The Washington Monthly praises Fareed Zakaria's 'Age of Revolution'
Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire.
Religious persecution was certainly a factor in the Dutch revolt. But the Dutch merchant marine could gain colonies and control of trade networks from Spain and Portugal. In other words, there was a prize worth fighting for.
The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—
it had not alternative. One of the reasons for the Revolt was the Hapsburg attempt to modernize and centralize the devolved, medieval, structures of government in the area.
much like America’s founders did two centuries later.
Again, they had not choice. There was and is 'dual sovereignty'.
In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.
No. When Calvinists conquered territory they forced the population to convert and allowed no other type of Church. However, they saw Sephardic Jews and other Dissenters as allies. There were penal laws against Catholics and (after 1620) Arminians though they weren't always enforced. Still, Calvinists monopolized public offices and Lutherans were only allowed to have churches in big cities. Even then, the outside of the church had to look Calvinist.
With the foundation for democracy laid,
There was no democracy. In the mid-nineteenth century an American historian- J.L Motley- and, Erskine May, the English expert on parliamentary procedure- wrote books suggesting that the Dutch revolt had set the ball of democratic reform rolling. But this was not a view the Dutch shared. In an often-quoted article from 1953, R.R. Palmer, an American historian and later the author of The Age of the Democratic Revolution, highlighted the early use of the word as a self-description in Dutch politics around 1800. However, after the Restoration there was no mention of democracy or popular sovereignty. There was oligarchic rule with the King dominating the stage. The problem was that the Catholic Belgians wanted to break away from their oppressive Calvinist masters.
enter stage right: capitalism.
Mercantile capitalism existed in all the ports of Western Europe and the emporia cities which produced and consumed luxuries.
In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one.
It had high agricultural productivity then as it does now.
Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period
because of high agricultural productivity
—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachet and influence in this milieu.
Or, aristocrats held shares in mercantile ventures. But merchants had been rising, through marriage, into the aristocracy for centuries.
The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds.
The bourse at Antwerp was older. But older yet was the Rialto in Venice. Did the Dutch East India Company broadcast love of democracy and religious toleration far and wide? No. Fuck off. The bigoted Boer is Holland's gift to the world.
At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.
What is telling is that Holland made no fucking contribution to democratic ideas. It was swarthy Greeks in the Athens of Pericles or swarthy Latins in ancient Rome who created Republican and egalitarian, indeed cosmopolitan, ideas.
What is telling is that Kuwait gains fame by being very very fucking rich. This is why it is a beacon of freedom and democracy.
This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s.
Fuck off! William's Mum was English and thus English was his mother tongue though he chose to speak it boorishly. Anyway, he only got the throne because his wife was the daughter of the rightful King.
Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.
Because it was too divided. Thankfully, after getting rid of Napoleon, Holland could turn into a Monarchy under the House of Orange.
The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution.
Billy spent a lot of time killing Catholics in Ireland. That's why Scottish and English Protestants loved him. For Macaulay, the Sun shone out of Billy boy's bum.
But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions?
He's a brown Brit of the sort Macaulay was keen on
“For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.”
This is not the conventional view. British historians and jurists consider all Western European monarchies to have been limited. The exception was the Norman conquest. Now, one may say that Anglo-Saxon (or 'Druidic'!) Common Law remained in force and this limited the power of the monarch. Alternatively, one may point to specific charters- e.g. Magna Carta- or acts of parliament as giving rise to rights and liberties. However, whichever way you slice or dice it the fact remains that political modernization begins with administrative modernization. In England this dates back to Henry Beauclerk and the creation of what would become the Exchequer.
Most English historians see the Hanoverians as ushering in the modern age where Parliament outweighs the Crown. The first two Georges had little interest in England. The third went mad while the fourth got fat and went to the bad. Still, Queen Victoria was the first monarch who didn't choose her own Premier.
Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance
not of Catholics and various types of Dissenters.
and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton
who kept his theological thoughts to himself
and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands),
Blasphemy remained a crime in England till 2008. The Dutch got rid of the offense four or five years later.
and, of course, capitalism.
Holland had consistent GDP growth from 1350 onward. On the one hand 'Frisian freedoms' created a mercantile class thriving on North Sea trade. On the other hand, land reclamation was creating a strong 'civil society' capable of solving collective action problems.
Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England,
Dutch humanists- like Erasmus- did have some influence on England but there were no 'liberal thinkers' from that country that any Englishman has heard off except maybe Grotius. But we hated him because he thought we should make a present of the English Channel to our enemies. Anyway, Grotius had to run away from Holland because he was Arminian or Anabaptist or some such shite.
Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity.
for English speaking peeps, sure. But England had no difficulty acknowledging the superior modernity of the United States.
These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.
