ABSTRACT
In his Farewell to European History, Alfred Weber attempted to make some kind of sense of the convulsions which had sped through Europe and there-after much of the world during the first forty-five years or so of the twentieth century (the English translation of Alfred Weber’s book appeared in 1947). He also tried to make sense of his own emotional responses to the world. He was sure that the twentieth century represented something unique in history because it stood on foundations which were themselves remarkable. Weber did not reduce the history of Europe to technological developments, but he made the point that certain technological and scientific transformations had taken place which simply demand to be taken into account by anyone who seeks to understand the present and its emotional life. He wrote that
ever since the scientific and technological discoveries of modern times we have been living no longer on our dear, familiar old earth of wide-open spaces and infinite variety. Instead we have come to live, ‘on a new star which in some remarkable manner combines the old geometrical extension with foreshortenings and shrinkings and permanent world-contacts, thus completely altering all life upon it’.
