Cato Unbound

The Bright Side of Modernity: Pluralism, Freedom, and Equality

Jack Goldstone — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:19:28 PST

One of the great accomplishments of modernity is the institutionalization of pluralism and religious tolerance. While not unknown in antiquity or pre-modern times, pluralism and tolerance usually meant no more than the official state religious order granting a protected but clearly second-class status to adherents of other faiths. Thus in Rome up to the 4th [...]

Modernity’s Darkness, Distinctness, and Technology

Stephen Davies — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:31:23 PST

It is truly gratifying to be part of such a stimulating conversation. I have a number of questions that spring to mind from points made in its course or which come out of works that the participants have previously published. One that Jason Kuznicki poses and Jack Goldstone responds to is that of the dark [...]

What Greece, Rome, and Christianity Didn’t Give Us

Jason Kuznicki — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:49:53 PST

Jack Goldstone writes, There is a long tradition, which Pagden seems to still hold to but which Davies and I seek to overturn, of seeing considerable continuity between the democracy of the Greeks and that of our own day, and among the urbane, cosmopolitan debates among literate non-nobles that could be found in the streets of [...]

Modernity Comes Suddenly

Stephen Davies — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:55:37 PST

What should be clear now is that I and my three interlocutors actually agree on a great deal. I will try to clarify exactly what it is we disagree about before having a look at the big issue and research agenda that is generated by the area we agree on. Jack Goldstone and I both think [...]

Continuity and Discontinuity

Jack Goldstone — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:52:02 PST

I am delighted to be taking part in such an important and rich conversation with sharp and witty intellectual colleagues — our disagreements here are as stimulating as those things on which we can agree. I’d like to highlight the odd fact that I disagree entirely with most of what Anthony Pagden says about the nature [...]

A Question of Timing

Anthony Pagden — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:39:56 PST

I would like to thank Professor Davies for his courteous response to my criticism of this thesis. I still do not think that his chronologies work. Without becoming bogged down in an historian’s squabble over dates, what seems to be at stake is just how much time one assumes has to pass, in particular in a world, or worlds, [...]

Armistice Day and the Ghost of Michel Foucault

Jason Kuznicki — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:05:02 PST

It’s surprising that we’ve recruited four historians to write about the meaning of modernity, and in four lengthy responses — now five — no one has yet dropped the name of Michel Foucault. I am curious whether doing so will advance the discussion any, particularly because Foucault’s story of modernity, like Davies’, also proceeds [...]

Reply to Goldstone, Pagden, and Kuznicki

Stephen Davies — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:20:58 PST

I am gratified that my initial post on Cato Unbound has moved the editor himself to respond, and honoured to have had rejoinders and comment from two such distinguished historians as Anthony Pagden and Jack Goldstone, two scholars whose work I have long admired and gained from. I do fear that in some areas I [...]

A Little Late to Early Modernity

Jason Kuznicki — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:12:38 PST

In his reply to Davies, Cato Unbound's own Jason Kuznicki worries that the alleged gap between the beginning of distinctively modern thinking in the late 17th century and the economic and demographic takeoff in the late eighteenth century is no gap at all. "I'm tempted to invert the supposed gap," Kuznicki writes, "and to suggest that in the earliest of early modernities ... a set of social practices, and substantial concomitant rewards, generally arrived before any modern ideology existed to justify them." Kuznicki notes that new ideas spread unevenly and over time, and he argues that the early emergence of upwardly mobile English and Dutch middle classes imply that "[i]f there was a modernity gap, its chief dimension was not temporal, but spatial." Kuznicki suggests that, pace Davies, elites and their new ideas did not precipitate the rise of modernity, but played an intermediate role. Kuznicki challenges Davies to clarifiy "what exactly the elites are doing" in his story.

Have We Ever Been Modern?

Anthony Pagden — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:29:33 PST

In his reply, UCLA historian Anthony Pagden doubts that the historical discontinuity created by the onset of modernity is "as sudden or as all-pervasive" as Stephen Davies makes it out to be. Pagden points both to much earlier and more recent changes that seem at least as dramatic as the changes between modern and pre-modern Europe, and he questions Davies' revised periodization of history. Pagden agrees that the emergence of the scientific method partly accounts for "the rise of the West," but "then we have to ask ourselves why it was that Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, etc. were not Chinese or Mughal or Iranian or Arab." Pagden submits that the answer is "the advent of secularism" following the post-Reformation sectarian wars, which drove "theological modes of reasoning forever from the public sphere."

How an Engineering Culture Launched Modernity

Jack Goldstone — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:47:21 PST

In his reply to Stephen Davies' lead essay, Jack Goldstone argues that modernity was launched when "elites developed a new 'engineering culture'" that departed sharply from European tradition. In order to gain from the commercial application of new knowledge by private entrepeneurs, Goldstone argues, political rulers were led to allow non-conformity with traditional religious authority and to "give up attempts to control the access of private firms and entrepreneurs to scientific knowledge and to market opportunities." These developments helped overturn older ideas of absolute royal authority and guild privelege, which in turn contributed to the political and social revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries and a decisive break from prior Western conceptions of society. Though the liberal idea of "a community of free individuals sovereign over a limited state" arose first in the West, political and economic liberalization do not require a commitment to pre-modern Western values, Goldstone concludes.

How the World Got Modern

Stephen Davies — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:30:24 PST

In this month's lead essay, historian Stephen Davies tackles one of the biggest of big questions: How did the world we live in -- the modern world -- so radically and rapidly diverge from the world of our pre-modern ancestors? Davies starts with a multitude of proposed explanations and winnows them down to three: the advent of empirical science and engineering, a shift in cultural attitudes toward commerce and trade, and the development of the Westphalian system of nation-states. Yet these factors emerged over a century before modernity really took off. Why the lag? Davies argues that the missing ingredient was the unique climate of competition between ruling elites in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, which combined with the other elements to produce the scientific innovation and economic growth that created the modern world.