An economic crisis cutting deep, rising food prices, a shortage of credit, spiralling unemployment – and the advent of a new government promising radical change, nourishing international hopes of a new start, with fresh ideas and the promise of a new age of international co-operation. The United States and the world in 2008-9?

Perhaps, but this might also pass as a description of Europe in the later 1840s, which witnessed the worst economic crisis of the nineteenth century. This was the underlying cause of the great liberal revolutions of 1848. In the first hundred days of that tumultuous year, a wave of insurrections swept over the continent. From Paris to Kraków, Palermo to Copenhagen, almost every major European city saw barricades built and street-fighting erupt as unemployed workers took up arms side-by-side with angry bourgeois and prevailed against the might of the forces of the conservative order which had held sway over Europe since the fall of Napoleon in 1815. The earliest reviewers of my book, 1848: Year of Revolution (Basic Books, 2009), have quite naturally drawn parallels – and contrasts – between the revolutionary crisis of 1848 and our present circumstances.

In 2008-9 there has not been (as yet!) a collapse of the existing political order as occurred in domino-like fashion in Europe in 1848, which has a more obvious resonance with the Revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. The economic crisis which tortured Europe before 1848 was more severe than anything felt in the developed world of the early twenty-first century. In the violent trade slump of the later 1840s, the unemployment reached truly catastrophic proportions. In some French textile cities, as many as eight out of every thirteen workers lost their jobs. To deepen the misery a severe crisis in agriculture brought not only spiralling food prices, but in some places starvation: these were the years of the notorious Irish famine, but it is for good reason that the decade is remembered at the ‘Hungry Forties’ elsewhere in Europe.

Here there are parallels with our own age: only last year, there were food riots in Mexico, Haiti, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Guinea, Senegal and Uzbekistan, caused by rocketing food prices. Gary J. Bass, reviewing my book in the New York Times, has remarked that the descriptions of impoverished peasants and alienated workers in mid-nineteenth-century Europe could well apply to Chinese migrant labourers and farm workers today. The political impact of the recession in China remains to be seen, but in 1847 one alarmed Prussian official wrote that"misery, spiritual and physical, traverses Europe in ghastly shapes .... Woe if they join hands!" They did just that in 1848, when the social protest amongst the workers and peasants was given political leadership by disenchanted middle-class and even aristocratic liberals.

For this reason, the differences between the political circumstances of the 1840s and the present are crucial. Firstly, the European states in the mid-nineteenth century were simply not equipped, financially or ideologically, to cope with the depth of the crisis. In 2008-9, governments – of almost all political stripes - acted decisively, with rescue packages for financial institutions and economic stimulus plans. Critics might legitimately question the effectiveness of these measures, or be anxious about the long-term impact of budget deficits, but the very fact of action separates 2008 from 1848.

Secondly, the conservative order which was toppled in 1848 was based on the rule of monarchs and, at best, the social elites, excluding much of what today we would call civil society, which was expanding everywhere in the nineteenth century. The division between governments and civil society meant that plenty of respectable, moderate people, who might otherwise have tolerated the conservative order, deserted or turned against it when the crisis came. Even in its hour dire need, conservative regimes refused to involve some of the most influential sections of public opinion in its decision-making. The democratic governments which are facing the financial crisis today are formed within a political framework upon which there is broad consensus and which more or less compel politicians to take cognisance of the response of civil society.

This leads to the third difference, which is that the liberals of 1848 had to construct a constitutional order, often from scratch. The problem with most revolutions, however, is that there are always conflicting groups and viewpoints seeking to fill the political vacuum and shape the new order in accordance with their own ideals and interests. There was no consensus over what should replace the old conservative system and the revolutionaries turned on each other. Moderate liberals crushed radicals and socialists on the streets of Paris, Berlin and Vienna, while the conflicting claims of different nationalities in Eastern Europe led the revolutions into the sort of squalid ethnic strife with which the twentieth century became all too familiar.

So in the midst of one crisis in 2008-9, we should perhaps spare a thought for the Europeans of 1848, who endured far more. History can be a springboard: it can remind us in sombre times that people have survived through similar, or worse, long before we did. Yet there are also parallels and, perhaps, lessons to be drawn from the 1848 Revolutions. They show that fresh starts are possible and even necessary when enough people demand it, but also that those who implement reform should always be aware of the expectations of those who gave them their mandate in the first place. The"Forty-Eighters" came to power on a groundswell of demands for change, but in some places they then went too far, too fast, while in others they did not go far enough, to retain the support of the majority of the population.

The lesson here is that for reform to have any chance of success, it must carry public opinion with it. Such change need not necessarily proceed at a Burkean, glacial speed, with all reverence for tradition, but if reform is to avoid (at least) creating lasting and poisonous political division and (at worst) violent conflict, it is best carried out through a process of agreement rather than confrontation, even if that means that a progressive movement has to trim some of its more ambitious, ideological proposals.

The most influential and lasting initiatives of 1848 – including some of the new constitutions and the abolition of serfdom in Central Europe - were pragmatically framed so that they survived the reaction which followed. In our age of globalized crisis, the lesson applies both domestically and internationally. If meaningful change is to have any chance of long-term, constructive influence, it works best when it is shaped to win the acceptance of a broad spectrum of political opinion: otherwise, in a domestic context, the reforms might simply be reversed when the opposition regains power (which was the fate of most of the liberal legislation forged in 1848).

Internationally, for those of us, for example, who believe that urgent, global action is needed to combat the impact of climate change, the implications are daunting, for persuading economic powers to work against their immediate interests has never been easy. Herein, however, lies the problem of any government intent on long-lasting innovation: if it must, at one and the same time, satisfy public demand for change and convince the political opposition – or, at least, those moderates open to some compromise - of the utility of the reforms in essence (if not in detail), then it is immediately confronted by the limitations imposed by the politics of consensus, and it is forced to negotiate the contradictory demands which it throws up.

For this reason, the final lesson for our own times is that we should be wary of what a French historian of 1848 has referred to as the"lyrical illusion." When the liberals seized power, almost anything seemed possible, but this meant that high expectations were bound to collapse in disappointment, despair and, ultimately, violence. It is hard to criticize the liberals for inspiring hope and to have visions for the future, but an awareness of the limitations of government action, and, commensurately, the recognition of the responsibilities of the individual citizen, should preserve us from our own, modern versions of the lyrical illusion.