Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

by Stephen Toulmin

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

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Politics, Sociology, Theory

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1990, this was Toulmin's first attempt to summarise how his views on history & philosophy of science had changed over the decades, and how it impacts the wider story of science and The Enlightenment ("Return To Reason" came later on). The first half is an excellent and convincing study of Descartes in the context of France in the early 17th century. This shows that Rene was well aware of the turmoil in the world around him and that this gave the backdrop in which he found the earlier scepticism of Montaigne to be unacceptable. It also shows why his intellectual project would be attractive to other thinkers looking for a way to salvage or reconstruct the edifice of civilisation that seemed to be toppling in apocalyptic times.

Toulmin is less successful in the second half, when he tries to stretch these ideas very thinly as an "agenda of modernity" this is supposed to explain much of the cultural politics of the next 300 years. This gets awfully silly and at its worse it descends in to dreadful pop-Hegelianism that seems to be assuming History has a natural telos toward western liberal humanism, which is precisely the kind of de-particularised facile universalism that is "rationalism" at its worse - his ostensible target. Of course at the end of 80s all sorts of people were thinking this way, Francis Fukuyama (God help us) being the most prominent. Some of the "looking ahead" musings here got dated awfully quickly - the 90s turned out to see a revival of interest in nationalism, rather than the inexorable progress of trans-nationalism expected. And Stephen seems to be expecting Gorbachev to be around much longer than he was.

On a positive note, he had moments when he was quite aware that things are not always rosy and we might not be slouching towards Eden. He is also keen to stress that his is not concerned for any kind of constructionist trivialism of science or glib anti-rationalism - he was a serious philosopher, not a tuppence ha'penny hack like Bryan Appleyard or any of the dozens of dreary windbags with their second-hand never-read references to Kuhn and "scientism". He was a former student of Wittgenstein who made his name with the influential "anti-logic book" (as Strawson called it) "The Uses Of Arguments", which first drew attention to how real debates function in dimensions beyond simple battles between alternative sets of propositions and their formal entailments. Trouble is, he forgets his own lesson, and treats "the modern world view" as if it were precisely such a bundle of axioms, rather than anything to live by. He doesn't consider that *any* theory of physics and the universe could as well fill the "cosmopolitical" role he holds that Newtonianism was assigned to, and in any case wasn't the pre-modern Ptolemaic model an enshrining of the centrality of Earth which put everything in its proper place? Didn't that and Aristotelianism serve any conservative polemical purposes? In any case, who are the constituency that held these views? "All educated people", but that would include a large amount of clergy right up to the brink of the 20th century. It is ridiculous to suggest that any kind of cultural consensus existed in the 1920s or 30s on logical positivism or guided by the Vienna Circle; plenty of movements were pulling in other directions. Take a look at Marshall Berman's "All That Is Solid Melts In To Air" to get a much broader picture of "modernity" than Toulmin was seeing from the HPS department library.

What both writers would agree about is a scepticism about reports of a "post-modern condition" or distinctive rupture, as opposed to modernity's continued evolution. In that respect they were both correct, but with different arguments. Berman's modernity lives in the streets of New York; Toulmin remained in the abstract cloud-city of Cosmopolis, even when he desired to escape from it. But there are plenty of worthwhile ideas in here, just read the final chapters as a period piece.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find this a difficult book to sum up. I enjoyed it. It opened my eyes to seeing philosophical, cultural and scientific theories in context -i.e. you should not interpret theories, and especially the reasons why those theories arose, because someone has found some universal truth, but as products of the context in which the theoriser was living. The book is relatively academic, but I think anyone with a moderate smattering of intellectual and philosophical knowledge will find it accessible. It is not like anything else I have read and that is usually a positive for me. It reawaken my interest in a couple of authors - especially Montaigne who I intend to go back to.

A couple of issues. I could not at the end of the book exactly say what the hidden agenda of modernity is. Perhaps I have a greater sense of looking beneath the surface of what concepts like Modernity apparently mean, versus a deeper meaning. Additionally, the book was published in 1990, and presumably much of the research was done before then. I still think the book has something of relevance to say, but it does at points feel the full weight of being 25+ years old.

[Homo · Rating 4 out of 5]

during his living days, stephen toulmin called his contemporary philosophers and academics a bunch of fart knockers that peed on themselves if sombedy axed them a question pertaining in anyway to something real, a particular concrete scenario in a certain persons life. now hes dead and contemporary philosophers are even more stupid and zizek is their king. this great book of his sets the record straight on the beginning of modernism in philosophy. its also flips the bird at modernists and later pomos for abandoning humanism instead of appropriating it and ponders on why they mightve done it. shame on them and two thumbs up to steve toulmen whose body of works will be read by hipsters in ad 2050 propably. if youve wondered how zizeks latest brick about hegel can be hailed as top ten important philosophic pieces in decades and simultaneously have zero impact on a single life on earth, check out stephen toulmin. hes cool.

[thad.miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended read for those interested in this stuff. Toulmin traces back the start of Modernity and the Quest for Certainty (and stability). Contrary to the popular narrative, he finds that Modernity actually started in the 16th century with a more humanistic flavor in Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, etc. Looking at the writings of these writers and others in the 17th century, in their context (rather than in the abstract), he argues that Descartes and Newton's Quest for Certainty (which is still with us) began in part due to the circumstances they lived in -- e.g., the assassination of Henry IV, Thirty Years War and Protestant/Catholic tensions. Descartes, and subsequetly natural science and philosophy, sought universal, stable theories that would rise above the conflicts of the day. Toulmin ends by arguing that we must humanize Modernity (or the post-modern) and return to the diversity and plurality that marked the writings of the 16th century writers.

[Imen Amimer]

who i am,
Who we are,
are we humans?
or just machines need to be feed with oil?
ah no i know who i am
i am a wealthy person like limozine
i choose who rides me
oh i am hungry
i need to fill my stomack
hey girl come
feed me baby
oh yeah we are eating like humans, aren't we?
hey friend tell me about the latest top car
oh c'mon it's still limozine
shall i change it again?
it is still brilliant shiny new
wait wait
i am thirsty
can you water me baby?
oh how sweaty you are
you should not be jogging
you should not be feeding
you are a shiny flower honey
water me again and again
oh my belly is full
my car is new
what can i do too?
count my notes and coins?
millions billions
Jane jane jane
can pay you books
as much as you will
can give you millions
but feed my gratification
pour me a cup of win
let's hit it up
oh Eric baby nothing can be bought by money
( in a disordered world, people are turning into materialistics and cannibals. After reading Cosmopolis, i couldn't write down my thoughts in a full paragraph or essay, but rather than just a disordered peom if i am allowed to call it a poem. i just expressed myself in the above lines)

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s kind of annoying to identify as a postmodernist, because no one knows what that means, and if they do they think it means something else, and if they don’t they think it’s awfully complicated. It’s the word I’ve used for lack of a better for a year or two now, and I’ve developed a pretty clear idea of what I mean by it. But my definition is pretty distinct from anything I’ve been able to find written out anywhere. Most places treat it as an artistic period, following modernism in architecture, art, and literature. That definition is limited to me because it is hard to extrapolate artistic principles to the kind of ideas I mean (though they’re related) and because it is historically limiting. Thought it may be kind of confusing, postmodernism can be identified traced through a lot of intellectual history in Europe, though it has only really flowered in the last 100 years.

