Age of Revolutions

Zakaria's frame is that Western liberalism itself moved in punctuated bursts — the Dutch Republic, England's 1688 settlement, the Industrial Revolution — each producing genuine progress and a backlash violent enough to threaten the whole project, a pattern he argues is recurring again now. The book is strongest as synthesis: dense, well-sourced connective tissue between economic history and political theory, built to answer big comparative questions like why the U.S. never produced a durable socialist movement. It's also narrower than its title promises, confined almost entirely to Western Europe and the U.S., which makes its claim to a "master narrative" of revolution feel more asserted than argued.