To begin with, if man, since his origin, has always lived in societies, the State is but one of the forms of social life, quite recent as far as regards European societies. Peter Kropotkin
The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe-the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century-had ceased to exist. Tony Judt