Troubles in Theory I - The State of The Art 1945-2000 - Architectural Review

12/13/21, 12:48 AM Troubles In Theory I: the State of the Art 1945-2000 - Architectural Review
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Troubles In Theory I: the State of the Art

1945-2000
21 SEPTEMBER 2011 BY ANTHONY VIDLER
ESSAYS
Becoming a subject of interest to those beyond the

profession in the late 1960s, architecture − and its
theory − in turn opened up to outside influences.
An anti-institutional ideology, with strong French
philosophical connections − Foucault, Barthes,
Derrida − served to undermine architecture’s own
disciplinary focus. Key figures − Summerson,
Banham, Eisenman − sought to regain the lost
territory, but a unified theory of architecture
remains elusive. The first of three essays outlines
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/troubles-in-theory-i-the-state-of-the-art-1945-2000 1/12
theESSAYS
background to architectural theory’s current

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‘The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’
John Summerson, RIBA Journal, June 1957
‘We lack a satisfactory theory of architecture.’
Christian Norberg-Schulz, 1965
‘A comprehensive unified theory of and for architecture
is important… No one has attempted a unified theory
since Le Corbusier, and perhaps since the book
The International Style, or perhaps since the work of
Christian Norberg-Schulz (Intentions in Architecture).’
Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 2011
Architectural theory has taken many forms since Vitruvius

attempted to bring together in 10 scrolls ‘all the principles of
the discipline’, with the conviction that ‘an architect should
know writing [litteras]’ both to ‘secure a more lasting
remembrance through his treatises’, and as a balance to the
knowledge of mere manual skill. The rediscovery of Vitruvius in
the 15th century led to several centuries of similar treatises,
followed by a 19th century full of style handbooks and teaching
manuals followed in the 20th century by a flurry of polemical
manifestos, and more measured statements of purpose and
strategy after the Second World War.
The generation that graduated from architecture schools in the

decade following the Second World War was a generation in
search of new principles for architecture itself. In the shadow of
the modern masters, critical of the social and urban effects of
International Style Modernism, yet reluctant to abandon a
commitment to modern architecture, they looked in different
ways for continuity through more or less radical revision.
In this search they were supported by the surprising catholicity

of The Architectural Review’s editorial board. Despite the
individual sensibilities of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Gordon
Cullen, Eric de Maré and Nikolaus Pevsner, the journal hosted
debates over questions asdiverse as those posed by Colin Rowe’s
Palladianising of Le Corbusier (‘The Mathematics of the Ideal
Villa’, March 1947) and the Modern Movement in general
(‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’, May 1950); de Maré’s
attempt to revitalise the ‘canon’ in his three-part survey of
Scandinavian, British, American and Russian ideas in 1949;
Banham’s ‘New Brutalism’ (1955); and Cullen’s ‘Outrage’ over the

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‘Townscape’ environment.
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Hubert de Cronin Hastings (aka H de C and Ivor de Wolfe)

berates the growing tide of unsympathetic urban
environments in a Townscape article, December 1949
Indeed, the AR seemed open to all comers, at the same time as

proposing a fairly consistent editorial position against what
Pevsner called the ‘new historicism’ and for de Cronin’s
campaign for a comprehensive adoption of Townscape. On its
signature blue, brown and sometimes yellow paper inserts,
contrary visions of what might be a principled postwar
architecture were posed and refuted, often by the editors
themselves. The AR was not alone in this debate: in Italy, the
gauntlet was taken up by Ernesto Rogers in the significantly
renamed Casabella-Continuità after 1953, as he indignantly
refuted Banham’s claim that Italy’s Neo-Liberty style
represented a retreat from Modernism, calling him the ‘curator
of refrigerators’. In France, André Bloc, editor
ofL’Architectured’Aujourd’hui until 1964, continued to support
the second generation of Modernists − Jean Prouvé, Georges
Candilis et al.
By the 1960s, however, a second postwar generation was

concerned to advance this critique, with a sense that what
Banham had called ‘une architecture autre’ was to be found in a
reframing of the discourse through technology and social
science. Architectural Design (AD) under the editorship of
Monica Pidgeon with Theo Crosby, and Kenneth Frampton,
supported the Smithsons an their allies in Team X, but also,
such widely disparate positions as those of Cedric Price,
Archigram, as well as of John Turner, with his reports from
Lima spearheading investigations into the potential
reconstruction of the barrios, or the world ecological
consciousness of John McHale, who edited a special issue in
1967 on ‘2001’, reviewing the state of world resources and
anticipating his seminal books The Future of the Future and The
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Ecological Context.
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Cedric Price features on the cover of Architectural Design,

