"Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press"
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Modernity, in Lange's telling, doesn't just shrink distances; it rewires sovereignty. The phrase "intellectual interdependence" is doing heavy lifting: it's not a warm metaphor for cosmopolitan understanding, but a diagnosis of a new political condition in which ideas, news, and public moods cross borders with the same inevitability as goods and capital. For a politician writing in the early 20th century, that carries a clear warning: national policy can no longer pretend to be sealed off from foreign opinion, foreign crises, or foreign propaganda. Your electorate is increasingly co-authored by forces you don't control.
The list of technologies matters because it traces an escalation from private to mass influence. "Post" and "telegraph" suggest statecraft and commerce; "telephone" adds intimacy and speed; "popular press" completes the turn toward public-facing politics where narratives become the real infrastructure. Lange isn't merely celebrating connectivity. He's implying that the arena of power has moved from borders to bandwidths, from armies to attention.
The subtext is an argument for new forms of international coordination - and perhaps restraint. If communication creates "interdependence", then isolation becomes not just impractical but intellectually dishonest. You can still raise tariffs and build fleets, but you can't un-hear the world. In the shadow of World War I and the interwar experiment with collective security, Lange's sentence reads like a calm, almost bureaucratic way of saying: the old nation-state story is already obsolete, and the next catastrophe will be fueled as much by headlines as by guns.
The list of technologies matters because it traces an escalation from private to mass influence. "Post" and "telegraph" suggest statecraft and commerce; "telephone" adds intimacy and speed; "popular press" completes the turn toward public-facing politics where narratives become the real infrastructure. Lange isn't merely celebrating connectivity. He's implying that the arena of power has moved from borders to bandwidths, from armies to attention.
The subtext is an argument for new forms of international coordination - and perhaps restraint. If communication creates "interdependence", then isolation becomes not just impractical but intellectually dishonest. You can still raise tariffs and build fleets, but you can't un-hear the world. In the shadow of World War I and the interwar experiment with collective security, Lange's sentence reads like a calm, almost bureaucratic way of saying: the old nation-state story is already obsolete, and the next catastrophe will be fueled as much by headlines as by guns.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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