Cosmopolis : the hidden agenda of modernity / Stephen Toulmin

Originally published: New York : Free Press, ©1990

Includes bibliographical references and index

1. What Is the Problem About Modernity?.--Dating the Start of Modernity.--The Standard Account and Its Defects.--The Modernity of the Renaissance.--Retreat from the Renaissance.--From Humanists to Rationalists.--2. The 17th-Century Counter-Renaissance.--Henry of Navarre and the Crisis of Belief.--1610-1611: Young René and the Henriade.--1610-1611: John Donne Grieves for Cosmopolis.--1640-1650: The Politics of Certainty.--The First Step Back from Rationalism.--3. The Modern World View.--Fashioning the New “Europe of Nations”.--1660-1720: Leibniz Discovers Ecumenism.--1660-1720 Newton and the New Cosmopolis.--1720-1780 The Subtext of Modernity.--The Second Step Back from Rationalism.--4. The Far Side of Modernity.--The High Tide of Sovereign Nationhood.--1750-1914: Dismantling the Scaffolding.--1920-1960: Re-renaissance Deferred.--1965-1975: Humanism Reinvented.--The Twin Trajectories of Modernity.--5. The Way Ahead The Myth of the Clean Slate.--Humanizing Modernity.--The Recovery of Practical Philosophy.--From Leviathan to Lilliput.--The Rational and the Reasonable.

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.