The Europeans Before and After the Cold War
The Europeans Before and After the Cold War

Summary/Abstract: Sometimes I am asked: why history? In so many places, history is a sort of primary-school nationalist propaganda, and serious people do something else. One of the best lines in Robert Skidelsky’s life of John Maynard Keynes is a remark made to Lytton Strachey in Florence, when he was writing one of those doctoral theses that make sense to historians and nobody else. Keynes said, he supposed that it needed to be done, but not by him. Faced with this problem in south-western Germany Max Weber said that a new subject altogether needed to be invented, and he came up with Politikwissenschaft, political science. In due course, history had its revenge: political science utterly failed to do what any science should do, predict. In this case, predicting the fall of Communism. Right to the end, the political scientists, or Sovietologists, simply did not see what was happening under their noses. The splendid Susan Sontag remarked, beating her chest, that if you had wanted to know what Communism was about, your best guide was The Reader’s Digest, a periodical that goes back to the days of Joe McCarthy.

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