The reason some nineteenth century WASPs gassed on about the Dutch was because they didn't want to admit that Democracy and Republican ideas had been invented by swarthy Latins or Greeks. Worse yet, Christ was actually a Jew.
Zakaria rounds out the first half of his book, “Revolutions Past,” with chapters on the great convulsions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the French Revolution, which he deems failed.
Napoleon failed to make all his brothers and sisters Kings and Queens but Napoleonic reforms permanently changed the political face of Europe.
(You can guess why—messianic, pre-totalitarian, marked by terror.) He’s more bullish on the First Industrial Revolution, British-born in the late 1700s and which saw the invention of the steam engine and factory manufacturing; and the Second Industrial Revolution, which mainly originated in the United States in the 19th century and is associated with the telephone and electricity.
What was important was industrialized 'total war'- e.g. the American Civil War- in which all able-bodied males might be conscripted and where the outcome would be decided by which side had bigger factories and could produce more bullets and bayonets.
When Total War came to Europe, you had the Bolshevik Revolution. When it came to China, you had Mao's Revolution. Russia may have changed tack, but Mao's Party still rules China.
In the book’s second half, “Revolutions Present,”
There aren't any revolutions at present. There was supposed to be an Arab Spring. It failed.
Zakaria, the academic, gives way to Zakaria, the journalist. Over a breathless 140 pages, he describes the global trade boom that knit together the world’s economies in the 20th century,
some previously dirigiste economies did indeed get knotted in that fashion
how the internet destroyed our communities,
it didn't.
how civil rights and feminism reshuffled political alignments,
they didn't. Both were dead by the end of the Sixties. Third Wave feminism was counter-productive. There was a Backlash. Black Power's fate was even more abject. The guy who invented the word 'woke' returned to Reagan's America and discovered that, as Thomas Sowell might say- White Liberals had fucked up Black Families so as to create a permanent, criminalized, under-class.
and how an emboldened Russia and China are roiling the world.
Post 9/11, America and NATO did a lot of stupid shit. This permitted Russia and China to rise. We can only hope that America will turn isolationist.
Zakaria is a free trader at heart—what’s derisively called neoliberalism now—but he understands wisely that the explosion in global trade over the past 50 years left many workers behind
so what? They will die soon enough.
and paved the way for the xenophobia and populism
not to mention flatulence. Neo-liberalism caused me to buy a lot of cheap Chinese tat. To signify joy, I farted vigorously. Too vigorously. That's another pair of chinos I will have to throw away.
that is fueling the growth of right-wing parties in Europe and Trumpism in America.
If establishment politicians are shit, voters will look elsewhere.
Again, this reflects a shift in thinking among the entire foreign and economic policy establishment, which is welcome but hardly new.
That establishment couldn't think. It had shit for brains.
So, it’s no surprise that he concludes that our modern world has led us toward terrifying alienation and loneliness amid a swirl of new technologies, shifts in how we approach work, mass immigration, and the like.
Also, 99 percent of us are going to die within the next eighty years.
Borrowing from a French philosopher, he entitles his concluding chapter “The Infinite Abyss,” and in explaining the current appeal of populist ideology, he quotes Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
So is flatulence.
“The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart,”
with stupid shit
Zakaria writes, locating solutions to our modern ills in policies like paid parental leave
Romania comes out on top there.
and subsidized childcare to promote family life;
or to keep kids from driving their parents to drink
wealth redistribution to reduce precarity;
it will increase it
and a Peace Corps-style service-oriented program in the United States. (It’s unclear whether he’s aware this already exists with Teach for America and AmeriCorps.)
Fair point.
I’d add that the reinvigorated antitrust movement can also bring order to a chaotic world,
or permit China to overtake us by the end of the decade in various high tech fields
allowing competition to return to monopolistic industries and creating more opportunities for underserved individuals and regions.
This would happen faster if paternalistic legislation doesn't raise entry barriers and compliance costs.
Age of Revolutions is Zakaria’s attempt to contextualize our modernity.
It fails. Modernity has nothing to do with a Dutch Republic which disappeared centuries ago. America changed in '65 not so much because of Civil Rights as increased immigration of people like Zakaria. To some extent, they represented the cream of their own societies. But there is such a thing as a reversion to the mean. The third generation are bound to be, not just thickos like their cousins back home, but lazy, drug addled, entitled, over-educated, American thickos.
In that sense, it’s a welcome background to the many elections taking place globally this year, from Zakaria’s native India to the U.S.
It is wholly irrelevant.
Although he appears to quote anyone of any significance from the last four centuries, he leaves out—in a surprising omission—the most apropos sentiment of all: William Faulkner’s oft-cited quip, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Yes it is. There is no fucking Dutch Republic. The thing went extinct around the time of the dodo. Get over it.
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