Ch. 1: Old or New?

Between the turn-of-the-century decades and the mid-1930s, intellectuals, artists, and political figures spilled rivers of ink over debates concerning modernity’s “radical break” with Europe’s both distant and recent pasts. New worldviews and historical experiences were, allegedly, giving rise to “new men” and new types of socio-political orders, fundamentally different, many believed, from those which had come before the interwar years. The interwar period, seen from this vantage point, marks a key turning point in Western (European) history; one that fundamentally transformed people’s collective consciousness and gave birth to new forms of social and political life.

Do you agree or disagree with this interpretation? Did the interwar period actually mark a radical “break” in Western (or even human, as some might have argued) history? Or were there significant continuities and parallels shared with Europe’s not-so-distant pasts? Put simply, did the social and political experiments of the 1920s and 1930s have as much to do with the 18th and 19th centuries as they did with the interwar years, or were they the exclusive offspring of Europe’s turn-of-the-century “mood” and the experiences and worldviews which emerged during and immediately after the First World War?