Indian born Fareed Zakaria, who claim to be America’s best-known tutor on world events, quotes from Civilisation, the classic 1960s BBC series narrated by Kenneth Clark, an art historian.
“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.” Kenneth Clark said.

Age of Revolutions chronicles ceaseless action and reaction , progress and backlash, that has been endemic to the modern age. Zakaria  dates the birth of the liberal nation state to the 16^th-century Netherlands, which is where  his book begins. He ends after 325 pages  later with liberal democracy today facing mortal threats from within and without. From the inside the system is threatened by those who see themselves to be its victims. From the outside, it faces  challenges posed by the “rise of the rest” – most potently from, autocratic China and Russia.  Donald Trump challenges America’s system from within and is an open admirer of its enemies without, notably Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Liberal democracy was established by the Dutch Republic, the first modern republic and techno-superpower where refugees and rebels flocked for individual linerty, during their long war of liberation from Habsburg Spain (1568-1648). Dutch Republic’s success was a decentralised system that pooled the efforts of a patchwork of towns and ports into a robust defence. The Dutch were the earliest champions of toleration and free trade. They were also the first to throw off the smothering blanket of absolutist monarchy.

At the end of England’s turbulent 17^th century, which was sawn in half by the beheading of a king, the Dutch put their stamp on their emerging rival across the North Sea. England’s glorious revolution of 1688 was crowned by Holland’s William and Mary of Orange, who were invited to become sovereigns by London’s elite. Their shift of address came 16 years after the Netherlands’ Ramjaar (year of disaster) in which the Dutch literally opened the floodgates to keep the invading French Bourbons out. The opening of the dikes was the end of the Dutch golden age.

The 18^th-century Britain’s liberal democracy – power sharing between the social classes, a constitutional monarchy and an independent judiciary.  Zakaira does not include the American Revolution, which he sees as a war of independence, in the critical stages of liberal modernity. His counterpoint is the French Revolution, reaction against the horror of that became the origin story of modern conservatism. France’s Jacobins attempted to remake their world by diktat from above The French Revolution gave us the word terrorism- notably from an armed state, not a splinter group and laid out the perennial alternative to liberal democracy.

Age of Revolutions tells the story of progress and backlash of the rise of classical liberalism and of the many periods of rage and counter-revolution that followed seismic change.

The book warns us that liberalism’s great strength has been freeing people from arbitrary constraints- but its great weakness has been leaving individuals isolated, to figure out for themselves what makes for a good life. This void- the hole3 in the heart – can all too easily be filled by tribalism, populism and identity politics. Today’s revolutions in technology and culture can even leave people so adrift that they turn against modernity itself.

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria, Allen Lane £25, WW Norton $29.99, 400 pages.