“The Middle Ages had given that awesome power of directing the fate of the individual to God and His representatives on earth—popes and kings; the nineteenth century gave it instead to history, first as progress, then as decline. However, the Enlightenment had posed the really revolutionary question: What if society is not an organism with a predetermined course and lifespan, but is made up of individual organisms, each with the power to more or less shape his own destiny? Then society’s future is not the product of some inevitable law of Progress, or Decrepitude; it is what the society’s members decide to make of it. At one stroke, the anakuklosis is broken and the cycle of disillusion and despair dispelled—not out in the world, but where it actually exists, in the minds of men and women.”