The Age of Revolutions

Never before in human history have so many different disruptive trends with global reach intersected: Today brings huge changes in geopolitics, technology, economics and communication. Our situation is unique, but we can learn from the past to address current challenges. Which earlier revolutions are most similar to our current upheavals – and which historical solutions can be inspiring for us?

Fareed Zakaria predicted the rise of illiberal democracies more accurately than Francis Fukuyama or Samuel Huntington did in their iconic books The End of History and the Last Man and The Clash of Civilizations. And now he comes with an equally fundamental work that will transform the way we view the era in which we live.

According to Zakaria, the source of the dynamism of the modern era is not the French Revolution, which resulted in chaos and economic backwardness, but the bourgeois, commercial and financial revolution in the liberated United Provinces of the Netherlands, which subsequently inspired political revolutions in Great Britain and America and paved the way for the rise of modern industry and international trade.

Successful revolutions provide space for individual ingenuity and ingenuity, but at the same time they build the mechanisms necessary to ensure social cohesion and do not succumb to radicalism. Every progress brings with it a wave of frustration, and people need to be given space to orient themselves in a deeply transformed world and find their place in it.

We are at the crossroads of four revolutions that seem to portend a dark future: We are influenced by globalization, the emergence of new technologies, identity issues, and geopolitics. However, Zakaria, in his book The Age of Revolutions, proves that if we act judiciously and tolerantly, pessimism is premature.

Globally respected political commentator Fareed Zakaria was born in 1964 in Mumbai and spent his childhood and adolescence in India. He then graduated from Yale University in the USA and received his doctorate from Harvard. He currently writes regular columns for The Washington Post (selections of which are published by Respekt magazine), contributes to The Atlantic magazine, and hosts his own show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, on CNN, which is watched by 220 million households worldwide. He considers himself a supporter of the political center. In 2019, the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy ranked him among the ten most influential global thinkers of the past decade. India and Ukraine awarded him high state awards.

Zakario' s most famous book, The Post-American World, has been translated into more than thirty languages and was published in Czech in 2010. His work, The Future of Freedom, has also been published in Czech. Illiberal Democracy in the USA and the World (2004) and In Defense of Liberal Education (2017). In 2021, PROSTOR Publishing House published his Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.