Before the war, the West had been energized by an unprecedented push of economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and culture. This combination of velocity and instability had been bearable only because the cultural foundations on which the Western project was built still seemed valid: the idea of progress, a hierarchical concept of society, and ideals such as patriotism, faith, heroic sacrifice, and honor. These pillars of a bourgeois understanding of the world were questioned only by a minority of critics. If, as Max Weber has written, the train of history was hurtling forward and
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