In the Shadow of Yesterday

Aurelian Craiutu thinks about Balázs Trencsényi’s “Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond: A Transnational History.”

By Aurelian CraiutuNovember 17, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• History

NINE DECADES AGO, as dark clouds were gathering over Europe, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga went to Brussels to speak on the crisis of Western civilization. “We are living in a demented world. And we know it,” he told the audience. “Everywhere there are doubts as to the solidity of our social structure, vague fears of the imminent future, a feeling that our civilization is on the way to ruin.” The exact context in which he uttered these words is now history, yet his message sounds eerily relevant today. We live again in a crisis-saturated world. Liberal democracy is not the only one in trouble—the environment, the economy, our education system, and our healthcare and welfare systems are as well. How are we to make sense of all these crises?

Balázs Trencsényi addresses this question in his new book Intellectuals and The Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond: A Transnational History. Coming from one of Europe’s most original intellectual historians, this erudite work draws on the pathbreaking scholarship of Reinhart Koselleck and offers “an insight into what goes beyond the current diagnoses of crisis, delineating the morphology, tracing the multiple genealogies, and pondering on the present political and cultural implications of these discourses.” Trencsényi is no stranger to crisis himself. Having grown up in communist Hungary, he now teaches history at Central European University, the same university that was compelled by Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán to relocate from Budapest to Vienna. He has also been actively involved in supporting Ukrainian scholars and students, forced out of their country by the Russian invasion.

Trencsényi’s book decenters the historical narratives focusing solely on developments in Western Europe and sheds light on allegedly “exotic” peripheries, thus offering a multifocal, pluralistic perspective on European history. This is a welcome development since many dilemmas of liberal democracy and crisis discourses have been felt particularly acutely in countries often seen as “marginal.” Trencsényi does an excellent job retrieving forgotten debates and highlighting links and parallels among a wide-ranging set of authors, some of whom are ignored today. As such, the book offers a novel way of thinking about European history, one that goes beyond the usual binaries of East versus West, European versus non-European, local versus global, or national versus transnational.

One of the main theses of the book is that framing an event as a “crisis” is never a neutral act. Crisis discourses are tools that can be easily abused or weaponized, depending on one’s political agenda. They have significant normative implications and may be used as cathartic mechanisms of creative destruction or, on the contrary, as means of radicalizing existing conflicts. Sometimes, crisis discourses are mere speech acts, seeking to mobilize one audience or another. At other times, they trigger challenges to political regimes. Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin interpreted the social and political crises of their respective times as omens of future revolutions. In other instances, however, crises do not involve a total breakdown of the existing regime but point out opportunities for innovation and structural reform.

The period that followed World War I and culminated in World War II, the time span that marks the subject of Trencsényi’s book, is a fascinating case study. While everyone sensed that the crisis of Western civilization had transnational roots, there was little agreement on its exact causes. The list of culprits was long, from market failures, the rise of the masses, and the growth of a monstrous Leviathan state (captured by economic interests) to the decline of culture, the rise of totalitarianism, and the weakening of political institutions. Liberalism was not the only thing in crisis—democracy and parliamentarism did not fare much better. People talked variously about the crisis of the mind, the crisis of capitalism or of socialism, the crisis of the nation-state or of the international system. Trencsényi shows in painstaking detail that many of the interwar crisis discourses did not project an unavoidable doomsday but sought to identify a viable path to collective regeneration.

The solutions proposed varied widely. For example, in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), Edmund Husserl placed the crisis of values within a broader temporal framework, as the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Others, such as the German writer, poet, and philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, sought to transcend national particularisms by proposing the creation of a European unity capable of overcoming national conflicts and preserving the cultural pluralism of Europe. In France, Paul Valéry’s The Crisis of the Spirit (1919) voiced a feeling of being lost in a world from which the idea of progress had disappeared, while Julien Benda, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), took modern intellectuals to task for abandoning their independence and enrolling in ruthless political tribes.

As Trencsényi points out, the crisis of liberalism functioned as an ideological glue of sorts, interconnecting sectorial crisis discourses and resulting in a vision of total crisis. This trope could be found in the discourses of Mussolini’s supporters such as Julius Evola, or legal scholars who embraced Nazism like Carl Schmitt. The “decadent West” was unfavorably compared with civilizations from the East, which had allegedly managed to maintain their spiritual integrity and purity. The idea appeared in the writings of René Guénon, whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) posited a sharp contrast between civilizations of “quality” and those of “quantity.” Oswald Spengler employed dramatic metaphors and parallels to describe “the decline of the West,” while Charles Maurras dismissed liberal democracy as incapable of conducting a vigorous foreign policy in times of crisis. Writing from a different vantage point but inspired by the same anti-modernist ethos, Martin Heidegger proposed his own catharsis, seeking a new beginning in the form of a novel way of philosophizing, predicated upon a return to pre-Socratic thinking. Most of those who espoused such views came to rely on the power of the Leviathan state to restore organic social structures. As Friedrich Nietzsche’s epigones sought to fill in a spiritual void in modern society, they unleashed a “counter-revolutionary revolution” fueled by their oppositional resentment toward liberal democracy.

Another meaning of crisis could be found in the writings of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and the Polish American sociologist and philosopher Florian Znaniecki, both of whom regarded crisis as a future-oriented transformative experience allowing for creative adaptation to changing conditions. Ortega y Gasset never relinquished his belief in liberalism (defined as the “supreme form of generosity”) and stressed the importance of protecting political opposition, creative minorities, and individual rights. In 1940, the Croatian thinker Bogdan Radica published an influential book, Agonija Europe: razgovori i susreti (“The Agony of Europe: Conversations and Encounters”), in which he interpreted the crisis of Western civilization as a “moment of despair and disorientation” rather than a definitive catastrophic defeat. While the old Europe was on its way out, a new Europe was striving to emerge from under the rubble, an idea Radica shared with the Catholic Lithuanian philosopher Stasys Šalkauskis.

