Inequalities in wealth and status abound, despite the official rhetoric of equal rights and opportunity. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the French Revolution had thunderous consequences for the capitalist world-economy and for how struggles between haves and have-nots have played out. Ideals promoted by the French revolutionaries, he argues, generated dynamics that produced a liberalism determined to contain radicalism at every turn.

Forty years ago, a wave of political and social upheaval swept the globe.