Fascism, the studies argued, is not a sublime evil or a pathology for which there is a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity. With this broadened definition, one could hardly take comfort in the defeat of fascism at the war’s end.

In recent decades, archaeologists and geologists have reanalyzed the evidence about what happened at Angkor. What they found is the truth behind the lost-city myth: Great cities are rarely snuffed out in an instant, nor do they “collapse.” Instead, they transform.