For others like Georges Duhamel and Jacques Maritain, Trencsényi notes, the solution was the creation of supranational structures leading to the federalization of Europe. In turn, H. G. Wells saw the creation of a world state as the only effective response to the crisis triggered by bellicose national particularisms. Nikolai Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier believed that the remedy to the moral disorientation and the loss of common values triggered by the rise of a mechanistic and rationalist civilization was the return to a personalist humanism of Christian inspiration.

Trencsényi also highlights the importance of a colloquium held in Paris in August 1938, inspired by the publication of Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society (1937), a critical text in the history of interwar liberalism. The participants discussed whether and how the crisis of liberalism might serve as a means of recovering “true” liberal principles. For them, the crisis of liberalism was a wake-up call that offered a stark choice between freedom and tyranny. The root cause of this crisis, they argued, was not the doctrine itself, but the form liberalism took in the 19th century, when it betrayed its original principles. This idea loomed large in the writings of the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, who believed that the social, economic, and political symptoms of crisis were interdependent and required deeper solutions. A conservative liberal who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933, he emphasized cultural decline and the disintegration of the fabric of society as illustrated by the decline of the middle class.

Trencsényi reminds us that the concept of “illiberal” democracy made an appearance in the interwar years under the guise of “authoritarian democracy,” the term used by the Russian-born Wladimir Drabovitch, a follower of Guglielmo Ferrero, Karl Jaspers, and Paul Valéry. Another notable development was the emergence of the discourse on “militant democracy” inspired by Karl Loewenstein’s seminal essay on the topic published in 1937.

As Trencsényi writes, “an obvious context where the crisis discourse had a pivotal role in the interwar years was the debate on economy.” The crisis was seen as constitutive of the economic cycles of capitalist development, an idea found in the writings of many Central and Eastern European economists, from Joseph Schumpeter and Tivadar Surányi-Unger to Arthur Spiethoff and Wladimir S. Woytinsky. Some interpreted the Great Depression as part of a recurrent cyclical movement of capitalism, while others, like John Maynard Keynes, doubted (with good reason) that there would be any intrinsic readjustments, calling instead for extensive governmental intervention. For some, the key to recovery lay in finding the right mixture of liberalism and protectionism, while others believed that the solution came from the rejection of interventionist and protectionist policies and a return to the principles of the free market.

In some countries where the contrast between the city and the countryside was framed in ethnocultural terms, an agrarian populist agenda emerged during the interwar years promoting regionalist discourses that offered widely different diagnoses and solutions. Two examples chosen by Trencsényi are worth mentioning here. The Romanian economist Mihail Manoilescu contrasted “true” and “deviant” democracies and endorsed a state-centered corporatist agenda for creating economic solidarity that offered an alternative to what he regarded as the flawed capitalist and communist systems. In turn, the Hungarian economist Jenő Varga wrote about the “permanent crisis” of capitalism and argued that the economic crisis grounded in overproduction was an indicator of the “terminal crisis” of capitalism.

Today, we live again in an environment shaped by crisis discourses. Liberal democratic regimes are in retreat across the world, and many fear we may well be heading again for another breakdown. Ours is a world increasingly dominated by rival visions of “alternative modernities,” some of which bear striking similarities to the interwar anti-modernist and anti-liberal agendas. As national emergencies are declared and turned into permanent conditions, authoritarian leaders subvert opposition groups and thwart the influence of the media, the universities, and the courts. By amplifying and exaggerating crisis discourses, enemies of liberal democracy create an artificial sense of urgency, thereby undermining the collective faith in liberal-democratic values and principles.

The consequence of this trend, Trencsényi argues, is a “general cognitive disorientation” that risks further amplifying the magnitude of the crisis. It is difficult to know what to do when the crisis seems omnipresent and everything is touched by it. A dangerous moment arrives when crisis becomes routinized as a self-fulfilling prophecy, offering incentives for radical political mobilization. The most destructive blend, Trencsényi claims, is “the combination of a feeling of permanent crisis rooted in the fading away of the future as a possible horizon of resolving it mingled with a compulsive urge to make radical decisions.”

The book, though, ends on a note of cautious optimism. “The omnipresence of the concepts of crisis,” Trencsényi writes, “should not be taken to indicate that the world is in permanent crisis.” We can become more reflexive about the ways in which we describe our present situation. Identifying specific, localized dysfunctions should not lead to bold diatribes against liberalism or modernity in general. Liberalism does not offer a blueprint for a perfect society. The main spheres of modern society (economy, politics, culture, and religion) are governed by different axial principles (economic efficiency, political legitimacy, self-expression, and faith) that cannot always be in harmony with each other.

This should not prevent us from recognizing, however, that the liberal societies in which we are privileged to live today are happy exceptions in the history of mankind. That is why we must remain skeptical toward oracular narratives about the “death of liberalism,” “regime change,” or the “irremediable decline” of the Western world. Such alluring narratives, which are omnipresent in the media, risk intoxicating us with empty words. In the end, the choice is a simple one. We can decide to give up on liberal democracy and replace it with something else or fight for it and seek to improve it gradually. Trencsényi’s book is a passionate invitation to do the latter, and we would be wise to pay heed to it.