Fire in the minds of men : origins of the revolutionary faith

Maintaining that the history of modern revolutions is the history of people in the grip of ideas, Billington looks at revolutionary movements and the passionate convictions and personalities of their founders "This book seeks to trace the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of our time: ... the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority" (Introduction), as demonstrated in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when two ideals, "equality and fraternity--split apart and became the founding tenets of two separate revolutionary traditions" (Jacket)