David’s Reviews > A Concise History of Modern Europe > Status Update

Just absurdly trash. Neoliberal and Fukayama central.

Enlightenment simplified to rationalism, implication of the cessation of dictatorship after death of Robespierre (ignoring Thermidor and White Terror), no mention of German idealism aside from brief mention of Kant, no mention of failures of European landowner-bourgeois liberalism pre-1848, trash chapter on Marxism with no mention of Hegel, oversimplification of SPD, revolution is just seizing control of factories.

Mason seeks to investigate European history from 1789 to 1989, considered the collapse of communism the victory of "liberty, fraternity, equality." He's right, but only in the sense of the domination of a contradictory bourgeois system, not the universalist liberal insinuation which he intends. Good point on the question of a "European" Russia, but doesn't address the anti-Asian racism inherent in the debate.