ABSTRACT
The decades around the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries were witnessing radical changes in a variety of scientific. The thesis that the new century had brought with it a decline of the type of "historical consciousness" that had dominated the nineteenth would be argued in 1940 by Carlo Antoni, a disciple of the Italian Hegelian philosopher Benedetto Croce. By the end of the twentieth century, this idea of a loss of historical consciousness could be reported as being effectively widespread and complete. The horrors of wars and totalitarian political programmes carried out in the names of nineteenth-century nationalist or Universalist worldviews had provoked a general distaste for "grand historical narratives", particularly those championing some march of reason in history. As the post-war decades were the years of the consolidation and institutionalization of analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world.
