Book Review

The American and French revolutions were the great transforming events of the eighteenth century. But how are we to understand these two very different revolutions? Why did the American Revolution have no Georges Danton, Jean Paul Marat, or Maximilien Robespierre, and why did the French Revolution have no George Washington, John Adams, or James Madison?	1
Susan Dunn has written an insightful comparative intellectual history that attempts to answer those questions. Sister Revolutions presents what we might call a Tocquevillean analysis of the American and French revolutions. Dunn examines how American and French revolutionaries viewed their competing revolutions, how they understood the very idea of revolution, and how they conceived and institutionalized principles such as liberty, equality, rights, and the rule of law.	2
Ideas and thinking revolutionaries loom large in this book. Dunn's modus operandi is to explain the causes and consequences of both revolutions as largely the result of the intended ideas of philosophers self-consciously put into practice by the decisions and actions of political actors. Dunn's method follows what has now clearly become the dominant historiographical school of the American revolutionary period—the "philosophic" school associated with Ralph Lerner and Michael Zuckert.	. . .