In 1994, Rolf Peter Sieferle presented this major essay on the "Battleground of History," which centers on Germany's resistance to the universalist project of the "West" and its dream of a unique path. He illustrates how the accelerated modernity, in its ongoing and relentless forward rush over the past hundred years, pushes ahead growing mountains of problems, for which the old ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism continually transform, producing new paradoxes in the process. In the eternal conflict between universalism (the proclamation of the general) and particularism (the proclamation of the specific), two irreconcilable conceptions of history confront each other. These are associated with different orders: the Leviathan, a rule of law and absolute power that leads to dictatorship.