What do you think?
Rate this book
The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age
Surveys main currents in Western thought through eight centuries.
720 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 1926
9 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 30, 2021
A very, very good intellectual history of the West which covers all the thinkers in schools pro and con various issues. Especially interesting is when he comes to the modern era and shows that he has a wealth of knowledge about the debates currently happening (in the 1950s) regarding religion, social problems, etc. 1 star deducted because he veers too much in the "Oh my! Industrial civilization is just so complex. Therefore, we need state control!" which has shown to be faulty reasoning again and again. Read Von Mises for a corrective.
January 28, 2015
Randall was a scholar of the old school, an amazing thinker with a very wide range. I read it in college, for a course simply titled, "The Making of the Modern Mind," a course based on the book. The course was one of those history courses at the time which had the background of the origins of Western Civilization, that is, European civilization. Since that time, the Sixties, colleges have turned to a more word view, historians have turned to a more world view, and we now have a more world wide, more inclusive, and of course, more accurate view of the panorama of human civilization.
Nonetheless. European civilization, with its grounding in Aristotle and early science, has a unique role in the world. Japanese engineering, wonderful as it is, has its roots in European science. Ditto other countries, think Indian computer programming, Chinese industry.
I remember this as a thoroughgoing tour through European history and development. I have the book on my coffee table and I look at it from time to time. My wife and I might read it, in my case reread it. I'm old enough and well read enough to offer little criticisms as I go through it.
Randall still comes through as brilliant. The European experience, stemming from Greece, and Rome, and earlier civilizations, and religion from Jewish history, is just part of the human story, but it's an important part.
Oh, and it's a good read.
Nonetheless. European civilization, with its grounding in Aristotle and early science, has a unique role in the world. Japanese engineering, wonderful as it is, has its roots in European science. Ditto other countries, think Indian computer programming, Chinese industry.
I remember this as a thoroughgoing tour through European history and development. I have the book on my coffee table and I look at it from time to time. My wife and I might read it, in my case reread it. I'm old enough and well read enough to offer little criticisms as I go through it.
Randall still comes through as brilliant. The European experience, stemming from Greece, and Rome, and earlier civilizations, and religion from Jewish history, is just part of the human story, but it's an important part.
Oh, and it's a good read.
March 27, 2020
This is the book that I have taken the most notes on - ever. I can only compare it to Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence," in terms of scope and breadth.
Let's just say that this book finally made me launch a YouTube channel. It's that pivotal.
A neglected classic.
Let's just say that this book finally made me launch a YouTube channel. It's that pivotal.
A neglected classic.
December 30, 2012
A book to be read over and over. Gives you a clear picture of where we are coming from and in a sense where are headed.
December 23, 2023
Dec. 22
When I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia in the 1970's, Prof. Emeritus John Herman Randall, Jr. (1899-1980) was something of a legend. Students would report in an awed tone that they had seen him walking on the campus. An elderly, white-haired gentleman (about the age I am now, but relatively much older at a time when the Biblical three score and ten was still the normal limit), he was the last link with the generation of Frederick J.E. Woodbridge and John Dewey. He is probably best known today for his massive two-volume, nearly two-thousand-page magnum opus, The Career of Philosophy, from the early 1960's, which is on my reading list for this winter or early spring. (The completed chapters from the third volume, unfinished at his death, were published with other essays as Philosophy After Darwin, which seems to be out of print.) This somewhat shorter book (only about 700 pages of small print), The Making of the Modern Mind, is from rather earlier in his career, having been written originally in 1926 and revised in 1940 when Europe was already at war and the US was soon to become involved. Not surprisingly, it is a defense of the imperiled unity and values of "Western" culture. Unlike the later work, it does not focus entirely on philosophy, but neither is it a general history; perhaps it could best be described as a "history of ideas", covering religious, social, economic and political theories as well as philosophy in the narrower sense.
There is much valuable information and synthesis in the book, but I was somewhat disappointed in it in many respects.
The book begins (part one) with the late Middle Ages, specifically the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and the Thirteenth-Century synthesis; this is one of the weaker parts of the book. While not actually wrong — his history is much better than Durant or Russell — he tends to rather romanticize the mediaeval world-view and the unity of Christendom in a nostalgic way, undoubtedly influenced by the crisis of his own time (as well as the fact that he is basing his view on the written works of the period rather than on what was actually practiced). This attitude towards the Middle Ages is something that he criticizes in discussing the Romantic reaction of the nineteenth century, without apparently realizing that it is largely true of his own account.
This view of what the mediaeval period was naturally also influences his views on the Renaissance and Reformation (part two), giving him a somewhat ambivalent — but perhaps more balanced — view of what they meant for modern thought. He argues that the Renaissance with its emphasis on the classical past and on literary scholarship actually retarded the development of modern ideas, and that the Reformation was essentially reactionary. (As he later founded the Renaissance Seminar, along with Paul Oscar Kristeller, he may have changed his mind somewhat; I will be interested to see how he deals with the Renaissance in The Career of Philosophy.) He sees the real origins of the "modern mind", undoubtedly correctly, in the new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His third part on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the best in the book.
