Foreign Policy Live: Fareed Zakaria’s ‘Age of Revolutions’¶
I really enjoyed this episode of Foreign Policy Live with Fareed Zakaria where he discusses his book Age of Revolutions.
“So you start out with the conservatives hating the Industrial Revolution because they’re the party of land and privilege, and tradition, and they look upon these new merchants and all this is terrible, too much change. By the end of the Industrial Revolution, and by the left, by the way, the liberals are the guys pushing forward all these nifty new ideas. And by the end of the Industrial Revolution, the rows have flipped because the conservatives now become comfortable with the new elite, the industrial elite, and the left, which had celebrated all this, sees that it causes a lot of turmoil, a lot of dislocation for particularly people at the bottom end of the spectrum, and they become the party of the working class.
So that’s the kind of perfect example of how a big structural revolution scrambles the politics of the age. The thing I got from it, the most important lessons I think are, you should expect these kinds of identity revolutions that we’re in right now when you have enormous change. And we have had enormous change over the last 30 or 40 years.”
The whole interview is quite thought provoking. I tried to read the full book, and found it a bit more dry and dull than his interview, so I think the interview is a great first step into the material.
