Revolutionary Reflections: Harnessing Historical Wisdom

As I described in my recent post, Fareed Zakaria’s recent book, “Age of Revolution,” provides an examination of the forces that shaped our modern world. From the revolutions of the past, Zakaria articulates the seismic shifts that have redefined global dynamics, influenced political landscapes, and reshaped societal structures. In a world that looks eerily like prior periods of revolution, there is much we can learn by analyzing history. However, analysis is meaningless if we do not learn from the past, and historically, we have failed to do so. It was Henry Kissinger that once said: “it is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.” Analyzing periods that look like our current day is the first step, but it’s the application of these lessons to our current context that enables constructive pathways.

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Learning From The Early 19th Century

One of the more eye-opening narratives in the story arc of my presentation is the comparison of our current era to the 1920s. Given the catastrophic period that followed, lessons can be learned. A great period of invention ran in parallel, helping to establish our modern standard of living. But there was another period of invention that is also very instructive. That period dates to the early 19th century and is closely associated with the Luddite movement and the birth of the factory system. In a book released this September, Brian Merchant explores this period in history and its similarities to our current era. If the 1920s sowed the seeds of the conflicts that followed, the early 19th century sowed the seeds of labor movements, the modern welfare state, and of all things, science fiction.

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