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Political Judgment in Historical Perspective: The Epoch of the Great War as Case‐Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
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THIS ARTICLE USES THE CONCEPT OF ‘UNDERCOMPREHENSION’ to review some of the principal features of the European experience during the years from c. 1910 to c. 1920. It does so in the belief that this is a decade during which the sort of frailties of judgment signalled by that term were singularly catastrophic in their effects; and it reminds us that the year in which we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War is also the one in which we mark the 50th anniversary of the start of a second huge conflict whose causes are themselves rooted in the circumstances of the first. Reference to such an historical case-study can be particularly valuable insofar as the privilege of hindsight allows us not just to consider the nature of the challenges to political comprehension and action which manifested themselves at that epoch, but also to gauge (as we cannot yet do properly for our own age) the quality and outcome of the responses then elicited from statesmen, experts, or citizens.
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- Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1989
References
1 These are designations which have featured particularly in recent debate about the Third Reich too: see, generally, Kershaw, I., The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems oflnterpretation (2nd ed.), London, Arnold, 1989.Google Scholar This point is all the more important when one bears in mind that the record of confused contemporary reactions to rumours about ‘the Holocaust’ might provide another very revealing historical case-study of a form of twentiethcentury ‘undercomprehension’.
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