The first issue of The Review of Politics was published in 1939, the year of Hitler's attack on Poland. The new magazine, thus, appeared at the end of one historical period, the interwar years, and at the beginning of the new age initiated by the Second World War. The years, 1918–1939, were themselves years of the working out of the crisis of which the First World War was an issue. That war, inhuman in its demands and protracted shock effects, had finally been sustained by Utopian and revolutionary hopes. The continuing crisis, compounded by that war, had been intensified by the world depression as well as by the period's characteristic political responses to the crisis. Often enough, the center and part of the right preferred to believe that things had not changed and that there was no crisis. On the left, widely enchanted by the Soviet Union's cooperation with history, seen as the ruthless work of justice, there was an astonishing unconcern about human liberty and a blindness to suffering. The right, too, often surrendered itself to the fraudulent conservatism of fascism, to political salvation by violence. So, in 1939, war, notably global in scope, came again.