In June, 2018, the political commentator Fareed Zakaria found himself in the Campo de’ Fiori, in the center of Rome, with Steve Bannon, who was then President Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon—whom Zakaria describes as a “volatile personality” and as a conduit for the international resurgence of nativist sentiment—had come to Italy to help convince two populist parties, one on the left and the other on the right, that their interests were aligned. He drew Zakaria’s attention to a monument to Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century poet and cosmologist who held Copernican views about the universe and was burned at the stake for heresy. Where Galileo sold out and recanted, Bannon explained, Bruno was a real hero. Zakaria was surprised by Bannon’s admiration for Bruno, who is widely regarded as a progressive, proto-Enlightenment figure. But Bannon was less interested in the substance of Bruno’s opinions than in his uncompromising defiance. It was Bannon’s conviction, Zakaria writes, “that in times of turmoil, take-no-prisoners radicalism is the only option.”
In his new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present” (Norton), Zakaria concedes the turmoil but resists the radicalism. Everywhere you look, he says, you can see dramatic change. The rules-based international order has been destabilized. Traditional left-right divides have been transfigured. The trade-friendly economic consensus of the post-Communist era has yielded to protectionism and autarky. Given that we may be living through “one of the most revolutionary ages in history,” he thinks that lessons can be drawn from previous revolutionary ages, especially those that involved actual revolutions.
The concept of revolution, Zakaria notes, is a slippery thing. How is it that Bannon, of all people, identifies himself as a revolutionary? Zakaria finds the problem embedded in the word itself. “Revolution” was originally employed to describe the orbital movement of a celestial body around a fixed axis. A full revolution is completed by returning to a starting point. But before long the word acquired a secondary meaning, designating a rupture that renders everything utterly different. The word now refers at once to predictability and to transformation. “Revolution” is hardly the only word that contains its opposite—“to sanction” and “to dust” are similar in that way—but in this particular case Zakaria sees something profound. Revolutions contain the seeds of their own undoing: “Radical advance is followed by backlash and a yearning for a past golden age imagined as simple, ordered, and pure.”
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Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea would represent a cyclical idea of history—a fatalist notion that has recently found favor among conservatives. Zakaria believes that we can and do make progress. But he is wary of the assumption that history tends to move in the direction of ever-greater human flourishing, a Whiggish view he associates with such frustrated optimists as Steven Pinker. Zakaria’s book represents an attempt to distinguish between revolutions that have inspired thermostatic reactions and revolutions that have endured.
The most auspicious models, Zakaria suggests, might be found in the Netherlands and in England. In the sixteenth century, all of Europe was confronted with a series of economic, technological, and social shocks: the globalization spurred by the Age of Exploration, the innovations that emerged from war and from the necessity of economic expansion, and a “radical identity revolution” driven by the Protestant Reformation. After most of the Netherlands threw off Habsburg rule, in 1579, the Dutch formed a republic that capitalized on these changes. For reasons of geography, they were accustomed to diffuse authority. The need to reclaim land from the sea, and the collective action required to do so, Zakaria explains, had insured that feudal centralization never took hold: “People had to work together to get anything done.” Technological development, in the form of windmills and dikes, was a necessity for survival, and precocious urbanization provided an infrastructure for industry and trade. The cultural shift to Protestantism encouraged freethinking. Finance was democratized in the form of the world’s first stock exchange, and the leaders of the republic were wise enough to ally themselves with the country’s commercial interests.
The Netherlands might have been early to liberalize, but that didn’t mean it was exempt from what Zakaria describes as the “familiar story” of reaction: “rapid advancement, dislocation, and then a wave of conjured memories of a lost golden age.” The Dutch Republic was split between the economic dynamism of tolerant coastal technocrats and the atavistic impulses of more conservative rural populations that had been left behind by liberal merchants and bankers. The country’s Golden Age came to an end in 1672, when the French invaded. A version of liberalism, in the form of a young William of Orange, nevertheless survived and, sixteen years later, was ported across the Channel to lead a constitutional monarchy. England, like the Netherlands, was prepared to make a seamless transition to a liberal dispensation. The brilliance of England’s Glorious Revolution, Zakaria thinks, lay in the collaboration of the country’s Whig and Tory élites in a “bipartisan escape from dangerous polarization,” and in their agreement that “English prosperity defined the national interest, not dynastic glory or religious zeal.”
