The 20th century was an age of competing ideas with lethal consequences. Fascism, communism, social democracy, neoliberalism, anticolonialism — these were not abstract philosophical positions. They were programmes for reorganising human society, and the contest between them produced the century’s defining events: the rise of totalitarianism, the world wars, decolonisation, the Cold War, and the global triumph of market capitalism.
This section traces the intellectual history of those ideas — where they came from, what they claimed, what they produced in the world, and where they failed their own premises. The approach is analytical rather than definitional: not what is fascism in theory, but what did fascism do, and what does that tell us about the conditions that made it possible?
Browse by Idea
| Idea | Core Question | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Fascism | Origins, varieties, and what distinguishes it from conservatism | Complete |
| Stalinism | Marxism-Leninism in practice — the terror state and its logic | Complete |
| Social Democracy | From Bernstein to Attlee to Blair’s transformation | Complete |
| Neoliberalism | Hayek to Thatcher to the Washington Consensus | Complete |
| Keynesianism | Managed capitalism, the post-war settlement, and its collapse | Complete |
| Pan-Arabism | Nasser, Ba’athism, and why it failed | Complete |
| Anticolonialism | From Wilson’s 14 Points to Bandung to armed liberation | Complete |
| Anarchism | Classical and 20th-century — Spain as the test case | Complete |
| Frankfurt School / Critical Theory | What it actually argued — and what it produced | Complete |
| Existentialism | Sartre, Camus, and the politics of engagement | Complete |
| Black Power | From Carmichael to the Panthers — the break with integrationism | Complete |
| Second-Wave Feminism | Beauvoir to NOW — and the contradictions of liberation | Complete |
| Zionism | Varieties — from Herzl to Ben-Gurion and the foundational disputes | Complete |
| Maoism | Great Leap, Cultural Revolution, and the export of the model | Complete |
| Postcolonialism | Said, Spivak, Bhabha — what the theoretical turn produced | Complete |
Related Sections
20th Century Lives — The thinkers, writers, and political actors who developed and applied these ideas.
20th Century Interpretations — How historians have debated the origins, nature, and consequences of these ideas.
Podcast Collections — Episode collections organised by topic, period, and theme.
