I believe that hope and new insight transcending the narrow limits of the positivistic-mechanistic thinking of social science today are needed, if the West is to emerge alive from this century of trial. Indeed while Western thought from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century (or, perhaps, to be exact, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) was one of hope, a hope rooted in Prophetic and Greek-Roman thought, the last forty years have been years of increasing pessimism and hopelessness. The average person runs for shelter; he tries to escape from freedom and he seeks for security in the lap of the big state and the big corporation. If we are not able to emerge from this hopelessness, we may still go on for a time on the basis of our material strength, but in the long historical perspective the West will be condemned to physical or spiritual extinction.

— Erich Fromm