come to terms with what was going on in the world, ultimately with such relevance
as to make me a political scientist instead of a medieval historian with a penchant
for philosophy of history, as I had intended.
- 1 The Liberalism of Modernity
Those medieval studies from which I had turned away, however, continued to orient
my eVort toWnd a way through the intellectual chaos of current politics. Thanks
to them I can call this commentaryEncounters with Modernity. They gave me
the perspective to perceive the onset of modernity as that profound turning
point in the development of the Western mind which produced the free society
I found under such dire assault. The freedom of that society is modern freedom,
so distinctive as to be the deWning characteristic of the age we call modernity and
of the process of modernization which transformed and continues to transform
the civilization of the West and of the other great cultural areas of the world.
This historical contrast brings out the basic traits of the political institutions of the
new age.
To be sure, freedom in one or another form has been a concern of
Western thought since ancient times. Plato’s myth of the cave is an allegory
of liberation, rendered even more illuminating by his vision inThe Symposium
of the soul rising through levels of being toward identiWcation with the Absolute.
In the Middle Ages a similar version of ‘‘the great chain of being’’ was
embodied in conceptions of government which made liberty their organizing
principle. The plural is a more accurate rendering of the idea, as seen in a
classic expression,Magna Carta Libertatum( 1215 ). In this document a variety of
freedoms were guaranteed respectively to the several ranks of a structure,
ranging down from theecclesia anglicanato thevillanusat the bottom of the
legal and political hierarchy. This structure foreshadowed the ‘‘polity of estates’’
(Weber’smittelaelterliche Staendestaat) which emerged later in the thirteenth
century, as a mature expression of the hierarchic and corporatist ideals of the
high Middle Ages.
For 2 , 000 years or more the leading minds of the West championed a doctrine of
hierarchic inequality. Classical philosophy had taught the rule of the wise; Chris-
tian theology the rule of the holy. Medieval thinkers had combined the two
imperatives, vesting authority in a hierarchy of natural virtue and divine grace.
They diVered in the relation of secular and sacerdotal power. They did not doubt
that the few should rule the many; that the ruler, whether prince or prelate, knew
what was good for the ruled and, therefore, had the right, indeed the duty, to direct
them toward that good.
694 samuel h. beer