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Abstract
This study is a comparative biography of four intellectuals who actively resisted the political and cultural fission of the European continent after World War II: the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard, the French journalist Louise Weiss, the English historian E. P. Thompson, and the Italian social reformer Danilo Dolci. Taking my inspiration from the work of Fernand Braudel, I have tried to show how each of these individuals came to think of the Cold War according to a distinctive set of temporal and strategic images: as a relatively "short-term" military and diplomatic emergency (Szilard); as a longer-term political imposition on the sovereignty of Europe (Weiss and Thompson); and as the symptom of a still broader and more deeply-rooted crisis within industrial civilization (Dolci). By juxtaposing these "layered" conceptions of historical time and process, I hope to cut across the traditional disciplinary boundaries that sometimes inhibit fruitful exchange among scholars who write about postwar history--from diplomatic historians to sociologists, from political scientists to historians of culture.
