TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
61
The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional
concepts have lost their power over the minds of men. On the con–
trary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and
categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living
force and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal
its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer
even rebel against
it.
This at least seems to be the lesson of the twen–
tieth-century aftermath of formalistic and compulsory thinking, which
came after Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, by consciously invert–
ing the traditional hierarchy of concepts, had challenged the basic as–
sumptions of traditional religion, traditional political thought, and
traditional metaphysics. However, neither the twentieth-century after–
math nor the nineteenth-century rebellion against tradition actually
caused the break in our history. This sprang from a chaos of mass–
perplexities on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual
sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and ideology,
crystallized into a new form of government and domination. Totalitar–
ian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness
cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political
thought, and whose "crimes" cannot be judged by traditional moral
standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization,
has broken the continuity of occidental history. The break in our tra–
dition is now an accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone's
deliberate choice nor subject to further decision.
The attempts of great thinkers after Hegel to break away from
patterns of thought which had ruled the West for more than two
thousand years may have foreshadowed this event and certainly can
help to illuminate it, but they did not cause it. The event itself marks
the division between the modern age-rising with the natural sciences
in the seventeenth century, reaching its political climax in the revolu–
tions of the eighteenth, and unfolding its general implications after
the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth- and the world of the
twentieth century, which came into existence through the chain of ca–
tastrophes touched off by the First World War. To hold the thinkers
of the modern age, especially the nineteenth-century rebels against tra–
dition, responsible for the structure and conditions of the twentieth
century is even more dangerous than it is unjust. The implications ap–
parent in the actual event of totalitarian domination go far beyond
the most radical or most adventurous ideas of any of these thinkers.