October 1970
As Beatriz Colomina and her colleagues have made clear in Clip,

Stamp, Fold, a book and exhibition devoted to the little
magazines of the 1960s and ’70s, by the late ’60s ‘theory’ had
been co-opted by a proliferation of these ‘little magazines’
representing an increasingly radicalised generation intent on
countering the conformist axioms of the profession. Even AD
was transformed into a hip broadsheet, with its signature
section ‘Cosmorama’, started in 1969 when Peter Murray joined
Robin Middleton as art editor and began the wild ride to be the
architectural equivalent of the Whole Earth Catalog. Here the
move to environmental, ecological and social issues was clear.
‘Casabella’, on the other hand, under the editorship of
Alessandro Mendini, was supportive of the groups Superstudio
and Archizoom in their utopian/ dystopian take on the present;
Archigram published its own ‘journal’ (from 1961), as did Jean
Aubert and Hubert Tonka of the Utopie Group (from 1967) in
France. In total opposition, yet fascinated by the potentials of
architecture to inflect society, Guy Debord and his friends
published the Internationale Situationniste from 1958.
Redressing the balance

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These counter-architectural movements were balanced during

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the 1960s and ’70s by a series of appeals to renew the language

of architecture itself after the perceived barrenness of the
hegemonic International Style: Robert Venturi’s Complexity and
Contradiction was only the first of such attempts, followed by
Charles Jencks’s The Language of Postmodern Architecture in
1977, and somewhat redundantly capped by Paolo Portoghesi’s
announcement of ‘no more inhibitions’ in his installation of the
Strada Novissima for the Venice Biennale of 1980. The journal
Oppositions published by the Institute for Architecture and
Urban Studies in New York between 1973 and ‘84, under the
joint editorship of Peter Eisenman, Mario Gandelsonas and
Kenneth Frampton, tried to redress the balance, with an
emphasis on critical theory, as did Arquitecturas Bis in
Barcelona.
All these movements have been excellently catalogued in

anthologies that convey the changing nature of theory during
those years. Ulrich Conrads, with a hint of nostalgia, assembled
the Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture,
demonstrating that the most important theoretical interventions
between 1900 and 1968 took the form, not of ‘treatises’ as
before, but of manifestos following the model of Marx. Taking
up the challenge, Joan Ockman’s anthology of statements in
Architecture Culture 1943-1968 reveals the shift to statements of
principle as opposed to manifestos.
But around 1968 − and not necessarily as a result of the

revolutions of that year − things theoretical seemed to change.
Architecture, rather than a subject discussed by architects and
architectural theorists, became a subject of interest from outside
− from philosophy, epistemology, linguistics and most
importantly politics. With the Marxist critique of institutions,
from Louis Althusser to Henri Lefebvre, architecture − already
under attack from the right and the left for its apparent failure
to address the social problems of the postwar period − became
an object of inquiry as an ideology, similar to those identified in
Marxist theory: law, religion, the state. Architecture was now
understood in Althusser’s terms as an ‘ideological state
apparatus’, and thereby an instrument of state power. It was a
moment fuelled not only by the role of architecture in
representing or constructing the State, or in aestheticising
Capital (the foundation of all ‘Theories’ of architecture), but
equally by the politics of resistance that emerged in the
opposition to the Algerian and Vietnam wars, to the neo-liberal

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capitalist governments of the postwar period, and to the

consumer culture of the 1950s and ’60s that threatened
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de-
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politicise the class and ethnic struggles of post-colonialism.
This argument was advanced on the left by the institutional

critiques of Michel Foucault, and reinforced by the textual
critiques of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In a move
towards what today might be called media theory, Pierre
Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio analysed the
relations of architecture to representation, traditional cultures,
technology and social mobility. The most effective of these
interventions within architecture itself was perhaps that of
Foucault, whose investigation of disciplinary discourse was
centred on institutions that had developed significant
architecturaltypologies since the 18th century − asylums,
hospitals, prisons − and whose writings from 1965 to 1974
inspired both critics and architects to rethink the idea of
typology on an architectural and an urban level.
These texts were taken by architectural theorists not, as before,

