Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

It is about the push and pull between the past and the future. Since the sixteenth century, technological and economic change have produced enormous advances but also massive disruption. The disruption and the unequal distribution of its benefits stoke huge anxiety. Change and anxiety, in turn, leads to an identity revolution, with people searching

The new legislature moved from dealing with minor fiscal issues to tackling much larger questions about the church’s power and the monarchy’s future. As discussions grew more intense, seating division by class and region gave way to a more spontaneous arrangement, with people sitting next to those with whom they agreed—ideological clusters. On Augu

By undermining the top-down authority of the Catholic Church, Luther cracked the door open for individual reasoning.

The Dutch also set the trend that has defined power in the modern world: that the dominant country is not the one with the largest population or the strongest army but the one with the most prosperous economy and innovative technology. The great economic historian Angus Maddison argued that “in the past four centuries there have been only three lea

by the sixteenth century, the dogmas and superstitions of the Middle Ages had begun to yield to critical thought, humanistic inquiry, and empirical experimentation. These intellectual trends had wide-ranging political effects all over Europe, plunging the continent into long and bloody conflicts over

We cannot predict with certainty what shape our revolutionary age will take—whether progress or backlash will dominate the years ahead. The future is not some settled fact out there for us to divine. It will depend on human actions and interactions over the years and decades to come.

These three forces—technology, economics, identity—together almost always generate backlash that produces a new politics. Human beings can absorb only so much change so fast. The old politics, inherited from a prior era, often cannot keep pace. Politicians scramble to adjust, modifying their views and finding new coalitions. The result is reform an