Half a dozen revolutionary generations run like gigantic fault lines across the face of the historical landscape. Their scarp-lines are a borderland of earthquake and volcano separated from the continuities of the past, and the paths to the present cut like high passes through their stony and disordered palisades. Such a revolutionary generation, perhaps the greatest in the world’s history, was that which flared out in the grand convulsions of World War II.
That a gulf divides the post-war from the pre-war generation is obvious. That it is much wider and deeper than the distances ordinarily separating the generations is equally obvious. Revolutionaries are, at bottom, moralists; and the moral activists who liquidated the middleclass world which they thought of as decadent, hypocritical and unbelieving, have little in common with the post-World War II generation which is non-ideological, non-believing and engrossed in all the middleclass attitudes and values which their fathers rejected.
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