In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.
While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame and Joseph Nye.
Much of what Zakaria writes is familiar, but that doesn’t make it unappealing. Anyone assigned to read the classic tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by the famed German sociologist Max Weber won’t be shocked to find that Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire. The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—much like America’s founders did two centuries later. In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.
With the foundation for democracy laid, enter stage right: capitalism. In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one. Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachetand influence in this milieu. The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds. At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.
This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s. Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.
The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution. But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions? “For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.” Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands), and, of course, capitalism. Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England, Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity. These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.
Zakaria rounds out the first half of his book, “Revolutions Past,” with chapters on the great convulsions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the French Revolution, which he deems failed. (You can guess why—messianic, pre-totalitarian, marked by terror.) He’s more bullish on the First Industrial Revolution, British-born in the late 1700s and which saw the invention of the steam engine and factory manufacturing; and the Second Industrial Revolution, which mainly originated in the United States in the 19th century and is associated with the telephone and electricity.
In the book’s second half, “Revolutions Present,” Zakaria, the academic, gives way to Zakaria, the journalist. Over a breathless 140 pages, he describes the global trade boom that knit together the world’s economies in the 20th century, how the internet destroyed our communities, how civil rights and feminism reshuffled political alignments, and how an emboldened Russia and China are roiling the world.
Zakaria is a free trader at heart—what’s derisively called neoliberalism now—but he understands wisely that the explosion in global trade over the past 50 years left many workers behind and paved the way for the xenophobia and populism that is fueling the growth of right-wing parties in Europe and Trumpism in America. Again, this reflects a shift in thinking among the entire foreign and economic policy establishment, which is welcome but hardly new.
So, it’s no surprise that he concludes that our modern world has led us toward terrifying alienation and loneliness amid a swirl of new technologies, shifts in how we approach work, mass immigration, and the like. Borrowing from a French philosopher, he entitles his concluding chapter “The Infinite Abyss,” and in explaining the current appeal of populist ideology, he quotes Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart,” Zakaria writes, locating solutions to our modern ills in policies like paid parental leave and subsidized childcare to promote family life; wealth redistribution to reduce precarity; and a Peace Corps-style service-oriented program in the United States. (It’s unclear whether he’s aware this already exists with Teach for America and AmeriCorps.) I’d add that the reinvigorated antitrust movement can also bring order to a chaotic world, allowing competition to return to monopolistic industries and creating more opportunities for underserved individuals and regions.
Age of Revolutions is Zakaria’s attempt to contextualize our modernity. In that sense, it’s a welcome background to the many elections taking place globally this year, from Zakaria’s native India to the U.S. Although he appears to quote anyone of any significance from the last four centuries, he leaves out—in a surprising omission—the most apropos sentiment of all: William Faulkner’s oft-cited quip, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