as supplements to the design process itself − anthropologists
and sociologists acting as ‘humanising’ influences on the theories
of Team X, for instance − but rather as invitations to rewrite
the theory of the disciplin as a whole. So, to give some examples
out of many, Foucault’s history and epistemology of institutional
discourse − asylums, hospitals, prisons − launched a critique in
architecture directed at the nature of power and its sources,
hidden and overt. Barthes’s essays on semiology introduced
architects to the structural analysis of buildings and cityscapes
as communication devices. Derrida’s deconstruction of
philosophical and literary texts led theorists to question the
commonplaces of their practice. Gilles Deleuze’s studies of
Gottfried Leibniz and the Baroque precipitated interest in the
topologies of folding and Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Sigmund
Freud brought a new understanding of the relations between
visual gaze and desire. In each case, the intent of the
transmigration of theories from outside to inside was to unpack
the verities of the profession and disclose the ideological
agendas behind apparently innocent practices.
Thus from 1965 onwards, we saw a gradual and increasing

influence of such critical texts from outside architecture,
continuing until now, with, of course, several moments of delay
due to translation lag. With the political and social movements
of the 1960s, some of these texts were implicitly normative, in
other words developing thought about the proper role of

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architecture in mass society. Some were politically engaged −

Situationism, and the rereading of Karl Marx (Althusser,
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Étienne Balibar), Antonio Gramsci. Some were ecologically RELATED STORIES
engaged (John McHale, Buckminster Fuller) − whether for or
Troubles in Theory VI: from Utopia
against architecture. But most of these questioned the discipline
itself, as a part of the general critique of disciplines as
to Heterotopia
3 OCTOBER 2014 BY ANTHONY VIDLER
themselves ideologically tied to and supportive of the
established political power of the bourgeois liberal state.
Mackintosh School of Architecture
Undergraduate Showcase 2014
It was perhaps as a direct response to these external theoretical
7 JULY 2014 BY AR EDITORS
movements, that a number of architectural theorists tried once
more to regain the sense of adiscipline. The pressures for a
Welsh School of Architecture Degree
rigorous and unified theory intensified, beginning with John
Show: 9-12 July
Summerson’s appeal for the ‘programme’ as a fundamental
18 JUNE 2014 BY AR EDITORS
source of unity for modern architecture (he drew his inspiration
from László Moholy-Nagy’s sense of a biologically-grounded Troubles in Theory V: the Brutalist
formal aesthetic); followed by Reyner Banham’s ‘Stocktaking’ of moment(s)
February 1960, which called for a new technological basis 30 JANUARY 2014 BY ANTHONY VIDLER
derived from cybernetics and computer science; and Peter
Eisenman’s first forays into formalism in 1963, publishing his 21 Cartoons Lovingly Poking Fun at
call for a ‘formal basis of modern architecture’ in AD. In Architecture School
Theories and History of Architecture (1968), Manfredo Tafuri 22 JANUARY 2014 BY PETER COOK
attempted to discriminate between the rigorous construction of
architectural history and ‘operative’ and instrumental criticism, Troubles in Theory IV: the social side
noted a distinct shift towards the framing of a comprehensive 10 APRIL 2013 BY ANTHONY VIDLER
theory of the discipline:
‘It is symptomatic, in fact, that there is a demand from many

quarters for the establishment of a rigorous theorization of
architectural problems. This need is felt by a considerable
number of English-speaking critics − particularly by [Peter]
Collins − by historians like Christian Norberg-Schulz, by
specialists of planning methods like Alexander and Asimov, by
theorists involved in planning like Aldo Rossi and Giorgio
Grassi.’
For Tafuri, the possible reasons for the desire for a systematic
theory of the discipline stemmed from the perceived loss of
public meaning in modern architecture and its failure in
linguistic communication; from the need to control the
underlying meanings of the radical transformations in the
physical and human geographical environment; and finally from
the need to control the form of the city, its territory and sectors.
In short, he summed up, the need to find ways that can
substitute for the lost linguistic unity, an objective logical and
analytical method for the control of planning, urban design and

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architecture. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, these attempts

took on forms that paradoxically seemed to reflect the divisions
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that classical theory from Vitruvius onwards had sought to

overcome: between use, structure and form.
Thus, writing in the RIBA Journal in 1957, Summerson opined

that a ‘theory’ of architecture would be ‘a statement of related
ideas resting on a philosophical conception of the nature of
architecture’, one that he found in a group of Mediterranean
beliefs about reason and antiquity, stated by Alberti,
reformulated in the age of Descartes, rewritten in Claude
Perrault’s critique of Vitruvius, then again by Laugier, Durand,
Viollet-le-Duc, Pugin, Berlage, Horta, Perret and Le Corbusier:
‘Perrault said antiquity is the thing and look how rational;

