Talking Revolution, with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

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.