In a musical comedy popular in America twenty or thirty years ago, the hero announced as a curtain line that he was departing to 'join the Thirty Years' War'. The larger wisdom implied in that absurdity was, of course, that no generation can comprehend how history may characterise major events that occur during its lifetime. While one cannot place the current scene in the context of what may occur in the next few years, however, there is still a widespread feeling - often encysted in layers of qualifications - that the world is undergoing massive change that is both political and economic. That change is of such epic proportions that one might legitimately equate it with the disappearance of the Greek city states before the swelling tide of Hellenism, with the advent of the Reformation or the experience of the Enlightenment.

LRB 22 June 1989 | PDF Download