Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a similarly accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has become “history” at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it—and the results are proving calamitous.

In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization has altered structures of thoug…