Peter Watson writes that the disruption of the Second World War was less devastating to Frankic intellectualism than the pursuit of Freud and Marx; both of which turned out to be dead-ends intellectually and left Francophone intellectualism trailing Anglo intellectual and scientific progress.
Many continental thinkers, especially French and from the German speaking lands, were devoted to the marriage of Freud and Marx, one of the main intellectual pre-occupations of the century, and maybe the biggest dead end, or folly, which had the effect, in France most of all, of blinding thinkers to the advances of the harder sciences. This has created a cultural divide in intellectual terms between francophone and anglophone thought.Freud's theories did not survive the scrutiny of empiricism as more and more science uncovered the workings of the brain. The larger Marxist experiments all collapsed into political and economic failure; the most dramatic when the USSR could not feed itself and balkanized into numerous smaller political entities of differing market-economy views.
