David Potter’s Disruption provides a framework for the analysis of many different historical epochs. This is both the primary source of its interest and an explanation for its ultimate failure.

A classicist by trade and the author of well-received studies of Constantine, Theodora, and ancient sport, Potter has now completed what many will consider the crowning achievement of a long career. Here is a book that leaps past Caesars and colosseums to take in Martin Luther, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. Here, too, is a muscular hermeneutic by which one might hope to interpret such disparate phenomena as imperial Christianity, the Bolshevik Revolution, and Brexit. Like many a thesis-driven historical survey before it, Disruption struggles to fit its case studies into an inflexible mold. So alluring is Potter’s central argument, however, that one is tempted, at least initially, to suspend one’s critical faculties and place oneself unreservedly in the hands of one’s supremely erudite guide.

Radical change, according to the author’s hypothesis, occurs when a society’s “central institutions have failed and [its] fundamental affiliations [have been] severed.” Whether in Hitler’s Germany or Abd al-Malik’s Arabia, successful change agents are those who create alternative “ideolog[ies] of legitimacy” to replace exhausted or outmoded ways of thinking. Though seemingly novel, these substitutive principles tend already to be present in embryonic form. (Think social Darwinism in the Weimar Republic or germinal Koranic doctrines in seventh-century Palestine.) The trick is that a “charismatic leader” must arise to transform mere theories into a workable administrative system. Crucially, “ideological correctness” must not be placed above “the practicalities of government” if disruptive movements are to endure.

In support of these contentions, Potter marshals five chapters that explore how world-altering disturbances have unfolded on the ground. In the first, the author considers the role of Constantine in Christianity’s spread and sees in the ascendant faith’s wake “the collapse of previous modes of describing authority.” In the second, an overview of the rise of Islam, Potter traces both the “self-inflicted wounds suffered by Rome and Persia” and the “exceptional talent of Muhammad’s followers” in capitalizing on those blunders. The next two parts, which cover, respectively, the Protestant Reformation and the revolutions in America and France, do similar work in dredging up the “loss of faith in existing institutions” and the concomitant opportunities granted to revisionists and radicals. Chapter five, a study of Lenin and Hitler, observes the analogous circumstances exploited by both men, as well as the horrific consequences of allowing “obedience to the party line” to preclude “basic human decency.”

Among Disruption’s chief characteristics is its willingness to pursue causal chains through dozens or even hundreds of years of history. Probing the success of the church under Constantine, Potter looks backwards to the ministry of Jesus before eventually contemplating the fate of believers under Nero, the influence of Stoicism on the nascent faith, and the religiosity of Roman emperors from Elagabalus to Diocletian. A comparable thoroughness is on display in chapter two’s examination of Islam. Here, after commencing with the outbreak of pestilence in 541, Potter winds his way from Rome’s loss of the central Balkans to Heraclius’s destruction of the Sassanian army in 627. Having paused to mark the death of Mohammed four and a half years later, the author moves on to the careers of Abu Bakr, Khalid ibn al-Walid, and the aforementioned Abd al-Malik, the first caliph to arise from the younger generation of Koranic adherents.

In his final three chapters, Potter is, if anything, even more comprehensive in his assessment of historical through lines. Thus does his excavation of the Reformation’s roots unearth medieval tax policy, Habsburg incompetence, and the economic consequences of the doctrine of purgatory. Thus also do his forays onto French and American soil explore such byways as Rousseau’s personal depravity, the failure of the French wheat crop in 1788, and the influence of Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius on Thomas Hobbes. (Both men viewed the state of nature “as being entirely hostile.”) By the time one arrives at the 20th century’s totalitarian movements, it is no surprise to find Thomas Malthus and William Gladstone alongside Hegel and Marx. In Potter’s hands, history is a grand mosaic. Each inlaid stone must be set in its rightful place, or the picture will never cohere.

