It was a crisis of the beliefs and assumptions on which modern society had been founded since the Moderns won their battle against the Ancients in the early 18th-century - of the rationalist and humanist assumptions, shared by liberal capitalism and communism, and which made possible their brief but decisive alliance against fascism, which rejected them. A conservative German observer, Michael Stirmer, rightly observed in 1993 that the beliefs of both East and West were at issue: 'There is a strange parallelism between East and West. In the East, state doctrine insisted that humanity was the master of its destiny. However, even we believed in a less official and less extreme version of the same slogan: mankind was on the way to becoming master of its destinies. The claim to omnipotence has disappeared absolutely in the East, only relatively chez nous - but both sides have suffered shipwreck.'Paradoxically, an era whose only claim to have benefited humanity rested on the enormous triumphs of a material progress based on science and technology ended in a rejection of these by substantial bodies of public opinion and people claiming to be thinkersin the West.However, the moral crisis was not only one that concerned the assumptions of modern civilisation.

It also concerned the historic structures of human relations which modern society inherited from a pre-industrial and pre-capitalist past. It was not a crisis of one form of organising societies, but of all forms. The strange calls for an otherwise unidentified 'civil society' or 'community' were the voice of lost and drifting generations. They were heard in an age when such words, having lost their traditional meanings, became vapid phrases.