Re-reading both volumes for the first time since graduate school, I was recently struck by their lasting salience-even presience. To combat that tendency, advocates of liberal democracy would need to be tough. People were fundamentally wired to do bad and irrational things. Writing in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, they cautioned liberals against a starry-eyed faith in human perfectibility. They also took a dim view of human nature. Politics, they argued, was as much driven by emotion and tied up with identity as it was an outcome of economics. They drew on interdisciplinary scholarship in psychiatry, sociology and anthropology and, in a sharp break with the generation of historians that directly preceded them, came to believe that people were motivated by more than material self-interest. Both historians swam in the intellectual currents of their time.
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