Lodoli seems to have said up with primitive antiquity, only
source of the rational; Durand said down with Laugier,
rationalization means economics; Pugin said down with
antiquity, up with the Gothic, and look how rational; Viollet-le-
Duc said up with Gothic, prototype of the rational. Eventually a
voice is heard saying down with all the styles and if it’s
rationalism you want, up with grain elevators and look, how
beautiful!’
In this argument, Summerson traced the idea of the Classical,

the rational and the organic, to its modern conception, following
a trajectory which moved ‘from the antique (a world of form) to
the programme (a local fragment of social pattern).’ Hence
Summerson’s celebrated conclusion that ‘the source of unity in
modern architecture is in the social sphere, in other words, the
architect’s programme − the one new principle involved in
modern architecture.’ In his terms, a programme ‘is the
description of the spatial dimensions, spatial relationships, and
other physical conditions required for the convenient
performance of specific functions,’ all involving a ‘process in
time, a rhythmically repetitive pattern that sanctions different
relationships than those sanctified by the static, Classical
tradition’. The problem he identified, as with a naive
Functionalism, was the need for a way to translate such
programmatic ideas into appropriate form − a problem to which
Summerson offers no direct answer. Dismissing Banham’s 1955
appeal to topology in his essay on the New Brutalism, as ‘an
attractive red herring (I think it’s a herring)’, Summerson was
not a little dismayed at the ‘unfamiliar and complex forms [that]
are cropping up’ in practice around him through the extension

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of the engineer’s role.

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Yet, as Summerson recognised, this tradition had come to a
close in the modern period, to be superseded by a new scientific
paradigm, that of ‘the biological’ as advanced by Moholy-Nagy.
As he stated, ‘architecture will be brought to its fullest
realization only when the deepest knowledge of human life as a
total phenomenon in the biological whole is available’. For
Moholy-Nagy, noted Summerson, the biological was
psychophysical − a demanding theor of design matching a broad
idea of function that called for ‘the most far-reaching
implications of cybernetics to be realized… if the artist’s
functions were at last to be explicable in mechanistic terms’. In
this context, the problem for architecture was to discover the
apt language for the expression of the new biological facts,
based on the discovery of the structure of DNA.
His conclusion was, however, pessimistic; he concluded that any

theory that posits programme as the only principle leads either
to ‘intellectual contrivances’, or to the unknown: for his fear was
that ‘the missing language will remain missing’ and our
discomfort in the face of this loss would soon be simply a ‘scar
left in the mind by the violent swing which has taken place’.
A new and compelling slogan
Reyner Banham, writing three years later, was more optimistic.

While he sided with Summerson in deploring the style-
mongering of the 1950s − ‘it has been a period when an
enterprising manufacturer could have put out a do-it-yourself
pundit kit in which the aspiring theorist had only to fill in the
blank in the phrase The New (…)-ism and set up in business’ −
he found that ‘most of the blanket theories that have been
launched have proven fallible, and partly because most labels
have concentrated on the purely formal side of what has been
built and projected, and failed to take into account the fact that
nearly all the new trends rely heavily on engineers or
technicians of genius (or nearly so).’ He proposed that what was
needed was ‘a new and equally compelling slogan’, and suggested
some of his own: ‘Anticipatory Design’, ‘Une Architecture Autre’,
‘All-in Package Design Service’, and, perhaps even ‘A More
Crumbly Aesthetic’.
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Reyner Banham heralds the arrival of a stark new style:

New Brutalism, December 1955
The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however,

was that proposed by a young PhD student at Cambridge, Peter
D Eisenman, who in 1963 propounded his faith in ‘the formal
basis of modern architecture’ in a short article in AD.
Attempting to go beyond the technological and social, the
programmatic and the functional weighting of Vitruvius’s
categories, Eisenman argued that ‘the situation is more
complicated than Summerson allows for, and if seeing a work of
architecture in terms of its programme is the only alternative to
seeing it in terms of history, it must be admitted that criticism
is not very far advanced.’
In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman then went on to refuse all

outside reference for meaning in architecture, exorcising
symbolic, iconographic and perceptual influences or
interpretation. Instead he looked at the ‘primary configurations’
of buildings considered as structures of logical discourse − their
internal spatial and volumetric considerations deriving the
formal ‘linguistics’ of his understanding of architectural systems
from Le Corbusier’s ‘Four Compositions’, and making their
implications explicit. If for Summerson form was considered
only in relation to proportional systems, or for Banham it was
no more than a dead (academic) language, Eisenman saw all
formal systems as communicative, based on the properties of
form itself: this was the only criterion through which
architecture could be thought a discipline.
Once more it was in reaction against this overt fragmentation of

the Vitruvian triad, that Christian Norberg-Schulz tried to bind
the body back together again, in a long-drawn-out assemblage of
observations on almost every aspect of architectural thought:
historical, semiological, programmatic, technological, and, above
all, phenomenological. ‘Experience’ was the key; balance, the
method. Yet despite his attempt to introduce the newly popular
Martin Heidegger into the equation − his phenomenological