I got the sense in Discovery of Time that Toulmin shared my understanding of postmodernism, particularly in its relationship to science and its evolution over time. I picked up Cosmopolis hoping it would be Toulmin’s narrative of postmodernism, and it totally fulfilled that expectation.
As ever, postmodernism defines itself in opposition to modernism, so most of Toulmin’s task is to provide an intellectual history of modernism, contextualized in its cultural and economic milieu. This is a super postmodern pursuit, and one I haven’t seen many examples of. Toulmin has a huge knowledge of Western science and philosophy and it allows him to see not just the most notable, textbook examplars of thought in a given age, but to know the outliers and eccentrics as well. With that information in hand, he traces the dominance and suppression of certain ideas by noting the nations, classes, and institutions where certain ideas were discussed during history. This is a neat strategy because it shows how those factors influence the ideas that are kosher to broach and work on among communities that include not just isolated thinkers, but active diplomats, leaders, and socialites. It provides a clear interface between social trends and intellectual development.

Through that interface, Toulmin posits that the social legacy of the Thirty Years War, a bloody and acrimonious struggle between Catholics and Protestants, created the cultural conditions that valued the hyper-rational ideas of Modernism. The Thirty Years War ended with a shell-shocked Europe and the independence of modern nation states from the international authority of the Papacy. The creation of nation states, alongside the shift to more market-based economic communities, shifted identities from vertical feudal regions to horizontal classes. That new intellectual arrangement demanded a new worldview to support it, which was found in an analogy with the new cosmology of Newton.

The philosophical basis of Christianity always seems tenuous to me, but for thousands of people to die over a rather narrow but intractable theological dispute apparently precipitated a huge crisis in the European intellectual community. Rather than acknowledging that both sides are expressions of the same faith in slightly different contexts they for some reason (this was left essentially unexamined in the book, one of the weakest links in its argument to me) looked to first principles, a clean slate of thought that could resolve this intractable dispute.

First principles, as laid out first by Descartes and elaborated by many philosophers who found his premises enticing, involved a series of faith-based premises that far overreached the scientific knowledge available at the time. They also seem to contradict the model of science laid out by Francis Bacon. They’re centered around a particularly phrased dichotomy between rational human minds and inert, mechanistic nature that allowed scholars to feel justified in, for instance, treating human history as a series of rational choices (cf economics), reifying the political order as a metaphor from cosmology, denying the possibility of ecological history much less environmental history, and setting back the very premises of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology by centuries.

So it seems natural that shedding these premises and embracing a contextualized view of the world, especially in focusing on the factors that shape human reason, would be a central part of the scientific method and philosophy. But the history Toulmin lays out undermines that point. Science emerged during a period obsessed with its own objectivity, the independence of its thought from the realities of its thinkers. And a ton of science got done nonetheless. That, to me, is an interesting point about the philosophy of science and I think it complicates our understanding of what science is. But regardless, science created itself under the philosophical auspices of rational modernity, and it’s not too surprising that it would look back on its history and validate those assumptions.

I still just struggle a bit to understand how this was still such an acrimonious debate in the 90’s. Perhaps all the research on motivated reasoning and the big debates about data analysis and science funding sources and objectivity that make the problems of objectivity in science so flummoxing to me now were still not well described or publicized then. But still, cmon, everything the postmodernists were saying in the science wars came straight from science itself (especially the recent postmodern offshoots like anthropology and psychology, but still). Weren’t they just reviving Bacon’s principles, trying to apply the critical lens of science to its own workings and ensure we were striving towards objectivity better than we had in the past? How could scientists really believe their work was objective and independent of social factors? Why did it take “outsiders” to break the hold of some very unscientific premises? I dunno, I’ve still got some reading to do on that.

Toulmin traces the ideas of modernism into the 20th century, when they were threatened by relativity, psychology, anthropology, and early ecology, but delayed by a last-ditch surge in hyper-rationalism sparked by the first World War (a parallel for the Thirty Years War in many ways). This narrative makes a lot of sense of some absurd extremes in philosophy and art like positivism and twelve-tone music. It also explains the burst of intellectual change in the 60s—the release of a subordinate tradition in thought that had been building up, especially in the last hundred years, but which found kindred spirits going back hundreds of years (in the Romantic movement, eg).

The narrative is quite convincing, but it can feel a bit too convincing, a bit too simple. It doesn’t feel like Toulmin tries all that hard to muster counterevidence, and ultimately this kind of intellectual history can only explain so much. I did kind of wonder how other major social upheavals between 1618 and 1914 affected the trajectory of Modernism, like the Napoleonic Wars, for instance. Put charitably, there’s a lot of mileage left on the premise Toulmin outlined, and hopefully I’ll be able to find some histories of science that follow in his mold (it has been 26 years since Cosmopolis was written, so I think that’s a reasonable expectation).

[Sarah Clement · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that makes you think deeply about history and the nature of knowledge, and one that has made me insufferable to those around me for a few months now. It was a slow read for me because I needed to read and re-read many passages, and then think about and research other perspectives. Toulmin takes a deep dive into both the nature and ideas of modernity and the notions that underpin the enduring idea of the cosmopolis and the idea that we can rationally describe the rules of both the natural and social worlds. If you are someone who thinks we can find the underlying rules of all things via rational enquiry without contextual variation, then I highly encourage a read for understand where that idea even comes from and how it perhaps represents a regressive, rather than a progressive, view of knowledge. My main criticism of this book is that it is so very dense. It took me months to read because I wanted to understand it, and to do so required reading not just this book but other contextual details in order to fully understand and evaluate his claims. The other criticism would be that as he gets further into his own lifetime (1920s onward, but especially from 1960), his description is compromised by his closeness to the material, as any history of ideas would be. This book is also over 30 years old at this point, so it may leave some leaders wanting or the coverage of recent ideological developments wanting. I kind of feel he should have stopped the book at 1945, but I will say that he is still quite prescient and nuanced in his discussion of the contemporary challenges that follow the historical development of ideas he covers. A book I will absolutely keep, read again, and reference when think about what we know, how we know it, and how we can even go about learning. I don't think he identified as a pragmatist, but to me his ideas are squarely within that philosophical camp and I found it quite a stimulating read.

