November, 2009

The Bright Side of Modernity: Pluralism, Freedom, and Equality

by Jack Goldstone
The Conversation
November 18th, 2009

One of the great accomplishments of modernity is the institutionalization of pluralism and religious tolerance.  While not unknown in antiquity or pre-modern times, pluralism and tolerance usually meant no more than the official state religious order granting a protected but clearly second-class status to adherents of other faiths.  Thus in Rome up to the 4th [...]

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Modernity’s Darkness, Distinctness, and Technology

by Stephen Davies
The Conversation
November 17th, 2009

It is truly gratifying to be part of such a stimulating conversation. I have a number of questions that spring to mind from points made in its course or which come out of works that the participants have previously published. One that Jason Kuznicki poses and Jack Goldstone responds to is that of the dark [...]

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What Greece, Rome, and Christianity Didn’t Give Us

by Jason Kuznicki
The Conversation
November 16th, 2009

Jack Goldstone writes, There is a long tradition, which Pagden seems to still hold to but which Davies and I seek to overturn, of seeing considerable continuity between the democracy of the Greeks and that of our own day, and among the urbane, cosmopolitan debates among literate non-nobles that could be found in the streets [...]

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Modernity Comes Suddenly

by Stephen Davies
The Conversation
November 13th, 2009

What should be clear now is that I and my three interlocutors actually agree on a great deal. I will try to clarify exactly what it is we disagree about before having a look at the big issue and research agenda that is generated by the area we agree on. Jack Goldstone and I both [...]

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Continuity and Discontinuity

by Jack Goldstone
The Conversation
November 11th, 2009

I am delighted to be taking part in such an important and rich conversation with sharp and witty intellectual colleagues — our disagreements here are as stimulating as those things on which we can agree. I’d like to highlight the odd fact that I disagree entirely with most of what Anthony Pagden says about the [...]

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A Question of Timing

by Anthony Pagden
The Conversation
November 11th, 2009

I would like to thank Professor Davies for his courteous response to my criticism of this thesis.  I still do not think that his chronologies work. Without becoming bogged down in an historian’s squabble over dates, what seems to be at stake is just how much time one assumes has to pass, in particular in a world, or worlds, [...]

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Armistice Day and the Ghost of Michel Foucault

by Jason Kuznicki
The Conversation
November 11th, 2009

It’s surprising that we’ve recruited four historians to write about the meaning of modernity, and in four lengthy responses — now five — no one has yet dropped the name of Michel Foucault. I am curious whether doing so will advance the discussion any, particularly because Foucault’s story of modernity, like Davies’, also proceeds from [...]

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Reply to Goldstone, Pagden, and Kuznicki

by Stephen Davies
The Conversation
November 11th, 2009

I am gratified that my initial post on Cato Unbound has moved the editor himself to respond, and honoured to have had rejoinders and comment from two such distinguished historians as Anthony Pagden and Jack Goldstone, two scholars whose work I have long admired and gained from. I do fear that in some areas I [...]

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