ABSTRACT
In his brilliant essay “The World We have Lost,” the late Tony Judt, America’s most distinguished historian of post-World War II Europe, expressed regret that in the early 21st century we live in “an age of forgetting,” in which we have great difficulty “making sense of the turbulent century that has just ended” and “in learning from it.” Rather than expressing an interest in the complexities of the global history of the 20th century, our ahistorical society seems, in Judt’s words, to act as if that history “has nothing of interest to teach us. … With too much confidence and too little reflection we put the twentieth century behind us and,” after the fall of communism in 1989–1991, “strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market” (Judt, 2006, 2008).