[Marcos Henrique Amaral · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um livro que confronta a narrativa padrão de uma modernidade monocromática, instaurada pela fase científica (cartesiana) do renascimento - que Toulmin chamará, em verdade, de contra-renascença - e a diversidade de cores da pós-modernidade, responsável pela retomada dos valores humanistas de outro renascimento, o de Montaigne. A argumentação de Toulmin se assenta na ideia de que o humanismo que servirá de insumo para a contracultura dos anos 1960, inclusos aí movimentos feminista e negro, não é algo propriamente novo, mas uma reconexão quase súbita com aquele humanismo da fase inicial renascentista, até então recalcado pelo dogmatismo das ambições de certeza, clareza geométrica e rigor lógico levados a cabo pela filosofia de Rene Descartes.
.
Após duas Grandes Guerras em nome dos nacionalismos e das premissas que sustentavam o mundo “moderno”, o Estado “moderno” e o pensamento “moderno”, se abriram caminhos para um questionamento radical dos rumos tomados pelo Ocidente. E não à toa a geração que efetivamente teria encarnado esse papel foi a geração nascida na aurora do pós-guerra, entre os anos 1940 e 1950, que, chegando aos “vinte e poucos anos” nos decênios seguintes, faz o eco distante do Renascimento humanista avultar sobre um mundo que acabara de passar por sua mais traumática experiência de desumanização. A hierarquia e estabilidade hegemônicas dão lugar a uma nova liberdade corporal e à expansão de consciência.
.
Em termos epistemológicos, há uma retomada do conhecimento oral, particular, local e temporal em detrimento daquele que se pretendia escrito, universal, geral e atemporal.

[Pieter · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's Modernity? We like to the link the beginning of this term to people like Descartes, Liebniz and Galilei. All gave a new drive to astronomy and philosophy. But the 17th century they were living in was not an era of free speech, but of strict doctrine (Cromwell, Counterreformation,...). The 16th century was more open minded with thinkers and writers like Erasmus, Shakespeare and Montaigne.

The Thirty Year War has created a sense of urgency with Descartes and others to rethink society and to come up with a universal language (helped by mathematics and philosophy). 'Truth' in the 16th Century and before (from the Ancient Greeks up to the Renaissance) was a balance between theory-centered (Plato) and practical-centered (Aristotle). Politics, science and others ought to be 'reasonable'. As from Modern times, it ought to be 'rational', created from scratch, with a clean slate. Toulmin rightly wonders which parts we should erase from the whiteboard as even the French Revolution left some institutions and traditions in place. Hume and Descartes to name two had a totally different opinion on whether senses or the mind should be the starting point to create a brave, new world.

I think the author is to optimistic about the role of supranational organisations. They lack democratic control. I rather believe a bigger role for the nation states in a multipolar world, that is guarantees peace through checks and balances and Realpolitik.

[Samuel Bierig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super fascinating and important if you are interested in the impact of the enlightenment.

[Peter Hoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1990) is one of those defining metatomes that come along from time to time. Parallels in my limited range of awareness are, for me, books like Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. They are books that can only be attempted by writers and thinkers with encyclopedic knowledge and a brilliant capacity to analyze and synthesize. They can only be read by people with sufficient background knowledge to grasp references to works spanning the last 500 or so years and dozens of academic disciplines—criteria that put me only on the fringe of meeting the necessary qualifications.
Cosmopolis—brilliantly titled because it references the totality of our understanding of the physical and natural world, plus the totality of human thought, understanding, and interaction, traces Toulmin’s concept of the Modern as a phenomenon that to his thinking arose in the seventeenth century, went through several phases up through the twentieth century, and then did—or didn’t—die.
In Toulmin’s paradigm, the Renaissance was a time dominated by a Humanism that was more or less set aside by modernity, which attempted to replace Renaissance Humanism—and a lot of other things—with reason, rationality, empirical observation, and calculation. Thus for him the Renaissance was the end of the Medieval period, not the beginning of the modern. Seventeenth-century thinkers had a high level of motivation to create something new. Prior sources of certainty, most notably religion, had let them down. The utter devastation and ruin of the Thirty-Years War (1618-1648), fought in the name of which Christian denomination was the one true faith, had made it clear that a quest for certain knowledge could not rest on such a shaky and shifting foundation. Most such thinkers did not abandon their respective faiths, but they no longer based their secular philosophy on faith. Rather they (e.g., Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc.) looked to empirical observation (looking at the moon through a telescope) and contextless but hopefully universal abstract ideas (“I think therefore I am”) to form the basis for new understanding that could not be challenged.
Having gone through the four hundred years during which this way of seeking truth (and dare I say “progress?”), we have lost much of our innocence about the limitless possibilities of modern thinking. As Pope put it, “God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light,” lasted only until Einstein and Planck showed otherwise. Bacon’s scientific revolution brought Nature to her knees and set her in service of mankind only until the one percent grabbed up all the profits and put mankind to work in service of them.
Clearly such snippets of a synopsis do little justice to Toulmin’s work. There is so much more. And when it is all over, one could have a hearty debate with this man, who like my own academic mentor Ian Watt, drew so much from his study at Cambridge with Wittgenstein. But to have that debate, one would have to be as smart as Toulmin and know as much as he did. Not many of us meet those criteria either.
As an intellectual dinosaur myself, I find that Toulmin offers me comfort even in the context of his withering deconstruction of modernism. He does it by remarrying modernism with humanism, and optimistically suggesting that what is good in both will come together in whatever is next to take us to a new and better place. And he does it by letting me choose: Have we entered what he calls the “Third Phase of Modernism,” or are we (as so many prefer to think) now in the Post-Modern period that has abandoned the “childish” things that we valued when we were merely modern.
The dinosaur in me wants to go with the first option. I am too old to give up my concept of the modern and what I like about it. Only time will tell. Galileo, Descartes and Newton had absolutely no idea what would eventually come out of what they started, and neither do we now.

[Adhoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool analysis of something I thought of primarily in its early twentieth-century configuration (in art and literature). I loved how he explicated on the significance of academic *fields* on large-scale developments of worldview, and the way society-at-large has been structured in the modern period (1650-1950) to reflect how the intellectual establishment weighed certain academic fields above others.

I was kind of annoyed by the repetitiveness of his binary between the 'conceptual rationalist universal' cosmopolitical dream of Newton/Descartes and the 'practical local humanism' of Montaigne/Shakespeare/Renaissance; and how the former camp was quintessentially 'modern,' while 'postmodernism' involves turning toward practicality and pluralism and grassroots issues. I don't disagree with this, but I was waiting for him to qualify that it might be possible to support a form of rigorous systematicity *without* making claims to universal certainty. However, he never illuminated this possibility.

More importantly, I wish he could have gone into classifying Descartes' method differently, instead of referring to it by its agenda alone. If the modernist cosmopolitical dream is proven to be just that - a dream - I want to THINK of it as something other than timeless and universal, but Toulmin only periodically gives us the opportunity to do so. More often, he exhaustively maintains the terminology surrounding his binary. I want to situate Cartesian thought within a different scheme. Yes, this mode of thought privileged physics and Euclidean geometry as 'master fields,' and yes, this refuses to account for human experience in the way we'd want the sciences to be going forward, but toulmin never actually deconstructs the notion that abstract concepts and immovable theories can be anything other than pretensions toward mastery. He undercuts the Cartesian half of his binary with a somewhat dismissive flick, but this dismissiveness strikes me as a move made in petulance. I'm all for frolicking in the fields of diversity and plurality, but I wish he could have advocated for these values by actually demystifying the cosmopolitical tower -calling it for what it is as a deeply human enterprise, and as an idiosyncratic stake in identity - instead of keeping it up in the clouds as a divine illusion.

