The cold war, which dominated nearly all U.S. public life for most of latter half of this century, interrupted a debate about crisis in modernity that had erupted at turn of century and occupied much of philosophical and social thought until World War II. Most anti-Stalinist intellectuals were fiercely committed to modernity's putative achievements-individualism, democracy, and social (if not always cultural) pluralism-which had their basis in ideas as old as era of revolution that accompanied rise of middle class in seventeenth century and reached their apogee with liberal revolutions during following two centuries. For both socialist intellectuals and modern liberals who presupposed them, these values were typically framed in terms ineluctably connected to universalism and its cardinal principle, faith in progress. According to this doctrine, history of humankind was, in Croce's felicitous phrase, the story of liberty.' Featured in this narrative were beneficent effects of industrialism driven by scientific and technological knowledge and division of labor, which stood alongside liberal democracy and individual rights as goals whose achievement was as inevitable as eventual eradication of poverty and hunger. At center of progressivism-the political expression of modernity-was striving individual. Yet one of perplexing questions for Anglo-American philosophy was how to establish ground for individuality in an increasingly complex social world dominated by growth of large economic enterprises protected by a centralized state. The proposition that individual is identical with itself is one about which Locke had no doubt. For even if identity cannot be established by positing of unique substance, agency of reflexive consciousness, of which memory is crucial faculty, unites past and present.2 Locke's doctrine of conscious-