Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

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University of Chicago Press, 1992 - 228 Seiten
In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

"By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."—Richard M. Rorty, University of Virginia

"[Toulmin] has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. . . . His aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium."—Quentin Skinner, New York Review of Books

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Inhalt

What Is the Problem About Modernity?
5
The Standard Account and Its Defects
13
The Modernity of the Renaissance
22
Retreat from the Renaissance
30
From Humanists to Rationalists
36
The 17thCentury CounterRenaissance
45
Young Rene and the Henriade
56
John Donne Grieves for Cosmopolis
62
The Far Side of Modernity
139
Dismantling the Scaffolding
145
19201960 Rerenaissance Deferred
152
Humanism Reinvented
160
The Twin Trajectories of Modernity
167
The Way Ahead
175
Humanizing Modernity
180
The Recovery of Practical Philosophy
186

The Politics of Certainty
69
The First Step Back from Rationalism
80
The Modern World View
89
Leibniz Discovers Ecumenism
98
Newton and the New Cosmopolis
105
The Subtext of Modernity
117
The Second Step Back from Rationalism
129
From Leviathan to Lilliput
192
The Rational and the Reasonable
198
Facing the Future Again
203
Bibliographical Notes
211
Index
221
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Seite vi - Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

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