[Ronald Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book not knowing what to expect, not knowing the author but being intrigued by the premise, pointing the way toward a 'humanized' modernism of the future. Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009) was a British philosopher and academic whose main claim to fame was moral philosophy. In tackling the modernist tradition from the Enlightenment to the present day, he was continuing what he saw as the work of 20th century philosophers like (older) Wittgenstein and Rorty who said "we don't really know everything we claim to know." This book is tracing out the steps in history that took us to where we are today.

So first in tackling modernity, you have to define what modernity even means. There are multiple starting points you can choose for "modernity" according to the discussion you're framing. For his case, he defines it along two axes - the scientific and the philosophical. Scientific modernity, he argues, starts with Newton, who ushered in modern science by transitioning from Aristotle's model of pragmatic case-based argument to a Platonic ideal of mathematical proof. By contrast, the 'natural philosophers' of previous centuries (e.g., Montaigne) were skeptical about reaching total consensus and wary of human self-deception. Often, they described natural phenomena as they observed them but remained agnostic about ultimate cause. Along the philosophical dimension, he identifies modernity with Descartes (he of "I think, therefore I am" and Cartesian mind-body dualism). The assumptions made by Descartes - that the mental and physical were two different substances, that a 'pure' (disembodied) rational mind could deduce all things, the notion of Absolute truth, etc. defined the modern era.

Despite his argument that one could trace multiple valid outlines for what is the 'modern' (for example, one could use the appearance of the modern nation-state in the 16th century, or the French Revolution in the 18th, etc.), his own choice of definition seems particularly potent because these scientific and philosophical viewpoints are arguably the stratum on which everything else grew. By framing the modern he also defines the 'post-modern,' which is not 'new philosophy' but a loose association of discourses that are in fact embedded in modernism but reactionary to its excesses, especially claims to absolute knowledge. Postmodernism, taking modernism as its base, will never progress beyond it without help.

Here he turns to the 'pre-modern' mindset of the 15th and 16th century humanists. The story here is not of dark-age philosophers counting the angels that could dance on the head of a pin, but Renaissance humanists whose outlook was remarkably cosmopolitan and absolutely more open-minded than that of the modernists of the following centuries. The common narrative of pre-Enlightenment Europe being in an ignorant, superstitious dark age is really part of the narrative of modernity, and handily skips the open-minded humanism of the Renaissance which doesn't 'go' with the story of progress toward absolute knowledge. Questions which are only now being raised in the postmodern era (for example, interrogating *whose* system of thought is being elevated as an example of the rational) came quite naturally to people of the 1500s like Montaigne. He notes that the medieval ecclesiasticism people envision had really given way to a cosmopolitan humanism, with the classical texts being widely available to lay readers across the continent by this time. Natural skepticism was seen as a check to human hubris, and in the relatively wealthy and peaceful Europe of the 1500s, the differences between religions, nations and people were seen as part of the richness of the world.

However, in the 1600s, the peace in Europe was shattered by the instability of the 30 years war. The assassination of Henri the IV destroyed a delicate balance and ambiguity led to decades of war. The 17th century saw a counter-Renaissance where science, like religion and politics, became more dogmatic. Battle lines were drawn and rationality became a proxy for legitimacy, a weapon to prove who was right. Ambiguity was out, and certainty was in. It is against this backdrop of chaos that rationality emerges as an appealing matrix to facilitate the reintegration of Europe. The treaty of Westphalia that ended the war also ended the feudal system and saw the development of the modern state.

Here, Toulmin really ties together the worldview of modernism with the political structures it emerges from and reinforces. Nation states and later capitalism would benefit from the 'rational matrix' that defines truth not only according to a narrow set of known and knowable quantities, but also posits the world to be in a stable order ordained by God (the motion of the spheres), with natural hierarchy and concentricity that seemed to echo the order of relations between the center (Sovereign) and successive spheres of power. The idealization of the rational and objective and depreciation of the emotional, relational and subjective are the root of the solipsism, alienation and narcissism that we identify with the 'modern' condition.

So how do we progress beyond it? Well, we already are. The artificial barriers between humanity and nature, world and mind have been in a long process of breaking down. He points to the emergence of the novel as helping restore emotion to the field of respectable discourse. The emergency of psychology (here he points to Freud and then many others followed) started what was seen as a change in human nature. In the 20th century, postmodern discussions on the limits of rationality point to the end of the modern.

Some people's desire to do away with the ills of modernism and 'clean the slate' with some new "post"-post modern mode of thought is, he argues, itself a display of a modernist taste for the absolute. You're searching for some universal baseline for thought when the lesson to be learned is precisely that there is none. Instead, the project he envisions is a reform which re-incorporates the very humanism that was ejected in the 17th century. Instead of rejection of modernism, it functions as a "yes, and..."

For example, ethical concerns previously divorced from science should be folded back into the scientific debate. He cites nuclear science (e.g., non-proliferation efforts) as an example, but this certainly applies just as much to genetic engineering. Rhetoric and narrative are also resurgent, instead of abstract explanation. Alongside that is what is called casuistry - that is, arguing based on specific cases rather than abstract principles (think case law). These modes of thought will grow, he argues, and allow us a more flexible worldview that will face the future. What the present world requires is diversity and adaptability instead of the uniformity and stability 17th century Europe craved. What we've slowly learned is that you can't abstract knowledge away from the situations and practices that produce it, and in this book he is attempting to 're-situate' knowledge, giving us a way of seeing the current era through the lens of the past. It didn't change the way I see everything, but it certainly succeeded in giving me new depth of understanding and perspective, and it turns out that's the way it should be.

[Giovanni Generoso · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what we might today call a post-modern critique of the Enlightenment, with particular reference to Renaissance humanism. Toulmin wants to take the best aspects of modernity and counteract them with a return to the Renaissance humanism of thinkers like Michel de Montaigne. What we need is a modernity that's been revised by the earlier strand of humanism which really set the stage for modernity itself; all of this entails a focus on the local, oral, particular, and timely, over against the written, abstract, timeless, and universal categories that dominated modernity.

Toulmin interestingly thinks that Descartes and Leibniz (who each sought to ground their inquiries into a timeless, universal language devoid of all biases) were really motivated by the chaos of the time period--particularly the meaningless and destructive religious wars following the Reformation. Seeing all of these people killed over dogmatic commitments that were based on faith alone scared these thinkers and sent them on a journey to finding a universal language that could compel all persons, regardless of their particular biases. Hence, we read Descartes taking up the question of skepticism and trying to find a ground of indubitable beliefs in order to overcome the senseless dogmatism of his day. This is a fascinating narrative Toulmin gives, indeed.

