In his new book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” Professor Turley explores the meaning and future of democracy on the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary.

The first half looks back at the unique confluence of people and events that led to the establishment of the American republic.

The second half looks forward, exploring whether the American republic can survive in the 21st century in light of changes ranging from artificial intelligence to robotics to global governance systems.

Turley believes the American republic is uniquely suited to address those challenges, but it will require a return, not a rejection, of the core values that defined the American Revolution.

“Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” Those words from journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan during the French Revolution referred to the Roman god Saturn, Kronos in Greek. Kronos attempted to defy his mother’s prophesy that he would be overthrown by one of his children by eating them upon their births. When his son Zeus was born, Kronos’ consort, Rhea, decided to trick him by wrapping a stone in a swaddling blanket and handing it to him to devour. She then hid Zeus on Crete. Once he reached adulthood, Zeus returned and, fulfilling the prophesy, defeated his father.

Kronos’ story held obvious meaning for Mallet du Pan, who watched with alarm as the French Revolution devoured first its aristocratic foes and then its own supporters. It is a story played out over and over again in history as ambition becomes activism, activism becomes extremism, and extremism becomes authoritarianism. Call it the Saturn gene. We are all Saturn’s children with an inherent impulse that rests within each of us: the capacity of all mortals to become monsters.

Saturn’s lesson would also be raised in the American Revolution by none other than Thomas Paine. Long before Jefferson put pen to parchment on the Declaration of Independence, it was Paine who would speak of the natural and inalienable rights as the basis for the American Revolution. It was Paine, in his pamphlet “Common Sense,” who made the case for “independency.” It was also Paine who saw, firsthand, the ability of a revolution to consume itself.

Paine would play a significant role in two revolutions that took strikingly different paths in America and France. Among the American Revolution’s best-known figures, only the Marquis de Lafayette could make a similar claim.

Paine learned the dangers of unrestrained popular government in the hardest possible way. It came close to killing him in France. He would learn that what was lost in Paris was precisely what he had left in Philadelphia — a system that could channel tremendous political and economic pressures into a stable republic.

We are again living in revolutionary times. It is not just classic revolutions where governments are overthrown but rather revolutions that can change countries from within. We refer to the Industrial........

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