While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.

Loneliness is gaining attention globally as a public health issue because elevated loneliness increases one’s risk for depression, compromised immunity, chronic illness, and mortality. Our objective is to zoom into how loneliness has historically evolved through midlife and investigate whether elevations in loneliness are confined to the United States or are similarly transpiring across peer European nations. We use harmonized data on loneliness from nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys from the United States and 13 European nations to directly quantify similarities and differences in historical change of midlife loneliness trajectories. Compared with any other European nation/region, overall levels of loneliness in the United States are consistently higher by a magnitude of 0.3–0.8 SDs. Middle-aged adults in the United States, England, and Mediterranean Europe today report higher levels of loneliness than earlier born cohorts, whereas no historical changes (if not historically lower levels) were observed in Continental and Nordic Europe. Our discussion focuses on possible reasons for cross-national differences in midlife loneliness, including cultural factors, social and economic inequalities, and differences in social safety nets.