Includes bibliographical references and index.

Book I: Foundations of the revolutionary faith: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- Incarnation -- A locus of legitimacy -- The objects of belief -- The occult origins of organization.

Book II: The dominance of the national revolutionaries: the mid-nineteenth century -- The conspiratorial constitutionalists (1815-25) -- National vs. social revolution (1830-48) -- The evolutionary alternative -- Prophecy: the emergence of an intelligentsia -- The early church (the 1840s) -- Schism: Marx vs. Proudhon -- The magic medium: journalism -- The waning of revolutionary nationalism.

Book III: The rise of the social revolutionaries: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- The machine: German social democracy -- The bomb: Russian violence -- Revolutionary syndicalism -- The path to power: Lenin -- The role of women -- Epilogue: Beyond Europe.

"This book seeks to trace the origins of a faith--perhaps the faith of our time: ... the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority" (Introduction), as demonstrated in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when two ideals, "equality and fraternity--split apart and became the founding tenets of two separate revolutionary traditions" (Jacket).