an independent judiciary and free press, public education, capitalism, and
monogamous marriage.
‘‘Modernity and Its Critics,’’ therefore, is perhaps best approached as the
storyof this habit of mind and its institutional embodiments. In a version of
the story that circulates widely in North America, Europe, and Australia, the
plot goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a (medieval Christian) world where nature was purpos-
ive, God was active in the details of human aVairs, all things had a place in the order
of things, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, and political order
took the form of an organic community experienced as the ‘‘prose of the world’’
(Foucault 1970 ). But this premodern cosmos gave way to forces of scientiWc and
instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic nation
state.
‘‘Modernity and Its Critics’’ is a tale of this epochal shift, of the secularization
of a traditional order that had been imbued with divine or natural purpose.
Some tellers of the tale celebrate secularization as the demise of superstition;
others lament it as the loss of a meaningful moral universe. When placed
against the backdrop of a dark and confused premodernity, modernity
appears as a place of reason, freedom, and control; when it is compared to
a premodern age of community and cosmological coherence, modernity
becomes a place of dearth and alienation. Even the celebrators of modernity,
however, share something of the sense of loss accentuated by its critics—and
this is to be expected, given what seems to be the tale’s prototype, the biblical
story of the Fall.
As a cultural narrative or civilization fable, ‘‘Modernity and Its Critics’’ tells
us who we are and are not, and it identiWes the key ideals to guide us and the
most important dangers and opportunities we confront. As such, the narra-
tive serves less a historiographical than a therapeutic function. It helps to
order the vast and variableWeld of experience, and thus to shape the actual
world in which we live. Under its banner, a certain tradition of thought
and a certain group of people try to make sense of themselves and their
collective life.
But which tradition of thought, which group of people? The story
of modernity is embedded in the history of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and
nineteenth-century Europe, in particular in its political struggles against
totalizing forms of rule and unthinking forms of obedience. The twenty-
Wrst-century encounter between militant strains of Islamic fundamentalism
and ‘‘Western culture’’ has been read by Michael Thompson, for example, as a
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