Saját véleményem a Paul Johnsontól idézettektől abban különbözik, hogy az amerikai gazdaság korábbi belső és külső helyzetváltozásainak mozgató (hatóoki) szerepet tulajdonítok a hatvanas évek viharos külgazdasági és külpolitikai fordulataiban. Ahogyan az lenni szokott, voltak más, legalább ilyen fontos hatótényezők is. Sohasem hittem az "egyoki" magyarázatokban.

Büyük másutt olvasható kijelentéseihez ezt is idézem Paul Johnsontól:
Some kind of proto-fascist state would almost certainly have come into existence on 6 February 1934 had Maurras given the signal for action. But he was then sixty-six, very deaf and by temperament a sedentary word-spinner: he spent the critical day writing an editorial instead.
Precisely the gifts which made him so dangerous in stirring the passions of educated Frenchmen incapacitated him from leading them into battle. There was thus no focus around which a united fascist movement could gather.

A politikus prototípusát is megrajzolta a szerző. Mutatis mutandis, amit Hammarskjoldről ír, az érvényes a magyar vezetőkre, a kelet-európai népek kezelésében pedig a nyugati és orosz politikusokra is.
"In this forlorn endeavour, Hammarskjold paid scant regard to the lives, black or white, he was risking. Cold, detached, consumed by an overwhelming ambition masquerading as an ideal, he thought in terms
of a political abstraction, not human beings.

Hammarskjold, like many other outsiders, assumed one could discern, and respond to, Western-type political principles and situations in what was, in fact, nothing more than a seething cauldron of tribal and personal politics."

Ozaki Yukio, the most durable of Japanese politicians, who took part in the first general election of 1890 and lived to sit in the first post-1945 Diet, wrote in 1918 that in Japan 'political parties, which should be
based and dissolved solely on principles and political views, are really affairs of personal connections and sentiments, the relations between the leader and the members of a party being similar to those which subsisted between a feudal lord and his liegemen'.

Why had the promise of the nineteenth century been dashed? Why had much of the twentieth century turned into an age of horror or, as some would say, evil? The social sciences, which claimed such questions as their province, could not provide the answer. Nor was this surprising: they were part, and a very important part, of the problem. Economics, sociology, psychology and
other inexact sciences - scarcely sciences at all in the light of modern experience - had constructed the juggernaut of social engineering, which had crushed beneath it so many lives and so much wealth. The tragedy was that the social sciences only began to fall
into disfavour in the 1970s, after they had benefited from the great afflatus of higher education. The effect of the social science fallacy would therefore still be felt until the turn of the century.

...But if, as deconstructionists maintained, 'hierarchical' systems of judgement, which favoured the
study of Shakespeare's plays over, say, comic books, were a source of social evil, what was the point of universities, whose traditional purpose was the pursuit of excellence?

...Significantly, just as in
Marxist states social engineering went hand in hand with financial corruption of the most blatant kind, the same conjunction appeared in 'progressive' American universities. Early in 1991, the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee, under the
chairmanship of John Dingell, began a vigorous investigation into the use of $9.2 billion a year funded to American universities by the federal government in the form of research contracts. They discovered that at Stanford, which had received $1.8 billion during the
previous ten years, about $200 million had been syphoned off into unjustifiable expenditure, designed chiefly to give the academic staff, from the university's president downwards, a higher standard of living. 149 Such scandals contributed to the process which, by the early 1990s, had begun to undermine the standing of the universities in general, and the social sciences in particular, among the
public.