This article examines the concepts of revolution that political actors employed during the age of Atlantic revolutions (c.1760–1830) and how they used these concepts to analyze, compare, and connect the era's political events. The article begins by briefly recapitulating the evolving meanings of revolution in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. The capacious concept of a “revolution of government” that developed in the eighteenth century remained in regular use into the 1820s as a key conceptual tool to imaginatively connect otherwise disparate political movements/phenomena. Revolutionaries also created two new concepts, “total” and “limited” revolution, that were crucial to drawing political distinctions, especially between the American and French revolutions. These three concepts of revolution, I argue, all gave late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century actors an unusual degree of flexibility—which did not exist before or after the period—in describing the temporal and causal dynamics of revolutionary change.

本文探讨了政治行动者在大西洋革命时代（约1760-1830）所使用的革命概念，以及他们如何使用这些概念来分析、比较和联系该时代的政治事件。文章首先简要回顾了 17 世纪和 18 世纪初革命意义的演变。18 世纪发展起来的“政府革命”这一宽泛的概念一直到 1820 年代仍被经常使用，作为一种关键的概念工具，以富有想象力的方式将不同的政治运动/现象联系起来。革命者还创造了两个新概念：“全面”革命和“有限”革命，这对于区分政治区别至关重要，特别是在美国革命和法国革命之间。我认为，这三个革命概念都赋予了 18 世纪末和 19 世纪初的行动者在描述革命变化的时间和因果动力时具有不同寻常的灵活性——这在该时期之前或之后都不存在。