Rather than viewing the American Revolution from a purely domestic perspective, Jonathan Israel, in ‘The Expanding Blaze’ chooses instead to focus on the relatively neglected theme of its “social, cultural, and ideological impact on the rest of the world” up to and including the Revolutions of 1848.

The charge of relative neglect is justified given that the concept of the ‘Atlantic Revolution’ only emerged with the publication in 1959 of ‘The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800” and because few followed in R. R. Palmer’s footsteps.

In doing so, Israel contends that the American Revolution “proved fundamental to the shaping of democratic modernity” insofar as it “commended the demolition” of the three pillars of the ancien regime by its challenges to monarchy, aristocracy and religious authority and by its creation of a new kind of polity “embodying a diametrically opposed social vision built on shared liberty and equal civil rights.”

There is obviously much in what Israel says, as the American revolutionaries were often publicly revered by their would-be imitators; the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French people to the American people, is the most obvious and abiding expression of this sense of indebtedness, which is also manifest in the way in which the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was modelled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and not just because Jefferson assisted Lafayette.

But Israel goes further, following Henry F. May’s ‘The Enlightenment in America’, in claiming that the American Revolution provided two sets of exemplars for their trans-Atlantic followers. Thus Franklin, Jefferson and Paine – the “architects of the radically reforming American Revolution” - provided inspiration for those who admired the American Revolution in its “universalizing, secularizing, and egalitarian aspects”, whilst Adams, Hamilton, Morris, Jay, and, to a certain extent, Washington - the men associated with defence of the pre-Revolution status quo - provided a similar function for conservative or ‘aristocratic’ republicans.

It is true that the impact of the American Revolution was wider ranging geographically and longer lasting than the seventeenth-century English revolutions of 1640-1660 and 1688 because in the meantime Israel's 'enlighteners' predisposed the transatlantic intelligentsia towards embracing radical change. But this also illustrates the fact that transatlantic influence flowed in both directions. As Israel himself states “American ‘moderates’ exalted Locke, the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, and especially British ‘mixed government’ as the proper ground-plan for America and all societies”.

In short, Israel’s book effectively regards the ‘cultural turn’ of the late twentieth century as an intellectual cul-de-sac, intelligently expands upon the work of Palmer and May, puts the role of ideas centre stage and successfully breathes life back into the concept of the ‘Atlantic revolution’ or ‘revolutions’.

If the book has a fault it lies in Israel’s very emphasis on the ideological. He asserts, for example, that the ideologies directing revolutionary upheaval “far more often mold and exploit than derive from social or economic pressures” so that revolutions “are not shaped by sociability or general attitudes but by organized revolutionary vanguards … as a means of capturing, taking charge of, and interpreting the discontent generated by social and economic pressures”. This is true as far as it goes but it does not take account of all the factors in play.

At the risk of sounding schematic, a successful revolution, like the American, has at least three preconditions, namely, the delegitimation of the existing regime; the legitimation of the revolutionary position; and the construction of a force outside the control of the state.

Intellectuals are clearly crucial to the first two of these processes (which are effectively mirror images of one another) but anyone wishing to be more than an armchair revolutionary must then get their hands dirty, although constructing a force outside the control of the state is made immeasurably easier if the would-be revolutionary can exploit the very international dimension to which Israel draws so much attention. That is to say, this becomes much more straightforward if one can enlist practical assistance from some foreign power or powers. In the case of the Bolshevik revolution that help was provided by Germany (funding and transporting Lenin and helping to delegitimize the existing regime on the battlefield). In the case of the American Revolution the rebels received invaluable aid from the French, Dutch and Spanish.

So, yes, Israel sheds much new light on the way in which the American Revolution provided the ideological underpinning for a whole host of revolutionary movements but in the final analysis the reason why the Irish revolutionaries failed and the Greek revolutionaries succeeded lies not in the ideological sphere but in the fact that French intervention in the former case proved less effective than British intervention in the latter. A book which discusses Greek Independence without discussing the Battle of Navarino Bay is one that is missing a trick, however commendable it may be in other respects.

The topic appealed to me but I only have Kindle capability