In this concluding chapter, the authors summarize the findings of the volume’s contributions and further develop the notion of the Weimar analogy as providing central clues about conceptions of modernity in the postwar era. It further emphasizes the multiple ways in which Weimar has been mobilized in different contexts, how it has worked as a cultural symbol, and why it has had such a profound impact on postwar political thinking in the West. The chapter, finally, expands on what we may take away from the studies in this volume for a more general understanding of the role of analogies and historical lessons for political thought.

Despite having few natural resources and peasant serfs, Denmark developed public primary education in 1814, while Britain delayed the mass, public school system until 1870 and provided little instruction to working-class students. Later, Denmark’s secondary education system included publicly-funded vocational training programs, while Britain developed a single-track system that ignored technical skills. Fiction writers and their cultural narratives contributed to educational choices. Authors became important individual political agents in school reform movements, by using fiction to advance policy ideas and inspire emotional outrage. Writers collectively contributed to the nationally distinctive symbols and narratives about education that appeared in their country’s literature. Each generation of authors inherited these distinctive cultural tropes from their literary ancestors, reworked these for new problems, and passed these along to future generations. Studying fiction writers and their narratives offers a tangible way to evaluate how culture matters to political outcomes, as we may empirically (with computational linguistics and a close reading of texts) observe significant cross-national differences in historical literary images of education. The work suggests how cultural narratives contribute to the emergence of coordinated and liberal varieties of capitalism and reflects on how cultural narratives provide a source of continuity within long-term processes of institutional change.