ABSTRACT
The great ideologies of the modern past emerged in vicious denial of each other. Liberalism came into being in radical opposition to Protestant partisanship, the French Enlightenment and English liberalism were by no means easy bedfellows, the struggle between socialism and liberalism defined politics for centuries, and the list could be continued. Yet, proponents of ideas that radically divided people for decades or centuries, creating enormous sufferings through wars and other kind of conflicts and crises, could switch clothes with remarkable ease and become devout followers of not simply a different ideology but the exact opposite of what they so far believed. Again giving only a few examples from a great variety, nationalists became liberals and vice versa, liberals became fascists and fascists Communists, but then the worst servants of the Soviet party line became the most ardent nationalists again, with former socialists becoming ardent believers of the liberal free market, critical Marxists denouncing the Enlightenment a few decades later re-launched the Enlightenment project, and propagators of the class struggle became radical feminists, even though the principles of class and gender cut radically across each other.
