So here's what was pretty revolutionary about the American Revolution. The colonists threw off the rule of an imperial monarchy and replaced it with a government that didn't have a king, a radical idea in a world that didn't feature many non-monarchical forms of government. And if you look at the explanations for the Revolution, especially those contained in, like, the Declaration of Independence and in pamphlets like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, there's definitely a revolutionary zeal that's informed by the Enlightenment. And that's especially true if you focus on the idea of liberty, as many of the pamphleteers did. That said, if you look at the actual outcome of the Revolution, aside from the whole no king thing, it wasn't that revolutionary. Let's look, for instance, at two ideas central to the Revolution, property rights and equality. So the Articles of Confederation gave the government no power to tax, which had the effect of making sure that people who had property were able to keep it because they never had to pay the government anything in exchange for the right to own and use it.