Burckhardt, Basel patrician and pessimist, was right. From his university chair in neutral Switzerland, the nineteenth-century pioneer of the history of culture saw Bismarck's founding of the German Reich in 1866/71 as the overture to a “world war” or an “era of wars” that would destroy the cultivated elite that Burckhardt exemplified. In the “coming barbaric age,” mass politics and industry would create a nightmare world under the domination of vast military-industrial states whose miserable inhabitants would serve out their regimented days “to the sound of the trumpet.”

The rulers of those states would differ markedly from the dynasties of the past. Equality, as Burckhardt's contemporary Tocqueville also suggested, could serve as foundation for wholly new varieties of despotism. In Burckhardt's jaundiced view the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and Rousseau's doctrine of the inherent goodness of humanity had destroyed all foundation for legitimate authority. The result – from Robespierre and Napoleon to the future of “terrifying simplifiers” that Burckhardt saw coming upon Europe – was rule by force in the name of the people. In the “agreeable twentieth century” of Burckhardt's imagination, “authority would once again raise its head – and a fearful head.