The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and political institutions in twentieth-century Europe

This note explores new ways of thinking about the history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that more attention ought to be paid to the interaction between political thought or imagination on the one hand and, on the other, actual political institutions as they were designed, sometimes destroyed, an often re-designed in the course of twentieth-century European history. With this comes a clearer focus on 'in-between figures' (such as public lawyers). The note then outlines an argument concerning the emergence-even triumph-of a particular set of institutions and normative ideas (or sometimes just intuitions) in Western Europe after 1945, a set that was largely extended to Southern as well as Eastern Europe towards the end of the century. What is summed up as a conception of constrained civilian democratic administrative statehood did not reflect any traditional 'ism' and constituted a genuinely new ideological configuration.