I think this book helps me realize all of the ways I've truly been influenced by the Enlightenment, even without knowing it, and even to this day--after reading the book. I, with Toulmin, think that there are many things the Enlightenment got right, that we ought to learn from. I also resonate a lot with the humanistic philosophy of Michel de Montaigne. Toulmin thinks they're not mutually exclusive.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a book to recommend to casual readers OR historians. This is a book of philosophy, so if you really want to spend a lot of time considering subtle changes in European philosophy over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this may be your book, otherwise, steer clear. I'm also not sure what "hidden agenda" of modernity means, even after reading the book. I don't remember a hidden agenda. This makes this book sound decidedly more intriguing then it actually is. The book should just be titled Cosmopolis- I wonder if the publisher added the rest of the title to gussy it up a bit.
I was reading this as part of my world history class, because we were debating how relevant the periods called 'modern' or 'post-modern' are to non-European history. The answer I got from this: not relevant at all. Terms like medieval, modern era, etc have absolutely no relevance for Chinese history or African history or anything outside of Europe. They are all based on events like the Protestant Reformation, and European philosophers responding to the Reformation, and so it is ridiculous to apply them to China.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is no easy book to read. i remember complaining about it almost non-stop. even though our professors were kind enough to space it out among other more readable books, that just meant "oh no, now we have to read cosmopolis again." yet, in the end, perhaps one of the most important books of my college career in terms of shaping my worldview.

[Jonathan]

None

[Sagely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Toulmin's Cosmopolis for a DMin course. I heartily enjoyed the story Toulmin weaves. Good reading.

Below find my "working outline" of Toulmin's text.

Preface/Prologue
Toulmin frames Cosmopolis as a “change of mind” (ix). More specifically, Cosmopolis
rehistoricizes Modernity, challenging “the picture our teachers gave us” of Modernity’s auto- genetic appearance in the 17th century as a pure intellectual movement. In its place Toulmin narrates in chs 1-3 what he calls a “realistic picture of 17th-century life,” including the “successes of the new intellectual movements, and also the agonies of the religious wars that were their historical background” (ix). Already in the Preface, Toulmin suggests that a better narration of Modernity starts not with Descartes and Galileo but with 16th-century humanist like Montaigne.
From the very first pages of Cosmopolis Toulmin also establishes the forward-reaching effects of how we choose to narrate Modernity. The Prologue’s title, “Backing into the Millennium,” suggests that we continue to live in the aftermath of the story we choose for our past. As Toulmin returns to in ch 5, mid-20th-century narrations of Modernity echo ways in which 17th-century folk opted to describe their times. In styling theirs as the “new philosophy,” 17th-century thinkers opted for “mathematical exactitude and logical rigor, intellectual certainty and moral purity,” rather than the rich particularity and tolerance of the Humanists. Toulmin asserts that those 17th-century choices (and their more recent recapitulation) “set [Europe] on a cultural and political road that has led both to its most striking technical success and to its deepest human failures” (x).
Writing on the cusp of the 1990s—a time when the Soviet bloc was weakening, the Berlin Wall was crumbling, the last of other empires’ colonies slipping away from their grasp— Toulmin asserts that the world is entering a new era. “For two hundred years, people in [the West] were content to believe that theirs was the modern age: that their ways of farming and manufacturing was the ‘modern’ one. ... They tackled all their practical and intellectual problems in distinctive ‘modern’ ways ... not available to people in the tyrannous societies and superstitious cultures that existed before the age of ‘modernity’” (3). But from the late 1960s to the 1980s, that conviction has been replaced by an “unease and sense of historical discontinuity” (3). There’s been a rupture with the story “our teachers” had passed down to Toulmin, and to look ahead and “make” the right futuribles happen (2), a new narration of the past, of Modernity, is required.

Ch One
Toulmin enters his re-narration of Modernity by searching out more definite beginning and end points for Modernity. The received, dominant story seems to assume Modernity’s beginnings in the mid-17th century with the rationalist turn identified with Descartes and Galileo. But, Toulmin warns, “what everyone is liable to assume ‘ain’t necessarily so.’ Too often what everyone believes, nobody knows” (12). He goes on, "age-old traditions are sometimes conjured into existence long after the event, and the circumstances of their creation throw as much light on the times in which they were invented and accepted as they do on the times to which they ostensibly refer." (13)
(Here Toulmin displays his bifocal interest in the narration of Modernity. He searches both for a better story of Modernity but also for the significance of the other stories we’ve told about Modernity—history and historiography.)
Toulmin lays out the “standard account” of the rise of Modernity: The start of the 17th century saw a Northern Protestant Europe bathed in prosperity and leisure. Print technology expanded literacy. Culture broke free from religious strictures. The maxims of Scholasticism no longer satisfied those who wished to think and learn for themselves. This context gave rise to new methods in philosophy and natural science.
But Toulmin proceeds to trouble or unseat each of these assumptions about the 17th- century context. The 17th century was not prosperity but crisis for Europe: wars and famine, the Little Ice Age. Far from breaking away from religious censure, theologian and philosopher both became more doctrinaire and dogmatic as ideological battlelines hardened between Protestant and Catholic. And literacy was already widespread by the 16th century, with the 17th century witnessing a narrowing of literary creativity.
Toulmin also troubles the trumpeted “turn to rationality” which the received story offers as causal for the expansion of natural science. Toulmin suggests that the 17th century actually witnessed a restriction of rationality, from an Aristotelian interest in practical, instantiated science to a Platonic devotion to abstracted theory.
From here Toulmin turns to the 16th-century Humanists, particularly Montaigne. Toulmin maintains that how we tell the Renaissance’s relation to Modernity fundamentally affects the sort of Modernity we get. In Toumin’s model, Modernity begins with first a literary, humanistic phase that gets rejected post-1600 for a rationalistic, scientific/philosophical phase. In this view, phase two Modernity effects something of an anit-Renaissance. Specifically, Toulmin maps a shift from pre-1600 fascination with rhetoric to a post-1600 obsession with logic, from case law and case ethics to universal moral theology, from ethnographic accounts of the local to abstract model of how societies ought to run, from timely application to the matter at hand to a timeless truths. The 17th century marks the ascendancy of theory. Toulmin illustrates this shift wonderfully by contrasting Montaigne’s attitude toward his body with Descartes’.

