DESPITE EVERYTHING, THE DECADES BETWEEN 1945 AND THE oil crisis will in retrospect be seen as a new belle époque. The basic features of our social and ideological landscape have not changed since, yet somehow the sky has become darker, lowering and menacing. There is a sense of civilization, liberty, decency being in a state of siege, more deeply precarious than before, more fragde, and also more rotten and betrayed from within.

Why, all in all, had things seemed so good? Indeed, we had never had it so good, in a variety of senses. Now it feels as if we were going to pay for it.