Is there any room left for grand ideas—social, political, economic—in Europe?
I think that we are going to see, certainly in your lifetime and probably in mine, a return of such ideas. Because if you think of it in the broad historical span, what has happened in the last 30 years, is the steady unraveling of the great projects of the Enlightenment or rather the confidence that went with them. This is partly because of the experience of communism, partly for other reasons, but they’re connected. I don’t, however, think that we should imagine for one minute that therefore history comes to a dead stop; all of the problems that drove the desire for these grand narratives and theories of human change and progress and institutional improvement and so on are still with us. And some of them are actually returning in very serious ways—whether it’s the problem of poverty, of inequality, pr of insecurity, all of those issue which led to the birth of what we think of as the welfare state, or social democracy. We will find in the course of, let’s say, the next 15 years the b
