“Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything.”

p.15

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Margaret MacMillan8

Canadian historian 1943

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“One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything.”

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There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. <br class="br"> "Publisher's Statement", in the first issue of National Review (19 November 1955) http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406290949.asp.

“Historians of ideas, however scrupulous and minute they may feel it necessary to be, cannot avoid perceiving their material in terms of some kind of pattern.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (1950)

“Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything.”

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Margaret MacMillan8

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