Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith is a 1980 book by historian James H. Billington about the spread of ideas.

The book takes its name from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, and it attempts to investigate the passion for revolutionary change which developed strongly in Central Europe and Russia starting with the French Revolution of 1789.

Unlike many other histories of revolutions and revolutionaries Billington does not focus on events and social causes leading to popular uprisings.

Instead he follows a sometimes almost invisible thread of incendiary ideas sometimes transferred via occult societies, but all having common genesis in the motto of the French Revolution: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité".

Billington equates the two schools of thought, claiming that though socially opposed in outside appearance, in their own respective way (one promoting individualism, the other collectivism), each is striving toward establishing these mutual goals, viz.