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Introduction: A Multitude of Revolutions

In his Introduction to Age of Revolutions, Fareed Zakaria lays out an overview of his plans for the book. His concern can be summarized as follows. For at least two centuries now, there has been a broad consensus in Western political thought that the ideal social order is the classically liberal one. Citizens enjoy a broad range of individual rights and liberties, including religious freedom. Commerce is governed by the principles that markets should be free and international trade is a good thing. The long-standing political conflict between Left and Right is mostly, according to Zakaria, a running argument over details and degrees—the right amount of commercial regulation, the right amount of income redistribution, and so on. Today, however, classical liberalism is under attack by “illiberal populists” who are suspicious of free speech, reject principles like the separation of church and state, favor trade barriers to protect domestic industries, and are willing to undermine democratic processes that don’t yield their preferred results. In short, Left versus Right is giving way to open versus closed.

Read about Main Idea #2 of Age of Revolutions: The Left-versus-Right debate is giving way to a debate about Open-versus-Closed.

Zakaria wants to know, “What makes a period revolutionary? Are there other predictable consequences of a revolutionary era? And how does it all end?” For answers, he will look at selected social revolutions in history, including the emergence of the first classically liberal state in the Netherlands and the transmission of that form of governance to England a century later; the French Revolution, which failed tragically to deliver on its grand promises; and the industrial revolution that began in Great Britain and spread to the United States. Zakaria will then turn his attention to four areas of revolutionary change today: the global economy, information technology, social identity, and geopolitics.

Read about the backgroud of Age of Revolutions author Fareed Zakaria.

Next section Part I: Chapters 1-3

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