Nineteen sixty-eight was a formative year for a generation of the left. Later, some observers (and participants) of philosophical bent thought to capture “the events” in a comment made long before by Hegel. After seeing Napoleon enter town following the battle of Jena in 1806, he wrote to a friend that the Weltseele (World-Soul) had just ridden by “on horseback.” Where Napoleon came, Old Regimes and their Old Ideas fell, clearing the way for—such was the anticipation—a reasonable world.

Did the protests and protesters of 1968, all together, make up the Weltseele on pavements? Those Old Regimes fell in the early nineteenth century only to be resurrected, re-overthrown and re-resurrected, re-invented and . . . and . . . and . . . . A lot happened before a stable, Western constitutional order emerged after 1945. Look only at the Big Historical Picture, you’ll miss contingencies. Nineteen-sixty-eight challenged the post-1945 order. Many people were surprised because wh...

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