To understand the last seventy years, we need to grasp their paradoxical character. The cultural consensus of the postwar era consolidated around an ambivalence about culture that, over time, evolved into an anti-cultural outlook. Figures such as Popper and Hayek implied that the norms of the Western tradition are not entirely sound and humane. They were not alone in this suspicion, which is not surprising, given the civilizational disaster that struck between 1914 and 1945. The mainstream liberal establishment was cautious. It wished to manage the tension between tradition and experiment, but
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