds demanded constitutions, a free press, and national self-determination.

For a few months, liberalization seemed to sweep the continent by popular acclaim alone. Then came the counterstroke: monarchies regrouped, armies retook the streets, and provisional freedoms narrowed. Within two years, most of the old order, or something close to it, was back. The ‘Year of Revolutions’ didn’t even last a year.

Anticipating Objections

England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) was largely a legal-parliamentary settlement—a negotiated transfer that reaffirmed liberties and curbed royal abuse. That was reform, not revolution.

Meiji Japan (1868) is called the Meiji Restoration because leaders said they were restoring imperial rule to the emperor (ending the Tokugawa shogunate). The Japanese term ōsei fukko literally means “restoration of imperial government."

India (1947) The post-Partition violence of 1947 in India was primarily communal, with religion as the main identity line, but also fueled by political, territorial, and social factors tied to state breakdown and mass displacement.

South Africa (1994) The end of apartheid was a negotiated transition and constitutional refounding, not a Jacobin-style purge or Bolshevik-type seizure. Power shifted through talks (CODESA), elections, and a new constitution—state-building by agreement, not terror by a vanguard.

“Isn’t America just lucky?” Geography and inheritance mattered—but that is precisely the point: success favored nations that respected constraints, drew on existing moral and legal capital, and built with the grain of human nature.

Why This Matters

“Revolution” still seduces. The underlying promise is always the same: if we tear down the existing institutions, paradise will come. Wisdom requires us to remember the examples of the past, that liberty planted in shallow soil withers soon.

We need to see that the hard work of reform, patient, principled, incremental, has freed more people, protected more conscience, and created more prosperity than a thousand manifestos.

This book is a simple and incomplete audit. If my thesis is correct, we must choose the slower, sturdier arts of a free people: law, habit, persuasion, compromise, local responsibility, and the humility to live with rivals under shared rules.

The American Revolution shines, not because its architects were demigods, but because they rejected politics as salvation. Following a realist view of human nature, from Madison more than Aristotle, they framed a republic where ambition checks ambition, power limits power, and law protects the weak from both the mighty and the mob alike.