The Genealogies of Modernity Journal

Decline & Renewal Maria Cecilia Ulrickson Decline & Renewal Maria Cecilia Ulrickson

A Genealogist of Slavery Confronts the Archives

We can tell stories other than slavery’s violence, but does that extend dignity to enslaved, brutalized humans? Does a story ‘against the grain’ face down the thing the archive does (preserving violence and creating race)? Or does a story about the violence memorialize violence?

Maria Cecilia Ulrichson asks what Christian genealogy can learn in the archives

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Decline & Renewal G. Marie Aquilina Decline & Renewal G. Marie Aquilina

Man Is a Social Organism

The body politic metaphor became proof that the immigrant and the dependent were biologically incompatible with the rest of society. The community that grew out of this interpretation shaped itself in strange, unsettling, and inhumane ways.

G. Marie Aquilina traces the history of eugenics as a distortion of the body politic

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Decline & Renewal Emily A. Davis Decline & Renewal Emily A. Davis

The Turn to the Body

The turn toward the body had three important effects on modern political philosophy: it naturalized security, individualized liberty, and privatized property.

Emily Davis reviews Birth of the State by Charlotte Epstein

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Decline & Renewal Erik Dempsey Decline & Renewal Erik Dempsey

A Lawless Man

Montaigne was charting new, and uniquely modern, territory. We embrace ourselves, as ourselves, and try to learn to be ourselves, rather than striving to become something other.

Erik Dempsey reviews Pierre Manent’s Montaigne: Life Without Law

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Decline & Renewal Alexandrea Pérez Allison Decline & Renewal Alexandrea Pérez Allison

Recipes for a Different Modernity

Using these recipes privileges cultural memory and tradition over efficiency and precision. Thus, we participate in the ritual of cooking not as a means of scientific inquiry or perfection, but to strengthen the community ties that bring us together at the table.

Alexandrea Pérez Allison on cookbooks and modernity.

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Decline & Renewal John Buchmann Decline & Renewal John Buchmann

Modernity in the Balance

Ideas have afterlives: they live on in subcultures that intentionally preserve them, in practices that have long lost their justification, and in our contradictions and nagging doubts.

John Buchmann offers a genealogy of balance and economics.

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Decline & Renewal G. Marie Aquilina Decline & Renewal G. Marie Aquilina

The Legacy of Margaret Sanger

It is interesting to imagine an alternative history, one where Sanger had received the support she sought from eugenicists. What would our feminist genealogies look like then?

G. Marie Aquilina examines Margaret Sanger’s place in feminist genealogy

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Decline & Renewal Kirsten Hall Decline & Renewal Kirsten Hall

A Mobile Proposal

We may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.

Kirsten Hall loses her phone and looks to the 18th Century for guidance.

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Decline & Renewal Michael Nevadomski Decline & Renewal Michael Nevadomski

Toward a Hopeful Decadence

Douthat begs us to consider the possibilities that we reached for in the past, less out of nostalgia, and more as inspiration: a cry of ‘Why not?’ that can lift us beyond screens, comfort, and deadlock toward a common goal.

Michael J. Nevadomski reviews Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society.

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