Politics & Power Quote by Hans Kung

Kung writes like a man staring down the wreckage of the 20th century and refusing to let it be the last word. The inventory is deliberate: two world wars, then a roll call of collapsed certainties - fascism and nazism as moral catastrophes, communism and colonialism as political totalities that promised order and delivered coercion, the Cold War as a global nervous system built on threat. By stacking them in one breath, he creates a sense of exhausted closure, as if history has finally spent its most brutal ideologies and is ready to turn a page.

The subtext, though, is less triumphal than it sounds. Declaring a "new phase" is a theological move as much as a historical one: it implies moral agency, a chance at conversion, even a kind of secular salvation narrative. Kung isn't just observing change; he's trying to authorize it, to persuade listeners that the old justifications for violence and domination have lost their legitimacy. His career-long project - a "global ethic" grounded in shared human obligations rather than sectarian power - sits behind the sentence like a thesis statement.

Context matters. Writing from postwar Europe, Kung saw how quickly modernity's promises could curdle into mechanized cruelty, and how institutions (churches included) could be complicit. So the line carries a warning inside its hope: if the age of grand, militarized ideologies is ending, the vacuum will be filled either by a new moral framework or by new, subtler forms of the same impulse. Calling it a new phase is an invitation - and a dare - to grow up.