Political and Legal
Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present
By Fareed Zakaria. Norton, 2024, 400 pp.
Zakaria tells the epic story of the upheavals, breakthroughs, backlashes, and transformations that marked the rise of Western liberalism and industrial modernity, looking for insights to explain today’s fraught global moment. Starting with the “liberal revolutions” of the sixteenth-century Dutch Republic and England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the book traces the tumultuous path of economic, technological, and political modernization through the eras of British and American industrial supremacy and post–Cold War globalization. Zakaria focuses on what he sees as the key dynamic at the heart of each of these revolutions of modernity: a struggle between forces seeking to harness economic and technological change for profit and progress, on the one hand, and groups seeking to hold on to their old identities and ways of life, on the other. In Zakaria’s account, societies that embrace liberal commitments to trade, openness, and free thinking, such as the United States in the postwar era, tend to be more innovative and powerful, but illiberal forces are never fully vanquished either at home or abroad. By grandly illuminating the great revolutions of the past, Zakaria holds a mirror to our own times.
Liberalism as a Way of Life
By Alexandre Lefebvre. Princeton University Press, 2024, 304 pp.
In this spirited defense of liberalism, Lefebvre celebrates the ordinary, everyday virtues of life in a free and open society. Most people define liberalism by its core institutions, such as individual rights, the rule of law, separation of powers, free elections, and open markets. Lefebvre argues that a more important (and often ignored) feature of liberalism is its worldview and value system: the diffuse societal underpinnings that enshrine diversity, tolerance, and multiculturalism. Notions of fairness, equality, respect, and openness to new ways of thinking are anchored in liberalism’s political culture. The book elaborates its argument with engaging
anecdotes and vignettes that show the range of ways liberal principles manifest in daily life, including comedians who mock identity politics, novels that dissect the power dynamics of gender and class, and codes of conduct for respectful workplace relations.The book evocatively captures the philosopher John Rawls’s idea of society as a “fair system of cooperation,” a sensibility that should be celebrated, cultivated, and embraced as an ethical vision for daily life.
Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking
By Van Jackson. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 234 pp.
Jackson helpfully maps the ideas of left-wing thinkers in debates over U.S. foreign policy. What unites these progressive critiques is the belief that the United States, guided by an old-style liberal internationalist vision, has failed to use its power to build a more peaceful, democratic, and egalitarian world. According to left-leaning thinkers, the regressive features of U.S. foreign policy that block global peace and progress include its imperial tendencies, its drive for primacy and hegemony, its militarism and construction of a national security state, and its support for neoliberal economic policies. Jackson identifies three schools of leftwing strategic thinking. “Progressive pragmatists” want the United States to promote economic equality at home and abroad; “anti-hegemonic” thinkers want restraint and retrenchment; and “peacemakers” want democratic solidarity and deeper cosmopolitan ties across borders. Each has its own theory about how to expand peace and security worldwide, variously through the spreading of economic opportunity, the reduction of the United States’ global military footprint, and the building of regimes for nonviolent peacemaking. Jackson argues that together these ideas constitute a vision of “progressive worldmaking,” in which U.S. power would be redirected in service of a better world.The book identifies tensions and inconsistencies within the progressive tradition but emphasizes its unity as a pragmatic agenda for statecraft.
Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age?
By Tom Wheeler. Brookings Institution Press, 2023, 264 pp.
Likening today’s digital revolution to the late-nineteenth-century Gilded Age of unregulated capitalism, Wheeler makes a powerful case for U.S. government action to set rules that protect the public interest. In both eras, American society has grappled with technology-enabled corporate giants that acquired huge windfalls of wealth and private power. The rampant capitalism practiced by robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John Rockefeller over a century ago was ultimately checked by government measures to protect consumers, workers, and market competition. Wheeler argues that the innovations of the digital age have brought modern capitalism to a similar crossroads. Revolutions in computing and connectivity have created new “platform companies” that harvest and monetize
vast amounts of private information and operate without meaningful government oversight. The consequences are profound—including the routine invasion of privacy, corporate control of information to thwart competition, and the erosion of common notions of truth and reality—and will only become more so with new tools such as artificial intelligence. Wheeler calls for government intervention that tames the unprecedented power of these digital platforms to make them accountable to the public.
Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order
Edited by Daniel Deudney, G. John Ikenberry, and Karoline Postel-Vinay. Oxford University Press, 2023, 312 pp.
The editors of this informative collection open with a familiar story. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, “liberal democratic capitalism” stood triumphant, its universalistic pretensions apparently vindicated. Now the tide has turned: “the Rest have surged in power, bringing with them new stories of the global past and present.” The collection argues that such narratives matter: their interaction will “shape . . . world order in the decades ahead.” Its contributors examine how the world has been imagined in the past and present by pan-Islamic thinkers, Japanese and Indian nationalists, and figures on the transnational radical right, among others. These critiques of liberal modernity are inextricable from it since they reflect two centuries of wrestling with Western material and political dominance. But as the political scientist Duncan Bell’s chapter shows, Western anxiety about the rise of “the rest” long predates the current crisis, and the racial prejudices underlying that anxiety produced the direct ancestors of many contemporary global-governance projects. The book, like many other edited volumes, often reads more like a grab bag of related topics than a unified, cohesive project. Yet the chapters are always informative and generally good reads, precisely because they are free to reflect the cacophony of the narratives that challenge liberal order.