All three movements offered a strong sense of belonging in place of the abstract, identity-less, human-being-as-such that was the human person as understood by eighteenth-century rationalism. This was one of the great transformations in the history of the West, from the Age of Reason to that of Romanticism and Revolution. In place of the universal came a new sense of the particular, whether defined by nation, race or class. Instead of focusing on what united humanity, thinkers started to focus on what makes us different. These ideas, born in the nineteenth century, bore bitter fruit in the
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