How did intellectual developments reflect the general crisis in Western thought?

The decades surrounding the First World War — from the 1880s to the 1930s — brought intense cultural and intellectual experimentation. As people grappled with the costs of the First World War and the difficulty of postwar recovery, philosophers and scientists questioned and even abandoned many of the cherished values and beliefs that had guided Western society since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century triumph of industry and science. Though some intellectuals turned to Christianity, others rejected Christian teachings and dismissed the possibility that rational thought could lead to greater human understanding or social progress. Radical intellectual thought thus dovetailed with the ongoing political and social crisis, and many people felt anxious and adrift in a world without certainties.

Historians find it relatively easy to set precise dates for political events, such as the outbreak of wars or the outcome of national elections. Exact dates for the rise and fall of intellectual and cultural developments are much more difficult to define. The emergence of modern philosophy, for example, did not follow the clear-cut timelines of political history. Thus to understand the history of modern thought, we must investigate trends dating back to the last decades of the nineteenth century and follow them into the 1950s.