That such an enterprise is the work of a frighteningly learned scholar is indisputable. The problem, evident almost from the first page, is that Potter’s knowledge is so vast that his book can feel at once unfocused and rushed. Take, for example, this representative passage from Disruption’s chapter on the rise of Islam:

Kusru was deposed in the immediate aftermath of the battle at Nineveh, tried, and killed. This happened by the end of February 628. The agents of his deposition were a senior general and one of his younger sons, Kavad. Kavad lived for eight months, during which time he murdered the majority of his male relatives while also presiding over his father’s execution. When Kavad died of the plague, he was replaced by his young son Ardashir, who was in turn murdered by the Persian general who had recently negotiated the restoration of Roman territory to Heraclius. This general was murdered after a reign of forty days and replaced by Kavad’s widow, who finalized the peace treaty and then died, being replaced by Yazdgerd, a grandson of Kusru and the one nephew Kavad hadn’t managed to kill.

Here, in 136 words, is not only half a decade of Neo-Persian history but a familio-political saga of startling complexity. Reading on, one comes to recognize that the paragraph’s aim is to emphasize the ripeness of the region for Muslim conquest. In the moment, however, one could be forgiven for concluding that Potter has resolved to document every incident with which he is familiar but is limited by word-count considerations to Wikipedia-grade summaries.

The result of this style is a project that is simultaneously underdeveloped and dense — a bird’s-eye tour that loses itself in every crack and crevice. Compounding this unease is Potter’s apparent confusion regarding the identity of his audience. Though composed in a gentle academese (“Luther’s crusade . . . drew upon new ways of arranging knowledge that challenged traditional thought patterns”), Disruption contains assertions of such astonishing simplicity (Christian Europe “had two administrative systems: one based on the political [and] the other based on the religious”) that one imagines even a general-interest reader groaning with impatience.

To be fair, Potter’s prose is not without its felicitous turns of phrase. The antagonists in China’s civil war were, in the author’s memorable formulation, “two ghouls” struggling “for control of a corpse.” The bubonic plague in sixth-century Asia Minor was “a play date for demons.” Equally pleasing are the modest but charming insights that crop up in Disruption’s pages with fair regularity. The specialist may know, but the average reader will be delighted to learn, that early printers kept their bottom lines strong by filling mass orders of papal indulgences. Among the prisoners freed during the storming of the Bastille was Donatien Alphonse François, otherwise known as the Marquis de Sade.

Unhappily, Disruption’s curiosities and bons mots are counterbalanced by more than one instance of seeming self-contradiction. If, as Potter writes, it is “false” to believe “that Constantine’s conversion was a carefully calculated political act,” then what is one to make of the author’s note, a mere five sentences later, that Constantine became a Christian because he “needed to forge a story with which to claim legitimacy as Rome’s emperor”? Of similar dubiety are a pair of contentions concerning the famed Tudor courtier Thomas Cromwell. On the one hand, Cromwell was “a genuine, if secret, convert to the reform movement.” On the other, he was “attracted to Reformation theology as a useful complement to [his] program of upsetting the status quo.”

That these and other circles could be squared given enough time and space is, of course, highly likely. Here again, however, Disruption butts up against the limitations of Potter’s design. There simply isn’t room for nuance in a 300-page volume that covers 2,000 years of turmoil and division across four continents.

If a certain superficiality of approach is endemic to the survey form, the regular intrusion of progressive clichés is, alas, less forgivable. Not for Potter is Lenin’s revolution an irremediable catastrophe; indeed, “there were far more opportunities for women to advance” under Soviet Communism than in the time of the czars. Nor is Brexit, in the author’s telling, comprehensible except as the fruit of “hyper-nationalism” and “delusions about migration.” Reading an academic historian, one expects the usual shibboleths and distortions. What one hopes is that they will not be quite so banal.

Though not without real merits, Dis­ruption is, finally, a book that fails to overcome its many defects. One can learn from it, but one is unlikely to be sorry when it is finished.