Ch Two
Toulmin’s parting question in ch 1 is why this shift happened when it did. To begin to answer this question, he directs the reader to the assassination of Henry of Navarre in 1610. Toulmin surmises, “By 1620, people in positions of political power and theological authority in Europe no longer saw Montaigne’s pluralism as a viable intellectual option, any more than Henry’s tolerance was for them a practical [political] option” (55).
Henri IV’s assassination not only tolled a death knell for a politics of toleration; it also did away with hope in Renaissance humanism. Toulmin writes, "The eclipse of Montaigne’s philosophical reputation, and the political consequences of Henri IV’s murder, are linked by a common thread: the dissatisfaction with skepticism which led people in turn, into an unwillingness to suspend the search for provable doctrines, an active distrust of disbelievers and finally to belief in belief itself. If Europeans were to avoid falling into a skeptical morass, they had, it seemed, to find something to be “certain” about." Rationalism began its assent.
Toulmin constructs this narrative of the early 17th century in parallel with La Grande Encyclopédie’s entry on “Descartes, René.” The entry presents Descartes’ life as “above all that of an intellect; ... the outward events of his existence have interest only for the light they can thrown on the inner events of his genius” (in Toulmin, 45). Through archival research, Toulmin complicates this story, retrieving a sonnet composed on the first anniversary of Henri IV’s death at La Flèche (possibly by Descartes’ own hand). The sonnet reveals both the depth of impact Henry’s assassination had on Descartes’ peers and also a telling enthusiasm over Galileo’s recent publications that offered a “stable” view of the cosmos.
Toulmin finds echoes of the despondency adolescent Descartes’ alleged sonnet in the mature John Donne’s “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary.” Another voice in the wake of Henry’s assassination feels the cosmos, both natural and social, disintegrating (and, thus, in need of stability) “in not one, but a dozen ways” (66). The fabric of cosmopolis was felt to be unraveling.
Viewed in the light of this felt fragmentation and decay of the world-order, a rationalist quest for certainty displays itself as a response to “a specific historical challenge—the political, social, and theological chaos embodied in the Thirty Years’ War” (70). The political, economic, and social crises laid the groundwork for an intellectual and theological turn toward certainty, modeled on Eculidean geometry. This turn reverberated in understandings of natural science and physics (cf. Newton), law (cf. Grotius), medicine, politics (cf. Hobbes), and theology (cf. emergence of manuals and dogma). Viewed together, these moves may be described as a counter- revolution, undoing the gains of Renaissance humanism. This was a battle to reestablish cosmopolis.
Toulmin concludes ch 2 with reflections historiographical method.

Ch Three
After the Thirty Years’ War, Europe faced a staggering “struggle for stability,” now with the role of the Church relativized. This was a process, in part, of establishing new “‘commonsense’ attitudes” through the “post-Cartesian quest for scientific and intellectual certainty and stability” (91f.). The process also entailed divining a balance between religious toleration and the power of common religion to unite the new nation-state. Distinctions of class came to the fore as one stabilizing strategy.
Toulmin profiles Leibniz as an example of one path of this reconstruction. Leibniz’ project of a characteristica universalis sought to do away with the failure of communication that had swathed Europe in war, offering a language that expressed thought with mathematical correspondence and rationality. Leibniz witnessed to the Rationalists’ dreams of “a rational method, a unified science, and an exact language,” which together would “‘purify’ the operations of human reason” by excusing Reason from context (104).
Leibniz’ contemporary Isaac Newton left far greater a mark on the shape of post-War commonsense. Toulmin outlines the popular shorthand apprehension of the Newtonian cosmo- political, beliefs that “went without saying.” These were the “timbers” of the “framework of Modernity” (108).
Chief among these was Descartes’ division between mental and the physical. Toulmin traces traces out the assumptions about both “Nature” and “Humanity” founded on that distinction.
Nature is governed by Fixed Laws set up at the Creation
The structure of Nature was established a few thousand years ago.
The material substance of physical nature is essentially inert.
Physical objects and processes cannot think or reason.
At the Creation, God combined natural objects into stable systems.
Higher and lower things are linked so that motion in nature, and action in society, flow from
“higher” to “lower” creatures.

The essence of Humanity is the capacity for rational thought and action.
The can be no science of psychology.
Human beings also have collective power to establish “social systems.”
Humans are mixed beings—in part rational, in part causal.
Reason is mental (or spiritual), Emotion is bodily (or carnal).
The Emotions frustrate or distort Reason.
Toulmin questions why these assumptions carried weight when and for whom they did.
Toulmin seeks to answer this question by listening to those who dissented from this cosmopolitical vision. He finds that a commitment to “stability in and among different sovereign nation-states, and hierarchy within the social structures of each individual state” (128) predisposed the culture to accept the “timbers of Modernity” even if most did not understand the details of the Newtonian model. Toulmin writes, “the world view of modern science—as it actually came into existence—won public support around 1700 for the legitimacy it apparently gave to the political system of nation-states as much as for its power to explain the motions of the planets” (128).
Toulmin again concludes the chapter with a turn to contemporary philosophy of science and historiography.

Ch Four
From 1690 to 1914, the unified nation-state was the central component of political identity. The modern cosmopolitical model held force, but with slightly different emphases in different nations, just as the specifics of their politics also varied. In England, for instance, the Enlightenment project was a conservative force within the political culture; in France of the Encycolpedists, just the opposite—the ongoing Enlightenment project began to erode its very own foundations. Criticism to any of Modernity’s foundational assumptions proceeded as debates within, not against the Modern cosmopolitical model.
The challenging, destabilizing, and eventual dismantling of this model began in the 1750s with historical geology or natural history—an argument that lasted well into the next century (if not to present day). Other assumptions, like that of inert matter or the separation of rationality from causality, took much longer to dislodge. The work of late-19th-century novelists and physiologists particularly helped loosen the hold of the latter. Toulmin surmises, “By 1910, culture and society in Western Europe were on the verge of returning to the world of political moderation and human tolerance which was the dream of Henri de Navarre and Michel de Montaigne”; he then adds, “if other things had been equal” (151-152).
Things did not, of course—two world wars separated by economic disaster. While the “frailty of the last remaining timbers of the scaffold was at last evident” (152), the crises of the early 20th century deferred a return to the value of the Renaissance. Toulmin offers many examples of a return to “formal rigor and exactitude” (153), from Schoenberg and Webern in music, Mondriaan and the constructivists in the visual arts, pure mathematics, Woodger in biology, the positivism of the Vienna Circle, and, above all, modernist architecture. Toulmin describes this deferral as “nostalgia” (154) paralleling the decontextualizing drive of 17th-century rationalism. A 17th-century response to a Europe living once more through 17th-century political and economic realities.
The years after the Second World War saw the dominance of discrete nation-states dying into transnational realities. The other divisions assumed by Modernity were also failing —“humanity vs. nature, mental activity vs. its material correlates, human rationality vs. emotional springs of action” (161). The events of 1968 and its era testified to this (as does JFK, the matching bookend figure to Henry of Navarre), but the “revolution of the late 1960s was a revolution waiting to happen” (162). Descartes’ fundamental division between humanity and nature had fallen. Toulmin cites the environmental movement, psychotherapy, serious popular music, Andy Warhol, biomedical science, and “computer theory.” A transformation of politics moved debate from centering on techniques to reach goals to which goals, given the internal diversity of that nation-state, are appropriate to pursue.
Toulmin again concludes with historiographic reflections, here worth noting. In narrating this history, two thematic trajectories are evident. The first—the “formal doctrines that underpinned human thought and practice” (167)—takes shape as an Omega, looping out but ending post-1960 very near to where it was pre-1700. The second—the “experiential”—however, takes on a forward, linear trajectory; things have improved. These twin trajectories complicate any evaluation of Modernity or what comes after it.

