Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual Curiosity

Fareed Zakaria — journalist, CNN host, and author of Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — joins Tyler Cowen in Ep. 208 to trace the origins of classical liberalism from the Dutch Republic through the Enlightenment, diagnose why the liberal project now faces a populist backlash, and reflect on a life built around intellectual curiosity rather than political power.

Key ideas

1. The liberal Enlightenment project is the most important achievement of the last 500 years — and is now under threat. Per capita GDP was essentially flat from 1350 to 1700; the sharp uptick that follows traces directly to the rise of science, free inquiry, and the institutions of liberal democracy. Zakaria fears that populism from both right and left, combined with the disruptive pace of globalisation and information technology, is eroding the foundations of that project faster than its beneficiaries appreciate.
2. The Dutch Republic invented modern politics and economics. Before the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, politics was about courts and kings; the Dutch created the first merchant republic with factions, interest groups, and proto-political parties. They also pioneered an economics based on labour mixed with capital — reclaiming land from the sea, building tall ships — that broke the medieval equation of wealth with land. Classical liberalism, in Zakaria’s telling, begins in Amsterdam.
3. The left–right divide is a serendipitous accident of French Revolutionary seating arrangements. Before a new chamber was built by architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris, deputies naturally clustered by attitude toward the monarchy — royalists to the presiding officer’s right, republicans to his left. That spatial accident hardwired a binary that has governed two centuries of political thought, long outlasting its original meaning.
4. Oil wealth, not culture, explains failed modernisation across the Muslim world. Where states can generate enormous revenues by drilling — Saudi Arabia, Iran, pre-revolution — they never face the pressure to build the tax base and bureaucratic competence that modernisation requires. Dubai, which has almost no oil, is the outlier that proves the rule: the same Emirati population, freed from the resource curse, built the Gulf’s most modern city. Culture is a grab bag from which you can always extract a post-hoc explanation; institutions and incentives are the real levers.
5. Intellectual curiosity, honestly revealed, was Zakaria’s compass at every fork. His revealed preferences — magazines over academic journals, journalism over the assistant professorship at Harvard Huntington offered him, independence over government service — consistently pointed toward the same thing: a life of broad ideas, deadline discipline, and his own voice. Television, he came to understand, works like haiku: severe constraints, but maximum impact when used well.

Content

The formation of a mind: Bombay, Khushwant Singh, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer

Zakaria’s intellectual formation was pluralist before it was political. His early mentor, the Indian journalist and novelist Khushwant Singh — born in what is now Pakistan, an Urdu-speaker from a Sikh family — taught him love of the English language and of poetry when Zakaria was ten years old. The Book of Common Prayer added a reverence for tradition and for Christianity’s central, and in Zakaria’s reading genuinely radical, insistence that dignity does not flow from power: ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’ The historian Tom Holland (see Tom Holland) has written about just how revolutionary that idea was against the Roman hierarchy the early Christians confronted.

His father’s socialism, he explains with characteristic generosity, was not intellectual laziness but a structurally produced alliance: the only Britons who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. Your friends and allies form your economic priors. That same father, as a student in London in 1945, voted Labour in the general election that ousted Churchill — not because he disliked Churchill, whose speeches he could quote from memory, but because on the question that mattered most, a vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of empire.

The Hindi–Urdu split across which Zakaria grew up is itself a map of India’s political tensions. Modi, he observes, takes pains to speak a highly Sanskritised Hindi purged of Persian borrowings; everyday Bollywood Hindi, by contrast, is a natural mixture of the two. The linguistic purism is a political signal — an attempt to make Islam foreign to India — directed against a community that has been part of the subcontinent since the eleventh century.

The Dutch invention of modernity

Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions opens with the 17th-century Dutch Republic because, he argues, modern politics and modern economics begin there. Before the Dutch, politics in the modern era was about courts and kings; the Republic was the first polity organised around merchants, factions, and the precursors of political parties. Its economics broke from the medieval equation of wealth with land: the Dutch reclaimed territory from the sea, mixed human labour with capital, and built the tall ships that amounted to one of the first great technological revolutions with a direct economic dividend.

The implication is genealogical: classical liberalism — liberalism meaning liberty, not the American partisan sense — descends from Amsterdam. Understanding that descent helps explain both the achievement and its fragility.

