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that the history and nostalgia of the 1980s was an expression of the decline of the West and its fear of the future. He saw the West as being characterised by economic stagnation, pessimism, and ideological emptiness after the end of the Cold War. The West had turned towards the past, with roots and tradition, to create new identities and contexts. Füredi viewed this development as a crisis of modernity, comparing his own present to the “fin de siècle” of the 1890s. He also criticised the use of the past as creating identities that are more about who people are than
division of the scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century into analytical and explanatory natural sciences on the one side and interpretative and understanding humanities on the other. And explanation and understanding are still two complementary ways of approaching knowledge (cf. Wright 1971 ), so there is no concept that could unite explaining and understanding, unite causes and intentions. Snow’s idea about the two cultures had a great impact in an era in which the Cold War created a polarisation between West and East. At the same time, it is easy to see