Nonfiction
Fareed Zakaria’s Speed Date With the Liberal World Order
In “Age of Revolutions,” the CNN host promises to shed light on four centuries of social upheavals and to offer insights on the global fractures of the present.
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Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”
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AGE OF REVOLUTIONS: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present, by Fareed Zakaria
Covering 424 years of revolutions in a couple hundred pages is an ambitious undertaking. That is nonetheless what Fareed Zakaria, the Washington Post foreign affairs columnist and CNN host, seeks to do in “Age of Revolutions,” a chronicle of the civil upheavals that have led societies around the world to seek new kinds of politics.
By one scholarly count there have been more than 160 major revolutions over just the last two centuries alone — so what to cover? Zakaria solves that problem the old-fashioned way, by writing mainly about Britain, the United States and France (Holland has a cameo).
Consequently, while the book opens with a quote from “The Communist Manifesto,” some readers might be surprised to find that the communist revolutions are not part of this history of revolution. Nor, for that matter, is the Haitian slave rebellion, Mahatma Gandhi’s anticolonial independence movement or any of the fascist takeovers.
There are some advantages to this approach. It gives Zakaria, a lively writer and good storyteller, room for amusing asides — Robespierre standing atop a plaster mountain in a feathered sash, trying desperately to promote his deistic cult of the Supreme Being; Britain debuting its first intercity train in 1830, an event that was marred when a legislator who had championed the train was run over by it.
Zakaria justifies his narrow geographical scope by suggesting that the legacy of a few major political and economic revolutions in the West forms a “master narrative” that can explain societal change elsewhere. But it is just weird to read a history of revolutions that barely mentions Vladimir Lenin.
The omission is even stranger, because “Age of Revolutions” implicitly adopts the Marxist view that material economic change drives history from the similarly titled “The Age of Revolution,” by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. Case in point: Zakaria skips the American Revolution, which he argues did little to “transform society’s deeper structures,” and focuses instead on the first and second Industrial Revolutions, in Britain and the United States.
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