In his acclaimed book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Eric Hobsbawm writes of the date January 30, 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Hobsbawm was a 15-year-old boy of Jewish origin in Berlin walking with his younger sister from school when he saw the newspaper headline that he still sees “as in a dream.” His overall period of concern begins at World War I and ends with the collapse of communism in Europe, the beginning and presumed end of political extremism, with the advent of Hitler as its apotheosis. The rise of communism, fascism (Nazism as an especially malign form), rampant Japanese, Pakistani, and Indonesian militarism, as well as varieties of extreme nationalism such as the Polish and Serbian, together constituted an “age of extremes.” Indeed, these cases will form a substantial portion of this book's empirical inquiry.

Although unlike Francis Fukuyama, Hobsbawm did not predict anything like “an end to history,” in his work there is a sense that humankind, at least that portion living in the West, had reached a watershed. The possibility existed that the twentieth century extremes were a thing of the past.

Yet just one year prior to the 1994 publication of Hobsbawm's book, the first World Trade Center bombing occurred, Osama bin Laden “declared war” on America in 1998, and a form of extremism not even listed in Hobsbawm's index – radical Islamism – emerged full force, especially after 9/11.