Previous

Age of Revolutions was widely praised when it was published in March 2024. The New York Times columnist David Brooks said: “[It] will help readers feel honored and grateful that we get to be part of this glorious and ongoing liberal journey.” Edward Luce of the Financial Times called the book “breathtakingly ambitious” and judged that it “successfully bridges the divide between the general reader and the academic.”

At the same time, reviewers for both The New York Times and The New Yorker criticized Zakaria’s reasoning for being confusing at times. Notably, they both expressed surprise at Zakaria’s argument that the French Revolution was illiberal because, whereas the Glorious Revolution was “bottom-up” and “organic,” the French Revolution was “top-down.” The stipulation that a revolution must be organic and bottom-up to be liberal is a belated addition to Zakaria’s definition of liberalism. The new wrinkle might be defended in principle, but only on a very selective reading of the facts can the Glorious Revolution, arranged by a committee of nobles, be a bottom-up phenomenon, and the French Revolution, which began with a mob of enraged citizens storming the Bastille, a top-down event. To be sure, any historical survey as grand in scale as the one Zakaria is engaged in will inevitably involve some “make it fit” simplifications; his compare-and-contrast study of the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution certainly does. Nevertheless, characterizing the Glorious Revolution as bottom-up and the French Revolution as top-down seems like a mistake or at least an over-step.

Another critical observation made about Age of Revolutions is over the fact that Zakaria devotes much more space to developments in Western Europe and the United States than he does to events in other parts of the world. This is a criticism that Zakaria seems to have anticipated, since he addresses it in Chapter 1. He explains that although there have been notable revolutions elsewhere in the world, and although he discusses some of them (including the communist revolutions in Russia and China), the “Western plot line … is a kind of master narrative that has cast a long shadow on politics everywhere.”

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

Take a Study Break