ABSTRACT
The idea that the western world was in decay exhilarated those who criticized its class structure, its liberal politics or its convention-bound culture, but for the rest it created a permanent sense of unease throughout the interwar years, later defined by the historian Fritz Stern as a mood of ‘cultural despair’. The sense of morbid decline could be detected in the prevailing views of capitalism as in some sense terminally diseased and of mankind incapable of preventing the return to a Dark Age which the death of western civilization would provoke. In an essay written in 1940, the French writer and philosopher Simone Weil argued that barbarism, not progress, was in fact the ‘permanent and universal characteristic’ of humans throughout history (Rees, 1962: 143).
