“WESTERN CIVILIZATION ” AND THE ACCELERATION OF TIME. RICHARD LÖWENTHAL’S REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS OF “THE WEST ” IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE STUDENT REVOLT OF “1968”1

“The West ” was in crisis – yet again. And Richard Löwenthal was deeply worried. The socio-political order of the Federal Republic had been challenged by the student revolt, and its impact was felt particularly strongly at the Free University Berlin where Löwen-thal, born in 1908, had been professor of International Relations since the early 1960s. West Germany’s intellectual foundation had been attacked, and for someone like Löwenthal who had experienced the demise of Germany’s first experiment in liberal democracy, it seemed as though Weimar’s shadows were hanging over the Federal Re-public deeper than ever before. The fateful tradition of German romanticism, “anti-liberal and anti-Western ” as he put it, appeared to have resurfaced once again. This time, however, it was not outright authoritarianism, but a leftist renaissance of romantic-utopian thought that haunted the “second republic”.2 Avowed advocate of what he saw as “Western values”, Löwenthal was amongst the most articulate exponents of “consensus liberalism”, which was, as Michael Hochgeschwender has argued, the “fundamental ideology of the West ” from the 1940s to the late 1960s.3 For liberal scholars like Löwenthal, whose self-imposed mission wa