Somehow the key to the whole book will be the idea of a “public mood.” There was a certain public mood in the decades leading up to 1914. The mood explains the fascination with warfare, the boredom and the ideas of degeneration and decay. The public mood also, if less directly, explain the outbreak of the war in 1914. The problem is only that no one has any idea of what a “public mood” migh be. There are no theories of public moods and no one makes references to them in a proper explanatory account.

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