Opinion | The Great Struggle for Liberalism

In 1978, the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning us about the loss of American self-confidence and will. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” he declared.

Today, those words ring with disturbing force. The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals. Meanwhile, those who try to defend liberal norms can sometimes seem like some of those Republicans who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries — decent and good, but kind of feckless and about to be run over.

Into this climate emerges Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” One of the powerful features of this book is that Zakaria doesn’t treat liberal democratic capitalism as some set of abstract ideas. He shows how it was created by real people in real communities who wanted richer, fuller and more dynamic lives.

His story starts in the Dutch Republic in the 16th century. The Dutch invented the modern profit-seeking corporation. The Dutch merchant fleet was capable of carrying more tonnage than the fleets of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined. By the 18th century, Amsterdam’s per capita income was four times that of Paris.

Dutch success wasn’t just economic. There was a cultural flowering (Rembrandt, Vermeer). There was urbanization — the building of great towns and cities. There was a civic and political stability built around decentralized power. There was a relatively egalitarian culture — until the 19th century, there were no statues of heroes on horseback in Holland. There was also moral restraint. Dutch Calvinism was on high alert for the corruption that prosperity might bring. It encouraged self-discipline and norms that put limits on the display of wealth.

The next liberal leap forward occurred in Britain. In the Glorious Revolution of the late 1680s, a Dutchman, William of Orange, became King of England and helped import some of the more liberal Dutch political institutions, ushering in a period of greater political and religious moderation. Once again, you see the same pattern: Technical and economic dynamism goes hand in hand with cultural creativity, political reform, urbanization, a moral revival and, it must be admitted, vast imperialist expansion.