It is time, twenty-five years on, to discuss the cold war again. In the decade following the events of 1989, we spoke about little else. None of us anticipated the rapid breakup of the Soviet empire, or the equally quick return of Eastern Europe to constitutional democracy, or the shriveling of the revolutionary movements that Moscow had long supported. Faced with the unexpected, we engaged in some uncharacteristic big thinking. Is this the “end of history”? And “what’s left of the Left?” Then life moved on and our thinking became small again. Europe’s attention turned toward constructing an amorphous European Union; America’s attention turned toward political Islamism and the pipe dream of founding Arab democracies; and the world’s attention turned to Economics 101, our global Core Curriculum. And so, for these reasons and others, we forgot all about the cold war. Which seemed like a very good thing.

It was not. In truth, we have not thought nearly enough about the end of the cold war, and especially the intellectual vacuum that it left behind. If nothing else, the cold war focused the mind. The ideologies in conflict, whose lineages could be traced back two centuries, offered clear opposing views of political reality. Now that they are gone, one would expect things to be much clearer to us, but just the opposite seems true. Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in. The connection between words and things has snapped. The end of ideology has not meant the lifting of clouds. It has brought a fog so thick that we can no longer read what is right before us. We find ourselves in an illegible age.

What is, or was, ideology? Dictionaries define it as a “system” of ideas and beliefs people hold that motivate their political action. But the metaphor is inapt. All practical activity, not just political activity, involves ideas and beliefs. An ideology does something different: it holds us in its grasp with an enchanting picture of reality. To follow the optical metaphor, ideology takes an undifferentiated visual field and brings it into focus, so that objects appear in a predetermined relation to each other. The political ideologies born out of the French Revolution were particularly potent because they came with moving pictures that disclosed how the present emerged from a comprehensible past and was now moving toward an intelligible future. Two grand narratives competed for attention in Europe, and then around the world: a progressive one culminating in a liberating revolution, and an apocalyptic one ending with the natural order of things restored.

The ideological narrative of the European left was a cross between Prometheus Bound and the life of Jesus. Mankind was assumed to be equal to the gods but bound to the rock of history by religion, hierarchy, property, and false consciousness. For millennia that was how things stood, until a miracle of incarnation occurred in 1789 and the spirits of freedom and equality became flesh. The problem was that redemption did not follow. Just as the followers of Jesus had some theological work to do when his return kept being deferred, so the nineteenth- and twentieth-century left developed a revolutionary apologetics to make sense of historical disappointment. It taught that while the French Revolution descended into Terror and Napoleonic despotism, it did prepare the way for the pan-European revolutions of 1848. These were short-lived but they inspired the Paris Commune. That lasted only a few months, but it set the example for the February Revolution of 1917. True, that was followed by the October Revolution and then Stalin and his terror. But after World War II the revolution’s pilgrimage wound its way to China and the Third World, globalizing the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. Then there was Cambodia, and the music stopped.

The counter-revolutionary right in Europe, though much stronger politically in the nineteenth century, could not offer a narrative nearly as glorious as the left’s. Formed in reaction and under duress, it was obscure and less inspiring. But in moments of crisis it could be very compelling. The story it told was a cross between the legend of the golem and the Book of Revelation. In the best-known version of the golem story, a rabbi places into the mouth of a clay figure a slip of paper bearing God’s name on it; the figure then comes alive and rages through a Jewish ghetto terrorizing its residents until the rabbi snatches the paper back. If we think of the golem as le peuple, the paper as the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the destruction of the ghetto as the Terror, we have made our way into the mind of the reactionary right.