You Say You Want a Revolution. Do You Know What You Mean by That?

The concept of revolution, Zakaria notes, is a slippery thing. How is it that Bannon, of all people, identifies himself as a revolutionary? Zakaria finds the problem embedded in the word itself. “Revolution” was originally employed to describe the orbital movement of a celestial body around a fixed axis. A full revolution is completed by returning to a starting point. But before long the word acquired a secondary meaning, designating a rupture that renders everything utterly different. The word now refers at once to predictability and to transformation. “Revolution” is hardly the only word that contains its opposite—“to sanction” and “to dust” are similar in that way—but in this particular case Zakaria sees something profound. Revolutions contain the seeds of their own undoing: “Radical advance is followed by backlash and a yearning for a past golden age imagined as simple, ordered, and pure.”The Best Books of 2024