Ch Five
The received story of Modernity married a quest for certainty and idolization of formal logic to a mythic trope of “starting over from a clean slate”—that “any new construction is truly rational only if it demolishes all that was there before and starts from scratch” (175) (cf. the apotheosis of this in the political-cultural programs of the French Revolution). From the 1630s to the 1950s, both rationalist and empiricists assumed that an “unchallengeable starting point of some sort was available” (177). A corollary to this penchant to build a new system from point zero was that these systems could not accommodate significant change, and so they too, in turn, would be razed to make space for the next system.
Toulmin advocates that with the death of the dream of a clean slate, “all we can be called upon to do is to take a start from where we are, at the time we are there”—a work of “refining and improving our inherited ideas” (179).
In the wake of the First World War, Europeans felt a need for a clean slate, recapitulating the 17th century, and weaving a narrative that rooted Modernity in the 17th century, boxing out the humanism of the16th-century. Toulmin proclaims that now is the time to retrieve this humanist heritage. At the same time, he insists that we cannot reject the legacy of the 17th century; rather we must humanize it, in the realms of natural science, philosophy, and politics—a change that seems already underway. By “humanize,” Toulmin indicates a turn to the practical, lived human context of these discourses, a turn to “diversity and adaptability” (183).
Since 1945, philosophers have returned from raptures of logic to these human, contextual concerns. In effect, this undoes the 17th-century moves, circling back to the oral (cf. Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Habermas), to the particular (cf. the just war debate), to the local (cf. cultural anthropology, MacIntyre), and to the timely (cf. medical practice, environmental policy).
This effects a change from a fixation on stable systems to attention to functionality and adaptability. Politically, this is paralleled by a shift to non-national/transnational institutions. This is an age of humble systems, the age of Lilliput, not Leviathan, an age of ecology, not astrophysics (noting that ecology, while ruling meta-metaphor, is essentially open to context in a way that Newton-esque models were not). In the ecology of power, moral authority now belongs not to rulers but to the many voices of NGOs (e.g., Amnesty International).
Toulmin concludes with a call to return the reasonableness of the 16th century (contra the rationality of the next). This is a renunciation of the abstract perfectionism of the Rationalists— an abstraction that itself involves an omission of context. Instead, the call is to a humanizing embrace of contextuality.

Epilogue/Frame
Moving in the third phase of Modernity, we face a choice: imagination or nostalgia. Nostalgia longs to preserve a the crumbling status quo inherited from High Modernity. Imagination calls science to dethrone physics as a ruling model for all science. Art is called to abandon class-based distinctions of respectability. The ends of technology must be morally justified.
The nations that dominated the twilight days of Modernity (USA, USSR, Britain) are poorly positioned to move into phase three Modernity—crippled, as they are, by “institutional sclerosis.” Energy is likely to come from other quarters, form non-national levels. The superpowers must learn adaptability within new and varied contexts.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis is a slim revisionist account of the modern period. Although I generally liked the book, the subtitle - The Hidden Agenda of Modernity - distracted my attention away from the arguments that Toulmin put forth. Judging from this unfortunate subtitle alone, it would seem to suggest that there was some kind of thinly veiled consensus of intentionality behind all forms of modern thought. The result is tacky and amateurish, and it makes the Enlightenment seem like a conspiratorial movement that sprung up from a secret society like the Illuminati.

Putting the problematic title aside, Toulmin is quite successful in broad strokes. He asks us to examine the ways in which big ideas and sweeping patterns of thought overlap, gel, and respond to one another. In a sense, the driving force of Cosmopolis strikes me as a mixture of Hegel and Rorty. Like those thinkers, Toulmin places a great deal of emphasis on history and the pendulum swing of time, ultimately suggesting that emergent intellectual traditions hinge on new expressions of old epistemological problems. The seeds of one tree of knowledge give rise to others, but the seeds from the new trees contain traces of everything that came before. In that way, the historical method is one of the best ways to understand philosophy.

While many take Descartes as the starting point for the modern period, Cosmopolis shows how one could just as easily take Montaigne for that point of departure. Indeed, the rigid labels that we slap over huge swaths of time illuminate as much as they obscure. Those labels are, in reality, porous and contrived. Though Toulmin doesn't deny that we can observe patterns in time and make generalizations about them, he does suggest that we approach them with an eye toward the practical and the reasonable.

[Jean Ranson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modernite hakkında okuduğum en iyi çalışmalardan bir tanesi.

Kitabın ismini Hilmi Yavuz'dan duymuştum. Eseri merak etmiş ama okumayı epey bir süre erteleyerek bir kenarda bekletmiştim. Açıkçası esere karşı biraz ön yargılıydım ve kitaptan beklentim de düşüktü ama okuduktan sonra Sosyal Bilimlerde Araştırma Yöntemleri (epistemoloji) dersimin hocasına da hediye ettim kitabı. Kışkırtıcı bir eser. İlgililere tavsiye ederim.

"Bu kitap, bir zihin değişiminin tarihsel kaydını yapıyor. Ortaya koyduğu keşifler, bilimsel oldukları kadar şahsi keşiflerdir de. 1930'laran sonlarında ve 1940'ların başlarında matematik ve fizik eğitimi aldıktan sonra, İkinci Dünya Savaşı'nın ardından Cambridge'de felsefeye geçtim; Modern Bilimi- ilk devi Isaac Newton olan entellektüel akımı - ve Descartes'ın başlattığı refleksiyon/düşünme yöntemini, modern düşüncenin kurucu iki temel direği ve modern dönemin kendisiyle iftihar ettiği katı "rasyonelitenin başlıca örneği" olarak görmeyi öğrendim. Hocalarımızın bize sundukları onyedinci yüzyıl Avrupa'sı resmi hoş ve güzel bir resimdi. insanlık ilk kez, amaçlarını Edebiyat-Modernite projesinin "rasyonel" hale getirdiği Edebiyat- içinde ölümden sonraki hayata tehir etmek yerine bu Dünyada ve tarihsel zaman içinde gerçekleştirme kapasitesiyle ilgili bütün kuşkularını ve belirsizlikleri bir kenara atıyor görünüyordu; ve bu optimizim yalnızca doğa bilimlerinde değil, moral, politik ve sosyal düşüncede de büyük gelişmelere yol açmıştı. Bununla birlikte, geriye dönüp bakıldığında, bu resim, en azından erken modern Avrupa tarihçilerinin, Roland Mousnier'ın 1950'lerdeki öncü eserinden sonra bize gösterdikleri başka şeyleri ciddiye alırsak, gereğinden fazla tek biçimli ve aydınlık bir resimdir. Onyedinci yüzyıl hayatının realist resmi günümüzde hem parlak ışıkları hem de karanlık gölgeleri içeriye olmalıdır: hem yeni entellektüel akımların başarılarını hem de bu başarıların tarihsel arkabahçesi olan din savaşlarının acılarını."

