So how should we think about the ideological legacy of the twentieth century? For one thing, we need to stop viewing the twentieth century as a historical parenthesis filled with pathological experiments conducted by crazed thinkers and politicians, as if liberal democracy had been there before those experiments and merely needed to be revived after they failed.
那么我们该如何看待二十世纪的思想遗产呢？首先，我们不应再把二十世纪看作疯狂思想家及政治家进行病态试验的一段历史插曲，好像在上述试验之前自由民主制度已经存在，而我们只需要在试验失败后将之重新恢复。