His fourth part, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which he oddly entitles "The Last Hundred Years" although by 1940 it would have been more like 150 years, represents a more subjective (and from a contemporary standpoint, rather outdated) selection; he is clearly identifying the "modern mind" with the viewpoint of Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. It seems rather strange that a book on the making of the modern mind has only one short paragraph on Marx and Marxism (as a pendant to Hegel), for example. Apart from Marxism, he barely mentions Positivism (only the version of Comte and Mach, no mention at all of the Wiener Kreis or Wittgenstein), Analytic Philosophy (Russell is considered only for his political theories), Phenomenalism, or any other modern philosophy later than the writers who were influential in the 1920's — Spencer, Bergson, Maritain and of course Dewey. He also devotes what seems to me to be a disproportionate amount of space to religious ideas. His main emphasis, however, is on scientific developments, evolution, relativity and quantum theory, among others, and of course this is the most outdated part of the book, especially as it seems not to have been much revised in 1940 — it struck me as mostly 1926 science, for instance claiming that natural selection has been replaced by de Vries' mutationism as the accepted explanation of evolution, which was only true for a short time just before the development of the modern synthesis in the thirties and forties.
The last two or three chapters seem to be the most revised, but paradoxically they also seen the most outdated; the context of the beginning of World War II determines all his discussion.
One very minor point — the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article on Randall describes him as a "New Thought author". This seems to be confusing him with his father.
When I was an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia in the 1970's, Prof. Emeritus John Herman Randall, Jr. (1899-1980) was something of a legend. Students would report in an awed tone that they had seen him walking on the campus. An elderly, white-haired gentleman (about the age I am now, but relatively much older at a time when the Biblical three score and ten was still the normal limit), he was the last link with the generation of Frederick J.E. Woodbridge and John Dewey. He is probably best known today for his massive two-volume, nearly two-thousand-page magnum opus, The Career of Philosophy, from the early 1960's, which is on my reading list for this winter or early spring. (The completed chapters from the third volume, unfinished at his death, were published with other essays as Philosophy After Darwin, which seems to be out of print.) This somewhat shorter book (only about 700 pages of small print), The Making of the Modern Mind, is from rather earlier in his career, having been written originally in 1926 and revised in 1940 when Europe was already at war and the US was soon to become involved. Not surprisingly, it is a defense of the imperiled unity and values of "Western" culture. Unlike the later work, it does not focus entirely on philosophy, but neither is it a general history; perhaps it could best be described as a "history of ideas", covering religious, social, economic and political theories as well as philosophy in the narrower sense.
There is much valuable information and synthesis in the book, but I was somewhat disappointed in it in many respects.
The book begins (part one) with the late Middle Ages, specifically the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and the Thirteenth-Century synthesis; this is one of the weaker parts of the book. While not actually wrong — his history is much better than Durant or Russell — he tends to rather romanticize the mediaeval world-view and the unity of Christendom in a nostalgic way, undoubtedly influenced by the crisis of his own time (as well as the fact that he is basing his view on the written works of the period rather than on what was actually practiced). This attitude towards the Middle Ages is something that he criticizes in discussing the Romantic reaction of the nineteenth century, without apparently realizing that it is largely true of his own account.
This view of what the mediaeval period was naturally also influences his views on the Renaissance and Reformation (part two), giving him a somewhat ambivalent — but perhaps more balanced — view of what they meant for modern thought. He argues that the Renaissance with its emphasis on the classical past and on literary scholarship actually retarded the development of modern ideas, and that the Reformation was essentially reactionary. (As he later founded the Renaissance Seminar, along with Paul Oscar Kristeller, he may have changed his mind somewhat; I will be interested to see how he deals with the Renaissance in The Career of Philosophy.) He sees the real origins of the "modern mind", undoubtedly correctly, in the new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His third part on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the best in the book.
His fourth part, on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which he oddly entitles "The Last Hundred Years" although by 1940 it would have been more like 150 years, represents a more subjective (and from a contemporary standpoint, rather outdated) selection; he is clearly identifying the "modern mind" with the viewpoint of Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. It seems rather strange that a book on the making of the modern mind has only one short paragraph on Marx and Marxism (as a pendant to Hegel), for example. Apart from Marxism, he barely mentions Positivism (only the version of Comte and Mach, no mention at all of the Wiener Kreis or Wittgenstein), Analytic Philosophy (Russell is considered only for his political theories), Phenomenalism, or any other modern philosophy later than the writers who were influential in the 1920's — Spencer, Bergson, Maritain and of course Dewey. He also devotes what seems to me to be a disproportionate amount of space to religious ideas. His main emphasis, however, is on scientific developments, evolution, relativity and quantum theory, among others, and of course this is the most outdated part of the book, especially as it seems not to have been much revised in 1940 — it struck me as mostly 1926 science, for instance claiming that natural selection has been replaced by de Vries' mutationism as the accepted explanation of evolution, which was only true for a short time just before the development of the modern synthesis in the thirties and forties.
The last two or three chapters seem to be the most revised, but paradoxically they also seen the most outdated; the context of the beginning of World War II determines all his discussion.
One very minor point — the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article on Randall describes him as a "New Thought author". This seems to be confusing him with his father.
December 12, 2010
-punya fotokopiannya-
GILAAAA...!! BUKU BEGINIANA KENAPA GA ADA YANG NERJEMAHIN SIH??11 -esmosi berat-
GILAAAA...!! BUKU BEGINIANA KENAPA GA ADA YANG NERJEMAHIN SIH??11 -esmosi berat-
May 20, 2012
Just getting into this, it's a vintage 1926 edition so I cant wait to see how it compares to modern thought.
November 21, 2014
Wonderfully helpful book about the transition from medieval times to modernity
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews