Abstract

Twenty-five years ago the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote an influential book on twentieth-century European political history called The Age of Ideologies. It was a classic text of liberal antitotalitarianism and is still in use as a text for under-graduates—an indication, perhaps, that our views of the twentieth century haven't changed all that much: Europeans were seized by an ideological fever in or about 1917, and were only really cured in or about 1991; what triumphed, in the end, was liberalism—though less in the American than in the European sense. And whenever we're confronted with new antiliberal challenges, the ideological-fever story of the twentieth century is readily at hand: as "Islamo-fascism" or a "third totalitarianism." So we haven't really left the twentieth century behind, as is sometimes asserted. The question is rather who will get to tell its story and what lessons will be drawn from that story.

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