Updated: August 26, 2026
Before a Revolution Can Begin, the Existing World Must Stop Feeling Inevitable
The American Revolution presents us with an obvious question: Why did the American colonists rebel against Great Britain?
We can answer that question by studying taxes, representation, imperial policy, the aftermath of the French and Indian War, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Act, Lexington and Concord, and the many other developments that damaged relations between Britain and its American colonies.
But there is another question that may be even more fundamental:
How does a society come to believe that a political order it has long accepted as normal is no longer
acceptable?
That question emerged toward the end of my conversation with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld about the Enlightenment and the intellectual foundations of the American Revolution. And the more I have thought about our exchange, the more important that question has seemed to me.
Most People Accept the World They Inherit
Dr. Rosenfeld made a deceptively simple observation during our conversation: people generally find the world in which they live to be normal.
That is worth thinking about.
The American colonists did not wake up every morning wondering why they were subjects of the British king. For generations, British rule was simply part of the political world they inhabited.
Of course, that did not mean colonists never complained about government. People have probably complained about governments for as long as governments have existed. But complaining about a tax, a law or a government official is fundamentally different from concluding that the political order itself must be overturned.
As Dr. Rosenfeld put it during our conversation, the harder question is how people begin “seeing their own world as strange.”
That strikes me as one of the most interesting ways of thinking about revolution.
Normal
“In every era, people find the world they live in to be normal.” Watch Dr. Rosenfeld discuss this at 49:26.
Revolution Requires More Than Grievances
A grievance tells us that something is wrong. A revolutionary idea suggests that things could be otherwise. That distinction matters.
For much of human history, people lived within political and social arrangements that most of us today would consider profoundly unequal. Kings ruled by hereditary right. Aristocratic privilege was embedded in law and custom. Political participation was restricted. Social hierarchies were treated as natural.
People certainly resisted particular abuses within those systems. But challenging an abuse is not the same thing as challenging the assumptions that make the system itself seem legitimate. This is where the Enlightenment becomes important to the story of the American Revolution.
In my full interview with Dr. Rosenfeld, we discussed Denis Diderot’s description of an intellectual “revolution in men’s minds.” The important part of that formulation is not simply that people acquired new political ideas. They increasingly began questioning how they knew what they knew and why inherited institutions should command their obedience.
In other words, the Enlightenment encouraged what Dr. Rosenfeld called “thinking about thinking.”
That intellectual habit could have revolutionary consequences.
The Enlightenment Did Not Cause the American Revolution
This does not mean that Enlightenment philosophy caused Americans to revolt. That would make history far too simple.
The Revolution arose from political disputes, imperial policies, economic interests, local conflicts, accumulated grievances and events that unfolded over many years. As Dr. Rosenfeld emphasized in our interview, ideas do not operate like a spark dropped onto political tinder.
But ideas can do something else. They can expand the range of possibilities people are capable of imagining.
Concepts such as liberty, equality, natural rights and popular sovereignty gave eighteenth-century people intellectual tools with which to reconsider political arrangements that had previously appeared natural or unavoidable.
The existing world could now be measured against another possible world. And once that comparison becomes possible, something important has changed.
When the Familiar Becomes Unacceptable
This helps me think differently about the revolutionary generation.
The extraordinary thing was not simply that American colonists became angry with Parliament.
It was that enough of them eventually became willing to contemplate something that would have seemed extraordinary only years earlier: severing their political relationship with Britain and establishing independent governments of their own.
Think about the magnitude of that mental transition.
These people were not being asked merely to support a different tax policy or elect different representatives. Revolution threatened lives, property, families, commerce and social stability. Its outcome was uncertain. Failure could mean ruin, imprisonment or death.
Yet at some point, for enough people, maintaining the existing order came to seem less acceptable than risking an entirely different one.
Dr. Rosenfeld describes revolution as an extraordinary willingness to upset what people already knew and expected.
That is the part of revolution that can disappear when we study it backward.
We know that independence came. They did not.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784), 1767 Portrait. Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which he co-created with Jean le Rond d’Alembert in 1751.
Watch Dr. Rosenfeld discuss Diderot’s contribution to the Age of Enlightenment at 4:24 in the above video.
Ideas Matter Because Alternatives Have to Be Imagined
Near the conclusion of our interview, I asked Dr. Rosenfeld what single point she wanted people to remember about the Enlightenment and the American Revolution.
Her answer was simple:
“Ideas matter.”
Not because an idea automatically produces an event. Ideas matter because before people can fundamentally change their world, they must first be capable of imagining that another world is possible.
That may be one of the Enlightenment’s most important connections to the American Revolution. It helped people ask questions about institutions, authority and political arrangements that had long been inherited as part of the ordinary structure of life.
And perhaps that is where revolutions really begin.
Not with the first shot. Not even with the first political grievance. But with the moment when enough people look at something their society has long treated as normal and begin asking: Why does it have to be this way?
About This Post’s Featured Image
Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y.C.—painted decades later—offers a romanticized view of the July 9, 1776 destruction of the king’s statue after the Declaration of Independence was read in New York City. Historical accounts suggest the actual crowd and the statue itself differed significantly from this later depiction.
Unless otherwise indicated, all images in AAR—including those in this post—are in the public domain.
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