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But the democratisation of communications and the loss of intellectual authority makes the dissemination, if not the rational discussion, of scare stories more efficient. Overy agrees with me that, as in the 1930s, we live in an age of scientism: the belief that science can solve social and political issues. Then, scientism involved crazed, usually Marxist schemes in which a scientific elite would be given ultimate power. Now, it is a cruder, more commercially driven force, in which scientists and the media collude in the most extreme interpretations of research to grab headlines and sell books. “In the process of popularising itself, science always presents things more simply,” Overy says. “The public always takes these things at face value, so the tendency in all this for apocalyptic thinking overcomes the tendency to say that all this is up for discussion.”

War was a big anxiety then. It is now, but in a very different form. The Morbid Age is full of accounts of the intense discussions that took place about how to prevent a coming war that was seen as certain to end western civilisation. The most furious debates took place in pacifist circles between those who advocated absolute pacifism and those who argued, with increasing urgency as Hitler’s ambitions became clear, for some form of limited pacifism that would permit military resistance to a barbaric aggressor. Reading these accounts, one feels immense pity for a generation haunted by memories of the first world war and stricken by the — in the event, well founded — fear that something even more terrible was about to happen. We don’t have any credible fear of another total war, but we have something else.

“Total war is not going to happen in the same way again. But, at a moment when people think there is a crisis of progress, they latched onto the war on terror. It’s a different kind of war, and it’s even worse, because you can’t see it and you don’t know what they are going to do... In some ways, Al-Qaeda was a highly convenient symbol for things that are very dangerous, and to which we need to react. So democratic governments go to absurd lengths, making old ladies take off their shoes in airports. There’s a quite extraordinary disjuncture between threat and response.”

Then, of course, there is the seemingly perpetual crisis of capitalism. The 1930s was the decade of the depression, and since Overy finished his book, we have experienced another capitalist convulsion that, some fear, may turn into a recapitulation of that terrible time. “Almost all the discourse in the interwar years was formed by a narrow view of capitalism as popularised by Marxism. Today, we don’t have that, because nobody reads Marx, and there are few Marxists. So it’s quite difficult to know how you define capitalism, and governments take the initiative. What we don’t have is a proper public discourse on what the nature of the system is and what we should try to do about it.”

Our biggest contemporary apocalypse, however, is the environment. Overy is not a sceptic about global warming, but he is certainly no catastrophist. “In the long run, I don’t think there’s much human beings can do about it, any more than the dinosaurs could. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to adopt greener policies. But over thousands of years, human beings have been remarkably adaptable and, unless we disappear in a methane gas explosion, I think we will continue to be inventive. The issue should be approached with a less catastrophist vocabulary.” The big message of this book is: “Democracies are no more immune from the distortion of reality or from the dangerous power of popular fear that provokes it, either then or now.”

Overy left the Labour party in 1997, when Blair was elected prime minister, and now describes himself as a nonaligned member of the (nonexistent) sceptical party. His central political position — which is not really right or left — is that we need to resist the overweening claims of the state. “We are rapidly moving towards a society that is dominated by people in uniform. The state’s claims are increasingly absolute. That’s happened in a very, very brief period of time. We are in danger of creating a worse situation than the one we are fearful about.”

He wants to see a return of the public intellectuals — not, this time, to propose crazy schemes or put the fear of God into us, but to explain that the human world is complex, that science’s findings are ambiguous in their implications and that there is, amid all the tendentious babble, room for legitimate discussion. He also wants to see ideas and culture given their proper place in history. Not much to ask of a crazed, therapeutic, panicky, materialist, multiply distracted culture, is it? I’m afraid so. But go for it, Richard.

The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars by Richard Overy is published by Allen Lane at £25

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