ABSTRACT
In a brief lecture I must, of course, radically oversimplify. I shall have to paint my historical portraits with a broad brush and in the crudest of colours.
Before the First World War, industrialization in Western Europe, Germany, and North America might well have led to the victory of a truly liberal society. In fact, these parts of the world did know both liberty and great economic success; open frontiers, no need for passports, decreasing criminality and violence, growing literacy, and rising wages and prosperity. Thanks to technological advances, there was even some improvement in the still horribly hard conditions of manual work. The First World War, started by Germany and Austria, destroyed all this and showed that the old forms ofgovernment could no longer be trusted. We are still faced with the same problem.
