The Deeper Revolution: How Worldviews Shape Western International Politics

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How would we tell the story of the last 500 years of international politics in the Western world? Most of us would struggle to tell the story of the last five years, let alone the last five hundred. But history matters to the shaping of identities, to our self-understanding, and holds important keys to understanding what we are seeing unravel today.

The Deeper Revolution resists modern preferences for soundbites and executive summaries and invites the reader to take a long journey through the political history of the Western world. Our tour guide is historian and international theorist Martin Wight, who when looking at the last five hundred years of the Western states-system, identified three waves of international revolution which profoundly shaped our politics and society: the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution – three historic moments he named “doctrinal conflagrations,” where revolutionary ideas, ideologies, philosophies, programs and belief systems came into violent clash, led to tremendous brutality and destruction, and ultimately reshaped political systems and societies.

Looking anew at these waves of revolution, this book claims that behind the visible forces of political might and change lie deep forces within belief systems and ideologies, which shape worldviews and make up a deeper revolution. While religion and faith have often been downplayed in secularised narratives of the international history of the West, this book argues for the inclusion of intangibles and belief systems to fully grasp these historic turning points and better approach our own times.

A journey through Western political history can help each reader take a step back from our current complexity, recognise familiar ideological overtones in past movements, learn from other societies who faced prodigious challenges, and reflect on how the way we see the world shapes our political and individual aspirations, our societal designs, our faith and our actions.

  Review by Prof. Dr. Robert Joustra: “Martin Wight’s Postliberal Idealism”, 1 December 2025 in Providence

“Any work that presses our political imaginations back into history is welcome, but Lange’s work is especially so for her recovery of Wight’s pathbreaking international theory through which she offers constructive applications for today.”