A good revolution, as Zakaria tells it, is not initiated by political actors. It occurs when exogenous shocks—in the form of economic or technological trends—are tamed by competent management. Liberalism flourished in the Netherlands and England because revolution was a “bottom-up process” in those countries. When Dutch and English leaders saw fit to intervene in the course of human affairs, they were content merely “to implement, confirm, and codify the transformations that had already taken place in society, beneath the surface of politics.” These revolutions succeeded insofar as they were scarcely needed. A good revolution respects the limits of natural forces. A bad revolution crosses a line and provokes the backlash necessary to maintain equilibrium. Zakaria’s counterexample to the Netherlands and England is France, whose revolution was a “grisly failure” insofar as revolutionary élites “tried to impose modernity and enlightenment by top-down decree on a country that was largely unready for it.” The Reign of Terror and the consolidation of power under Napoleon, Zakaria says, prove that social change “must take place organically.”
Zakaria’s descriptions of revolutionary activity make a great din—when things aren’t “plunging” or “soaring,” they have “skyrocketed” or “ricocheted”—but his evocations of historical inflection points feel dutiful and formulaic. They are also confusing. After a while, one can’t help but wonder what Zakaria means by “revolution.” What he calls the “Dutch revolution” seems to refer to the entirety of the country’s Golden Age, which lasted about ninety years and ended with the republic’s abrupt decline. We’re invited, with fine illogic, to compare the success of the Industrial Revolution with the failure of the French Revolution, even though a failed industrial revolution would be no industrial revolution at all. He identifies the English Revolution with the Glorious Revolution, treating decades of bloodletting and repression as mere prelude to a crowning moment of liberal reconciliation. By this reasoning, one might claim that the Russian Revolution culminated in glasnost.
Nor is it clear what Zakaria means by “top-down” or “bottom-up.” The French Revolution failed because the élites tried to force top-down change, but the Glorious Revolution—which might better be described as a coup by Dutch commercial interests—somehow reflected a wise acquiescence to bottom-up processes. The specifics of revolutionary activity seem of secondary interest. Zakaria takes solace in the fact that civilization seems able to heal itself. The revolutions of 1848, for example, may have been “crushed” by societies mired in primordial autocracy, but everything that they hoped to enact—the proliferation of human freedoms—was “almost invariably adopted through gradual reform.” The implication is that what the vanguard struggled to achieve by fiat was going to happen anyway. All they had to do was sit tight.
Most revolutions have, at one point or another, had their revolutionary credentials challenged. Events that purportedly failed to rise to the radical occasion include the English Revolution (merely a bid for bourgeois power, skeptics say), the Mexican Revolution (a rivalry between warlords), and even the French Revolution. The American Revolution is a recurring example. At the time, it seemed as though an awful lot changed after 1776; in retrospect, many things in fact remained the same. Some historians have introduced further distinctions without introducing further clarity. The colonists’ struggle against the British, it has been suggested, qualified as a political revolution but did not meet the criteria for a social revolution. This, however, is just a restatement of the observation that the same set of historical episodes might, with equal plausibility, be described from one point of view as continuous and from another as a break. The word “revolution” may be perfectly useful as a compliment we pay to inflection points for developments that are, by consensus, important. But the attempt to provide a load-bearing definition might be more trouble than it’s worth.
In “The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It” (Basic), Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, offers what he calls an “anti-exceptionalist history of the age of revolution.” In his view, there is an alternative way to understand why the great transatlantic revolutions that straddled the turn of the nineteenth century—in the United States, France, Haiti, and Latin America—are often said to have “failed.” Unlike Zakaria, Perl-Rosenthal doesn’t really believe that counter-revolutionary or illiberal reversals prove that the early revolutionaries were overweening. He argues, instead, that the degree to which these revolutions met (or did not meet) their egalitarian aims should be understood in the light of processes that took a full generation to unfold. In 1972, Henry Kissinger asked the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou is said to have responded that it was “too early to tell.” (The story apparently turns on a miscommunication—Zhou was probably referring to the events of 1968 rather than those of 1789—but it persists for a reason.) Perl-Rosenthal doesn’t go that far, but, like a professor who generously grants extensions before grading, he thinks that revolutionary fervor can be assessed only as the spark of a longer undertaking.
Perl-Rosenthal’s book follows several members of what he calls the first generation of “gentlemen revolutionaries”: his cast includes famous political actors such as John Adams; less well-known but influential women such as Maria Rivadeneyra, a prioress in Peru, and Marie Bunel, a merchant in Haiti; and more run-of-the-mill figures like France’s Louis-Augustin Bosc, now best known for the pears that bear his name. Perl-Rosenthal believes that these figures had considerable difficulties “overcoming the hierarchical reflexes of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic old regime in which they had grown up.” Theirs was a largely closed world of intimate relationships and norms opaque to outsiders. Their social attitudes made it difficult for them to forge alliances beyond their station.