ABSTRACT
The immediate years of post-war Europe and the USA were of utter desolation, and of emotional and physical exhaustion, 'photographs and documentary films of the time show pitiful streams of helpless civilians trekking through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields'. In the United States, although some of the more radical aspects of the New Deal did not survive the war, there was nevertheless, in the post-war years, a heavily state-managed mixed economy; with innovation and scientific management usurping the role of the individual entrepreneur, and a relative decline in the power of finance capital. Political theories of totalitarianism were also, however, themselves in part a product of the cold war era, contrasting liberal democracies, civil rights, pluralist cultures, and open markets with oppressive and monolithic terroristic or authoritarian regimes. Self-designated labels proclaiming progressivity had, though, as now, to be taken with at best a pinch of salt, at worst as manifestations of a self-serving, class-based, pseudo-radicalism.