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credo was set out in Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971),

the result was what historian Ignazi de Solà-Morales termed
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‘weak’ theory − one that gave no indication of the desired result

save as a bundle of untested principles without explicit formal
outcomes.
The present condition of theory, however, is more complex. For,

despite attempts to produce a unified theory, the proliferation
of theories ‘from the outside’ has engendered a new kind of
resistance, one that poses as a ‘post-theory’ position, with the
argument that the counter-disciplinary emphasis of critical
theories left designers with little to go on; words like ‘post-
critical’ and ‘pragmatic’ are used to describe a new attitude
towards design that seems on the surface to reject traditional
theorising altogether. The second essay in this series will assess
these ‘post-theory’ positions, and look at the non-traditional
places where theory now resides and flourishes − in the
experimental practices, somewhere between, art, architecture
and science, that take on in a different mode, the urgent tasks of
inventing a theoretical practice for an uncertain ecological
future.
The AR will complete this theoretical trilogy in forthcoming

issues. ‘Part II: Postmodernism to Post-Criticism’ will be in
January 2012, and ‘Part III: The Global Context: New Critical
Paradigms’ later in the spring.
Author’s note
In this and the following essays I have adopted the position of Eric de
Maré, who, in 1949, published three articles towards a new ‘canon’ in
The Architectural Review, attempting to account for the range of
theoretical interventions inpostwarScandinavia, Europe, Russia and the
US. And, like de Maré, I will be unable to come to a definitive
conclusion…
OCTOBER 2011
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challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new
are chosen as prisms through which arguments
and broader narratives are constructed. In their
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12/13/21, 12:48 AM Troubles In Theory I: the State of the Art 1945-2000 - Architectural Review

Troubles In Theory I: the State of the Art

Becoming a subject of interest to those beyond the

‘The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’

John Summerson, RIBA Journal, June 1957

‘We lack a satisfactory theory of architecture.’

Christian Norberg-Schulz, 1965

‘A comprehensive unified theory of and for architecture

is important… No one has attempted a unified theory

since Le Corbusier, and perhaps since the book

The International Style, or perhaps since the work of

Christian Norberg-Schulz (Intentions in Architecture).’

Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 2011

Architectural theory has taken many forms since Vitruvius

The generation that graduated from architecture schools in the

In this search they were supported by the surprising catholicity

Banham’s ‘New Brutalism’ (1955); and Cullen’s ‘Outrage’ over the

Hubert de Cronin Hastings (aka H de C and Ivor de Wolfe)

Indeed, the AR seemed open to all comers, at the same time as

By the 1960s, however, a second postwar generation was

Cedric Price features on the cover of Architectural Design,

As Beatriz Colomina and her colleagues have made clear in Clip,

Redressing the balance

These counter-architectural movements were balanced during

the 1960s and ’70s by a series of appeals to renew the language

All these movements have been excellently catalogued in

But around 1968 − and not necessarily as a result of the

opposition to the Algerian and Vietnam wars, to the neo-liberal

capitalist governments of the postwar period, and to the

This argument was advanced on the left by the institutional

These texts were taken by architectural theorists not, as before,

Thus from 1965 onwards, we saw a gradual and increasing

other words developing thought about the proper role of

architecture in mass society. Some were politically engaged −

‘It is symptomatic, in fact, that there is a demand from many

analytical method for the control of planning, urban design and

architecture. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, these attempts

that classical theory from Vitruvius onwards had sought to

Thus, writing in the RIBA Journal in 1957, Summerson opined

‘Perrault said antiquity is the thing and look how rational;

In this argument, Summerson traced the idea of the Classical,

are cropping up’ in practice around him through the extension

of the engineer’s role.

His conclusion was, however, pessimistic; he concluded that any

A new and compelling slogan

Reyner Banham, writing three years later, was more optimistic.

Reyner Banham heralds the arrival of a stark new style:

The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however,

In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman then went on to refuse all

Once more it was in reaction against this overt fragmentation of

Martin Heidegger into the equation − his phenomenological

credo was set out in Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971),

‘weak’ theory − one that gave no indication of the desired result

The present condition of theory, however, is more complex. For,

The AR will complete this theoretical trilogy in forthcoming

Maré, who, in 1949, published three articles towards a new ‘canon’ in

The Architectural Review, attempting to account for the range of

theoretical interventions inpostwarScandinavia, Europe, Russia and the

US. And, like de Maré, I will be unable to come to a definitive