The graph that matters: per capita GDP from 1350 to the present

Against the Chinese and Indian politicians who point to their countries’ large nominal GDPs circa 1800 as evidence of historical primacy, Zakaria deploys per capita GDP growth over six centuries. From 1350 to 1950, Indian and Chinese per capita GDP was essentially flat — roughly $600 at both endpoints. In the same period, the West moved from roughly $500 to roughly $5,000 per capita. The nominally large pre-modern GDPs simply reflected large populations in agricultural societies where the state could not meaningfully extract or deploy that wealth.

The corollary is that the rise of the West is deep-rooted and not reducible to colonies or cheap energy. There is no path to modernity we know of that does not run through the institutions the Enlightenment built. Countries that become modern are, in some important sense, becoming Western — not culturally, but institutionally.

This bears directly on the backlash Zakaria diagnoses in his book. The liberal Enlightenment project has been so successful — driving globalisation, the information revolution, rapid economic and social change — that it has generated its own opposition. The disruption is real; the populist response reaches for easy answers that are, almost without exception, illiberal.

The Huntington inheritance: the Clash of Civilisations and what it got right and wrong

Zakaria took Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilisations’ draft to Foreign Affairs when he left Harvard to become managing editor at twenty-eight, making it the magazine’s first-ever lead essay. He defends what Huntington got right: after the Cold War stripped ideology as the organising frame for conflict, people reverted to identity — religious, civilisational — in ways the liberal internationalist consensus had not anticipated. The rise of political Islam, of Chinese and Indian nationalism, all confirm that prediction.

What Huntington missed, Zakaria argues, is that international relations remains fundamentally a struggle for power, and power politics sometimes transcends identity. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait — fellow Arab, fellow Sunni state. African wars are largely intra-civilisational. Richelieu, running the great Catholic power of France, routinely allied with Protestant powers. The Clash framework illuminates identity’s return but cannot explain the cases where power logic overrides it.

On his post-9/11 Newsweek essay ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’, Zakaria is largely unrepentant. The Arab world was the principal outlier in late-20th-century democratisation; the explanation was oil wealth coupled with failed modernisation; the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism was a reactionary response to that failure. What has changed since 2001 is that elites in Saudi Arabia and parts of the Gulf have made more serious efforts at genuine modernisation — opening women’s education, ending gender segregation — not merely purchasing the surface goods of modernity.

The cultural explanation trap

Lee Kuan Yew told Zakaria that culture is destiny; Singapore’s anti-corruption record proves him wrong, Zakaria argues. Singapore is clean not because of something in Chinese Confucian culture — Chinese bureaucracies in mainland China and Chinese businessmen in Indonesia are extensively corrupt — but because Lee Kuan Yew deliberately engineered a compensation structure: senior civil servants earn close to market wages, removing the temptation that produces corruption elsewhere.

Max Weber nominated Catholicism and Confucianism as the two cultures hostile to capitalism; Spain, Italy, and East Asia have since buried that thesis. Culture is a large grab bag, and whenever a country succeeds or fails you can reach in and find something that appears to explain it. Institutions, incentives, and leadership are harder to quantify but more causally honest.

The making of a journalist: revealed preferences at every fork

Zakaria discovered at the Yale Political Union that he was good at politics — building alliances, switching horses, overpromising when necessary — and decided he did not want to be the person it was making him. That early self-observation turned out to be consistent with every subsequent choice: he turned down government service several times, including offers well below the ‘secretary of state’ speculation a 2003 New York Magazine profile raised. His explanation: the modern trend toward loyalty-based appointments means that the price of government service is your independent voice, and that is the thing he is not prepared to pay.

Huntington’s example — three to four hours of uninterrupted writing every morning before taking the subway to Harvard, producing a major work every five years — clarified for Zakaria that he lacks the self-discipline for academic solitude. He needs deadlines, feedback, and the relationship with an outside world that a journalist’s life provides. Books remain the hardest thing he does and, in his own hierarchy, the most important — ‘everything else is trivia’ — but television, understood correctly, is not its enemy. Six minutes of well-constructed television is haiku: constrained, powerful, and capable of reaching people print cannot.

Related

• Fareed Zakaria — guest; author of Age of Revolutions
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Enlightenment — concept page; Zakaria’s argument about the liberal Enlightenment project as the source of modern progress and its current fragility runs directly parallel to the Pinker and McGilchrist strands documented there
• Tom Holland — mentioned by Zakaria for Dominion (on the revolutionary nature of Christianity’s inversion of Roman values)