The impending turn of the millennium may be based on dubious chronology, but these final weeks of 1999 nevertheless offer a good opportunity for stock-taking. Whatever else can be said of it, the twentieth century has been a study in contrasts. The mighty engines of capitalism have produced wealth beyond reckoning even as mankind’s technological ingenuity has populated the world with dazzling instruments of comfort, inquiry, and diversion. At the same time, as Hilton Kramer notes in his reflections below, this “unrepentant” century has been, by far, the most murderous on record. Untold lives—numbering in the hundreds of millions—have been blighted or extinguished in the name of political ideology —above all Communist ideology—over the course of the century.

Facing up to the real dimensions of this evil has proved to be extraordinarily difficult—partly because the seductive nature of political ideology is felt ...

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