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Fareed Zakaria grew up in India, the child of Muslim parents. He came to the United States as a young man, earning a BA from Yale and a PhD in government from Harvard. At age 28 he became the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He lives and works in New York City. Zakaria hosts CNN’s weekly international affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. Articles and columns of his have also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, and many other publications. His published books prior to Age of Revolutions include From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (1998), The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003), The Post-American World (2008, 2011), In Defense of a Liberal Education (2015), and Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (2020).

Zakaria’s political views have been a subject of interest to his viewers and readers. Age of Revolutions confirms that he clearly considers himself a classical liberal. In 2003, speaking to a writer for New York magazine, he described himself as a conservative, specifically a “Reaganite.” He explained that growing up in India taught him two things: that a highly-regulated economy fosters bureaucratic corruption, and that there is nothing attractive about life in a pre-industrial village. Muslim by birth but non-practicing, in 2015 he described his views on religion as “somewhere between deism and agnosticism,” adding that he was “completely secular” in his outlook. 

When Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present was published in 2024, some of observers pointed out that it deals with many of the same seems as a famous book published over 30 years earlier—Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Zakaria has cited Fukuyama approvingly, noting that Fukuyama never claimed that history would stop happening, only that the debate about the best way to organize a society was over and liberal democracy had won. Where Zakaria perhaps differs with Fukuyama is in being less optimistic that the gains made by classical liberalism will hold. However, it is unclear whether Fukuyama himself is as optimistic about the sustainability of liberal democracy as he was in 1992. In a 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed piece,  Fukuyama noted recent setbacks in the cause of global democracy, due partly to pursuits of aggressive anti-democracy agendas by Russia and China. Fukuyama suggested that things might be starting to turn around (although developments since 2020 may not have been what he was hoping for).

Next section Context: The 2024 Election Outcome & Age of Revolutions

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