[3] Brinton summarizes the revolutionary process as moving from "financial breakdown, [to] organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown … revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists.

According to Brinton, while "we must not expect our revolutions to be identical" (p. 226), three of the four (the English, French and Russian) began "in hope and moderation", reached "a crisis in a reign of terror", and ended "in something like dictatorship—Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin".

These include problems functioning—"government deficits, more than usual complaints over taxation, conspicuous governmental favoring of one set of economic interests over another, administrative entanglements and confusions".

Financial problems play an important role, as "three of our four revolutions started among people who objected to certain taxes, who organized to protest them ….

In each revolution a short "honeymoon" period follows the fall of the old regime, lasting until the "contradictory elements" among the victorious revolutionaries assert themselves (p. 91).

In England the "Presbyterian moderates in Parliament" were rivals of "the illegal government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army" (p. 135).

Even their small numbers are an advantage, giving them "the ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions" (p. 154).

Terror stemming from the abundance of summary executions, foreign and civil war, struggle for power; virtue in the form of puritanical "organized asceticism" and suppression of vices such as drunkenness, gambling and prostitution (p. 180).

In its ardor, revolutionary "tragicomedy" touches the average citizen, for whom "politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable … as food and drink", their "job, and the weather" (p. 177).

Along with centralization, lethal force in suppression of opposition, rule by committee, radical policies include the spreading of "the gospel of their revolution" to other countries.

Jameson[5] that 'sober Americans of 1784 lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and extravagance of society' (p. 235-6).

In France, the revolution did away with "the old overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited from, the thousand-year struggle" between Crown and feudal nobility.

Brinton concludes that despite their ambitions, the political revolutions he studied brought much less lasting social changes than the disruptions and changes of "what is loosely called the Industrial Revolution", and the top-down reforms of Mustapha Kemal's reforms in Turkey, and the Meiji Restoration or post-World War II MacArthur era in Japan (p. 246).