Manuscriptum Epochenwechsel: Die Deutschen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Werkausgabe Band 1

Rolf Peter Sieferle presented this great essay on the "battlefield of history" in 1994, in the centre of which Germany is resistant to the universalist project of the »West« with its dream of its own way. It shows how accelerated modernism pushes in its constant "flight forward" growing mountain of problems ahead of itself for a hundred years, to cope with which the old ideologies of liberalism, socialism and nationalism are constantly transforming and producing new paradoxes. In the eternal conflict between universalism (proclamation of the general) and particularism (proclamation of the particular), two concepts of history are at the same time irreconcilably opposed. Different orders are connected to them: the Leviathan, a rule of law and absolute power that can lead to the dictatorship, and the Behemoth, where individual freedom threatens to turn into chaos. The vanishing point of salvation from the approaching environmental and resource problems finally becomes the universalist world association led by a global central government. Behind the back of this supposedly saving grand instance, with the loss of the nation states, the original collectives of family clans and tribalist tribes inevitably prevail and thus revoke a two-thousand-year process of civilisation. Sieferle describes in his "Theory of the Present Age" (Hans-Christof Kraus) that particularism wins in the name of universalism: not in favor of freedom, but with social disintegration as a result.