Thinking the 20th Century

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Notes

• And so this combination of faith and the very considerable attractions of shared allegiance gave communism something that no other political movement could boast.
• Whether they are born awkward, or become so over time, such men are difficult: they have sharp edges and prickly personalities. Berlin suffered no such defects. This was undoubtedly part of his charm; but over the years, it also encouraged in him a certain reticence on controversial matters, a reluctance to speak out which may, in the course of time, diminish his reputation.
• In the Soviet Union or communist Czechoslovakia, the outcome for two generations of “bourgeois” was decidedly unpleasant, at just the moment when their counterparts in New York or London, Paris or Milan, were elevating themselves to the status of spokesmen for History.
• The bourgeois-democracy association always seems to me a brilliant Freudian adaptation on the part of the Marxists: it means that you can be against the lawyer-father or the banker-father while remaining at liberty to enjoy the privileges of childhood and childish rebellion.
• The notion that what is wrong with bourgeois democracy is the adjective rather than the noun was a truly brilliant innovation on the part of Marxist rhetoricians.
• Arendt’s is, to coin a phrase, the republicanism of fear. In this way of thinking, the foundation for a modern, democratic politics must be our historical awareness of the consequences of not forging and preserving a modern, democratic polity.,
• Not just Arendt and Sartre but a whole generation of European intellectuals were connected to Heidegger, directly or otherwise.
• Martin Heidegger himself became all but unacceptable in the States as a result of his Nazi sympathies
• mass societies in turn reflect a pathological interaction between “mob” and “elite,” a distinctive dilemma at
• the paradox of distributed responsibility: bureaucracy dilutes and obscures individual moral responsibility, rendering it invisible and thus producing Eichmann and, with Eichmann, Auschwitz
• Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value
• Wisdom seems to come from being both an insider and an outsider, from passing through the inside with eyes and ears wide open and returning to the outside to think and to write.
• To understand an event requires the historian to release any one framework and to accept the validity of several frameworks simultaneously.
• I was personally interested (although I never raised the issue explicitly) in how Tony became a better thinker, writer and historian over time. In general, his preferred answer to related questions was that, in all of his various identities and in all of his various historical methods, he was always an outsider.,