Required Reading for the Arab Revolutions

I have been saying for over a year to students, friends, and colleagues that we should be reading Book 2 of Thucydides very carefully as we watch the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. I will now add that we should all read von Gentz' The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution. Liberty Fund has reissued John Quincy Adams' translation of the German.

Adams also had a mastery of Greek and Latin and I wonder if he channeled this into his sententiae in his translation, or if these reflected the literary tastes of his age. Here is one such (of the taxes imposed on the colonies by Parliament): "their secret object could scarcely be any other, than to wrest by artifice, what was not ventured to be maintained by force." (p.22)

Let this serve as a word of warning to current enterprises:

a revolution, which has no other principle than to attack the existing constitution, must necessarily proceed to the last extremities of imagination and of criminal guilt. (p.79)