Twentieth-century Stories
| Author | TORBJØRN L. KNUTSEN |
| Published date | 01 January 2002 |
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343302039001008 |
119
Three Stories
The old century has closed and historians
and social scientists are busy at work trying to
make sense of it. Many historians have seen
the transition to a new millennium as a con-
venient occasion to summarize our age, sys-
tematize its key themes and identify its most
conspicuous trends.1
The most celebrated effort is undoubtedly
Eric Hobsbawm’s immensely popular Age of
Extremes. It represents in many ways the first
attempt to collect the key events of the 20th
century into a single, synthesizing volume. It is
a master historian’s popular synthesis. It is
written with clarity and wit, but it tells a gloomy
story – which begins and ends with Sarajevo.
Many themes are interwoven in this dynamic
and readable book. The dominant theme is the
evolution of the international economy and the
technology that drives it – the ‘evolution of the
means of the production’, as the author might
have put it 15 or 20 years ago.
François Furet’s Passing of an Illusion is
another celebrated volume – the last book
written by one of France’s most pre-eminent
historians. If Hobsbawm has written a story
on the fall and rise of contemporary capital-
ism, Furet has written a story on the rise and
fall of Communism. Why did the Russian
Revolution and Communism trigger such
enthusiasm among soldiers, workers, aca-
demics and intellectuals during the course of
the 20th century? Furet answers that Com-
munism became synonymous with anti-
Fascism during the interwar years, and for
decades thereafter its anti-Fascist character
served to excuse and whitewash its ruthless
excesses.
© 2002 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 39, no. 1, 2002, pp. 119–127
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(200201)39:1; 119–127; 021065]
Twentieth-Century Stories*
TORBJØRN L. KNUTSEN
Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology (NTNU)
This essay examines four influential books on the trends and themes of the 20th century: The Age of
Extremes, The Passing of an Illusion, Dark Continent and Triangulating Peace. All four books discuss
the same historical events but incorporate them in very different stories. The main differences
between the books are in the literary forms that they most closely conform to – tragedy, comedy,
satire and romance, respectively. The essay concludes by asking why historians tend to bypass in
silence the remarkable fact which constitutes the core of Triangulating Peace – and which might well
be the most important feature of the 20th century – namely, that no democracy has gone to war
against another democracy.
* Four books are discussed here: Hobsbawm (1994), Furet
(1995), Mazower (1998) and Russett & Oneal (2001). I am
in debt to Sejersted (2000), who unwittingly suggested the
carrying idea of this essay; and to the Filadelfia Advertising
agency, whose director wanted me to explain the signifi-
cance of plot structures more fully.
1There are many historians to choose among – Bulliet
(1998), Bullock (1992), Conquest (1999), Grenville
(2000), Howard & Louis (2000), Keylor (1996), Mazower
(1999), Ponting (1999), Roberts (1999), to mention just a
few.
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