Few of the ideas expressed by Hitler and Mussolini were original. In the late nineteenth century, as the masses pressed for involvement in national politics and industrialisation and urbanisation exposed societies to unprecedented change, the language of politics altered. Parliamentary democracy was still a crusading cause, resisted by conservatives, but socialists criticised liberals and democrats for failing to address economic injustices that seemed to negate democracy. Others, however, rejected both the levelling tendencies of democracy and the revolutionary implications of socialism while recognising that popular politics and social reform had come to stay.This last response was expressed by a cluster of intellectuals and political activists in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, who tried to find new political forms for traditional concerns of order and hierarchy. Their chosen language was nationalism. For a century since the French Revolution, the idea of the nation had been associated with the left, as an alternative source of political legitimacy to monarchy and religion. By making it supreme over all other doctrines, exponents of the new nationalism detached it from this heritage and used it to address the ills—and opportunities—of the age.