The Genealogies of Modernity Journal
Giving Utopia Its Due
Abjuring the legacy of utopianism distances us from one of the prime affective and intellectual forces motivating such modern ideals as popular sovereignty, human rights, and social progress.
Daniel Cunningham on the need for utopias
The Crisis of Historicism as a Crisis of Deep History
The crisis for historicism was its inability to hold together a single human story in the wake of its demolition effect on older sacred narratives.
Evan Kuehn engages Ernst Troeltsch on deep and sacred history
In Hope of Bulkington: Moby Dick and American Doom
We cannot know the end of America, though we know from the first unfurling of Ishmael’s prophecy that the voyage of the Pequod is doomed.
Daniel Fitzpatrick follows in the wake of the doomed Pequod
Traveling the Via Moderna with Pierre d'Ailly
From the vantage point of Pierre d’Ailly’s introduction to the Consolation of Philosophy, history looks like a tower of hand-wringing moderns all the way down.
Matthew Vanderpoel looks to the medievals and finds that we are not the first moderns
Sex Is Not a Metaphor: the Politics of the Modern Self
The self exists to be true to itself, and it can only be so insofar as it sloughs off the heteronomous influences of society. The unhappy result is that “we are all expressive individuals now.”
James Matthew Wilson reviews Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Are We Still Medieval? Epochal Overlaps in Contemporary Life
When we are doing genealogies of modernity, we may find that what we are doing is arguing for which epoch we think is best for the future. Thee real question for the present may be this: which past will be our future?
Terence Sweeney on living within different eras
The Problem of Japanese Modernity
Because Japan had grafted what was available in Anglo-European modernity onto its socio-political and cultural milieu (i.e., fūdo 風土), Japan ended up with a strange mixture of ‘super-modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity’ as their peculiar form of ‘modernity.’
Takeshi Morisato on the thought of Maruyama Masao
Getting to the Roots of Modern Culture: On Lonergan Part II
If Christians would engage, penetrate, and Christianize a culture and society like ours, one with a robust and developed superstructure, we must develop a theology of comparable robustness in the face of contemporary questions.
Jonathan Heaps on the superstructures of modern culture
The Ecology of a Different Modernity
A new modernity will be marked by a different account of the good life with a different set of shared loves. Kate Soper shows that underneath our tawdry love of stuff there are deeper, more interesting loves.
Terence Sweeney reviews Post-Growth Living and finds in it a counter-modern modernity
Marriage Made the West WEIRD
Joseph Henrich’s account shows that much of what we take to be typically modern habits of mind—individualism, impersonal prosociality, an acute sense of guilt—were already deeply imbedded in the Western psyche by the High Middle Ages.
Brendan Case reviews The WEIRDest People in the World
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
On the Myth of a Singular Science
Stephen Gaukroger exposes the insubstantial reasons for assuming that some meaningful theoretical construct or set of practices called "Science" underpins all the sciences..
Eileen Reeves reviews Civilization and the Culture of Science
On Background: From the Renaissance to Zoom
Like 15th Century portrait painters, we find ourselves amid an experimental period. It is unclear what the future will hold, whether it is standardized virtual bookshelves or targeted ads that suggest lipstick shades based on wall color.
Chloé Pelletier on the background to our Zoom backgrounds
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
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
The Housing Crisis in the Humanities
When modernity lost its modularity, it became an asset to be fought over, a territory to be controlled. Modernity became the cool neighborhood that scholars jockeyed to buy into.
Daniel Zimmerman critiques the excess of periodization
Resisting the Modern Desire for Dominance
Fratelli Tutti offers an alternative to such modern forms of domination and points to fraternal service as a way of countering its love of money, the desire that so often presents itself as development.
Trevor Williams reviews Pope Francis’s latest encyclical
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
Microbes and the Birth of the Modern Era
Given all the transformations wrought and about to be wrought by COVID-19, we will see much more attention paid to the role of plagues, pandemics, and pestilences in shaping human affairs.
Andrew Latham looks to microbes to explain macro-changes in history.
The Geopolitics of Nostalgia: Dante and Xi Jinping
The politics of nostalgia looks to translates the past into a near-future that is utterly inhospitable to it. It is about using the past-that-never-was to build a future-that-never-could-be.
Andrew Latham reads Dante’s Monarchia and Xi Jinping’s China Dream together.