“Truly, I live in dark times!” laments Bertolt Brecht in his 1940 poem, To those born later. The German playwright felt that he was “in the dark” because he had no ready-made answers to the problems he and his contemporaries confronted on the eve of the Second World War. The corpus of Western political thought available to Brecht’s generation – their tradition – did not tell them how to confront the inhumanity of totalitarianism without conducting inhumane acts themselves. Lacking the guiding light of tradition to make sense of their predicament, Brecht and his contemporaries had to chart their own course through the darkness that engulfed them. They had to rethink the reigning conventional wisdom about politics to find answers to the questions raised by the unprecedented threat posed by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union.
