An exploration of the history of ideas in Europe from the revolutions of 1848 to the beginning of World War I. Historian J.W. Burrow populates his book with the great thinkers of the age - among them Mill, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Proust, Flaubert, Wagner and Wilde -and examines the impact on European intellectual life of such powerful scientific and social concepts as social Darwinism and the unconscious mind.