* Daha sonra Marshall Berman'ın "Katı Olan Her Şey Buharlaşıyor" kitabına göz atmanızı da şiddetle tavsiye ederim.

[Tara · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the better moments there are some interesting historical insights. Philosophically, it's mush, and it also fails to apply its own standards to itself (as relativists so often do). I'm hesitant to apply the language of the very-online, but the pattern of "the boomer" (or as I prefer, the soft man of history) applies. He's not interested in Spengler, but in Montaigne fussing over how much he can talk about his erections. Now *that's* freedom for Toulmin - and if he'd like to psychologize Descartes, perhaps Toulmin, Rorty, and Montaigne deserve the same treatment.

But all that comes about (partially, don't forget we can psychologize Toulmin too!) because of this initial failure (refusal?) to distinguish between Objective & Universal Truth. In his fear of dogma he and the pragmatists wrongly thought that because there are particular truths there is no such thing as universal truth. That error, repeated for 200 pages, becomes tedious quickly.

[dahyung · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of the book is provocative and exceptional, as it challenges the conventional view of the modernity (or the beginning of the modernity).

For Toulmin, the modern, as Descartes opened up after going through The Thirty Year's War in Western Europe, was a response against the extreme uncertainty of the time in history. Unlike we tend to think the 'modernity' or reason being on the top as decontextualized from the history.

Probably, the 'solution' for this modernity is going back to the humanist approaches as traced to Renaissance intellectuals, but the system itself is still overwhelmed us and the nation-state is still powerful.

[Brandon Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

A super interesting perspective on today's science. Why is objectivity the end-all be-all? Who decided that only hard science has a place in academic discourse? Today, we create models even for economies and people, trying our best to ignore and "hold constant" their culture and beliefs. This book outlines the history of how we got to our objectivity focused world and why it isn't the only way we can think about the world.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helps us to understand why and how we have come to think as we do in the West in the early 21st century. Posits the need for transnational communities which aid each other in local contexts. I see this to be the mission of the Lord's body.

[Thomas Keller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Putting cracks into the enlightenment. I woke up to the theme thanks to D.B.Hart.

[Adrian K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat interesting, somewhat boring polemic. Did not finish.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Argument" by "scare" "quote"

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought-provoking, but I lost interest halfway through

[J. Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading History and Social Theory As If People, The Planet, Or The Future Mattered

A Review of Stephen Toulmin's, Cosmopolis, and, A Reading List For Thoughtful People

Slow to get going, then increasingly fascinating, Toulmin's Cosmopolis is a genuine must-read. As a history of culture and consciousness it is stellar. I'd give it four out of five stars, in that realm. However, as a work of philosophy, I'd have to give it a failing grade, because it ends with a regression to ancient Skepticism (echoed in that rotting bog which is contemporary post-modernism). Two out of five as a work of philosophy. And as a history of political-economy, again, it fails: leading us into an uncritical passive acceptance of a clearly anti-democratic, technocratic, increasingly crypto-fascist neoliberal corporate globalization, as the inevitable and naturally superior gift of "progress". Two out of five stars as a book on politics.

For a vastly better critique of modernity, and far more insightful views on our ever-unfolding history, see:

Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues, along with: Class Warfare, Requiem For The American Dream, Profit Over People, and Necessary Illusions

Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents, and, A Short History of Progress

EF Schumacher, A Guide For The Perplexed

John Michael Greer, Retrotopia

Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures

Wade Davis, The Wayfinders

David Maybury-Lewis, Millennium

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Rianne Eisler, The Chalice and The Blade

Murray Bookchin, The Ecology Of Freedom

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism

Erich Fromm, The Pathology Of Normalcy, The Sane Society, and Escape From Freedom

Arthur Kroker, Data Trash

Ken Wilber, A Brief History Of Everything

Chris Brazier, The No-Nonsense Guide To World History

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and On Civil Disobedience

Happy reading!

JTR,
April 7, 2020

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Should be read by everyone in the 'Western' world...

This book deepened my understanding of European/Western 'modernity' and how it's evolution ended up in postmodernity

The book starts by questioning the mainly optimistic 'standard story' about modernity.
Therefor Stephen Toulmin first describes this standard story.

After this, Toulmin gives a historical description of the emergence and evolution of modernity during the last 500 years.So, in essence it's a story about the evolution of rationalism as a means to build a cosmopolis during the modern period between the humanistic renaissance of the 15th-16th century and, what Toulmin calls, the New Renaissance of the 1960's-70's.

It is a sequential book showing that the first phase of the transition between medieval/scholastic thought and modern thought began during the (15th-16th century) period of Renaissance Humanism. In this phase 'rationalism' was mere reasonableness. One could balance the fallible human behavior with the idealistic doctrines (mainly Christian) of that age. This balance lead to a state of cosmopolis. A balance between the cosmos (Nature) and Polis (society) and stayed away from any form of radicalisation. A main reference for Stephen Toulmin during this period is Montaigne.

Stephen Toulmin marks the beginning of the second phase of modernity with Descartes and Galileo around the 1630s. The publications of these two 'giants' led to the hegemony of 'hardcore' rationalism in method and thought and ignited the scientific revolution (of mostly the natural sciences). The focus was mainly aimed at the cosmos instead of at the polis. The Cartesian Object-Subject devision was born. The only allowed 'subjectivity' was centered in the Res Cogitans. The Res Cogitans was the whole of logical coupled innate ideas which were consulted and investigated to find the Truth of the Res Extensa by means of logical thought. Only by applying this method Certainty could be reached. Hence, 'I think (res cogitans) therefor I am (res extensa)'. The consequece of this radical focus on rationally obtained objectivity killed subjectivity (humanistic reasonableness) at the same time.

Stephen Toulmin points out that philosophical ideas are always generated, and need to be understood within a historical context. So he places the roots of these Cartesian ideas within the context of the 30 Years War.
In the midst of this long, brutal, conflict between Catholics and Protestants, The ideas of Descartes were formed by the need of a mean/method to find a common base to resolve (this) conflict.

When the 30 Years War ended, a period of reconciliation started in the age of Louis XIV, Leibniz and Newton. Leibniz tried to design a universal language as a base to find agreements between all humans of different cultures. The Newtonian ideas had a big influence on the period after his death till the 1780's. During this period, feodalism was referred to as history and the sovereign national state was born defining a new modern horizontal class system. In the same time the new core of the modern worldview, as a foundation for a new cosmopolis, came into existence.

The endphase of modernity started with the Enlightenment in the 18th century and lasted till the 'New Renaissance' of the 1960's and 1970's where focus on humanism (human subjectivity) was re-ignited.

It's interesting to read this book in combination with Roger Scruton's 'A Short History of Modern Philosophy' to have a deeper understanding of the different philosophical ideas in detail during the same period.
Also a related (dutch) book which is influenced by the views of this book is 'De draad van Penelope' of Guido Vanheeswijck