Today, Neither Left Nor Right Can Find

I Worry That We Have Forgotten That The De-ideologized, De-politicized, Uncontentious Public Space Of The Last 50 Years As Europeans Have Experienced It Is Not The Normal Human Condition. We Shall Be Sorry To Have Abandoned A Little Too Quickly The Institutions That Were Set Up By Our Parents And Grandparents To Protect Themselves Against A Return Of The Bad Old World. Because The Bad Old World Can Still Come Back To Haunt You.

As Recently As The 1970s, The Idea That The Point Of Life Was To Get Rich And That Governments Existed To Facilitate This Would Have Been Ridiculed: Not Only By Capitalism's Traditional Critics But Also By Many Of Its Staunchest Defenders.

The Pleasures Of Mental Agility Are Much Overstated, Inevitably - As It Now Appears To Me - By Those Not Exclusively Dependent Upon Them.

We Are Not Merely Historians But Also And Always Citizens.

The Different American Experience Of The 20th Century Is Crucial Because The Lesson Of The Century For Europe, Which Essentially Is That The Human Condition Is Tragic, Led It To Have A Build A Welfare System And A Set Of Laws And Social Arrangements That Are More Prophylactic Than Idealistic. It's Not About Building Perfect Futures; It's About Preventing Terrible Pasts. I Think That Is Something That Europeans In The Second Half Of The 20th Century Knew In Their Bones And Americans Never Did, And It's One Of The Big Differences Between The Two Western Cultures.