ABSTRACT
Whatever the importance of ahistorical personality factors, we sense that the totalitarian departures would not have been possible in 1750, or even 1830, or even 1870-yet somehow, at some point, they became so. It became possible to worry about, to desire, to find necessary and possible, certain things for the first time. On one level, the First World War was crucial, even a sine qua non, but it could not have had the impact it did without the new layer of possibility that had emerged before. We must grasp the emergence of conditions of possibility on this necessarily abstract level even before considering how intellectuals responded by articulating the new problems and possibilities that seemed to have emerged. Even when they ask about “origins,” most inquiries into the three interwar regimes do not consider this background layer explicitly, but any account presupposes some understanding of the elements in play and the interface between them, even some sense of what was normal and desirable. And certain ways have come to structure-and limit-our inquiries.
