Chapter 1. Once ........................................................................................................ 10 Chapter 2. The First and Second Wave of Modernity: ...................................... 13 Chapter 3. When History Resumed in the Third Wave: .................................... 16 Chapter 4. And of the Third Wave: .................................................................. 17 Chapter 5. The Politics of the Unfinished: ......................................................... 21 Chapter 6. The Challenge of Unfinished Socialisms: .......................................... 22 Chapter 7. The Social Sciences and Education: ................................................. 27 Chapter 8. The Philosophy of the Unfinished: .................................................. 28 Chapter 9. Conclusion. ....................................................................................... 32 References ........................................................................................................... 35 Index. ................................................................................................................... 37 PART I. _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER 1. The First Wave of Modernity A History of Western Civilization: 1500–1820 Nearly three hundred years ago, on the basis of a rich combination of historical inquiry and philosophical speculation, the great early Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant summarized the past three hundred years of Western civilization in the following sentence: Humanity has now entered on a new era and a new hemisphere. Kant's statement appeared in the Introduction to a three-part study that, because of its theoretical scope and its bold historical sweep, was not only to give him a name—that of Homo Novus—but also to mark the intellectual point of departure for the Enlightenment in Europe. By this definition, the Enlightenment was not a set of political, social, or economic doctrines that suddenly appeared on the eighteenth-century scene, but an age whose seeds had first been planted in the seventeenth century. Whence its name, the age of "Enlighten-ment." The name, as used by Kant, had already entered the popular vernacular; indeed, it would be a mere quarter of a century before Sir Thomas More would describe the seventeenth century as the "Enlighten-ment," and before Voltaire would adopt the term for his own political party in pre-revolutionary France. During the next century and a half, the epithet would become associated with both the movement for "Enlighten-ment" in the arts and sciences and the revolution itself. "Enlightenment," moreover, was to connote a complex range of innovative political, social, and cultural theories and practices whose impact was to be felt throughout the modern era of the West. As a result of its influence, it would begin to con-note also a sense of distance from the past; and even if nineteenth-century theorists of progress never achieved the self-confidence of Kant and his immediate successors, the imperative to transcend "our ancient prejudices and errors"1 was now firmly in place. The impulse to move on to a new "hemisphere" represented, in fact, only the most prosaic application of an extraordinarily rich intellectual and spiritual ferment, a ferment that had first arisen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Western Europe. By the seventeenth century, the ferment of the Renaissance—which, as Harold Perkin has observed, 2 consisted not only of a revival of classical learning but also of the study of Greek, a reworking of the Latin tongue, and an exploration of new forms of spatial and temporal perception—had helped to shape a new outlook on nature and a new sense of art and of life. In reaction against the medievalism of the late Middle Ages, its roots deeply entrenched in feudal practices, an age that may be called the Renaissance was dedicated to celebrating the new and the modern. The goal of the emerging movement, which found its first theorists in such figures as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Desiderius Erasmus, Galileo, and Bacon, was the reformation of the past. As Foucault and others have suggested, however, the Renaissance could also be considered the first great philosophical modernity, because the quest for a new start in thought and culture involved the attempt to "understand [the present] not only for [one's-elf but] also for [one's] forebears."3 It was an attempt to re-evaluate and to revitalize both the content and the form of the medieval inheritance. The term "Renaissance" itself implies not only an overturning of the past but also a reaffirmation of the classical tradition. 1. Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?" in Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss and J. Schmidt, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 65, 83. 2. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1549–1642 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 3. For the use of the term "modernity" in an eighteenth-century context, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1997), 32. 4. Ibid., 41. 5. See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 8. 6. For a more detailed analysis of the cultural significance of modernity for Kant, see Anthony J. Leslie, The Modern Self: Kantian Ethics, Modern Practical Philosophy, and Kant's Legacy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 17–33, and Anthony Llewelyn, "The Role of the Artist in Kant's System," Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 205–22. 7. George Steiner, A Portrait of Metternich (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 19. 8. Walter Bauer, The German Historic School of Law: The Rise of Natural Law and Natural Law Theories in GermanThought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 11. 9. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought of the Fifteenth Century (1957; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17, 24–5. 10. Ibid., 22. 11. See ibid., 18, 24–5. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, ed. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 183–242. 14. Ibid., 185. 15. See ibid., 183–5. 16. See ibid., 185–6. 17. See Harold Perkin, The Third Wave: Popular Politics and Social Justice in the 1980s (New York: Schocken, 1989), 1–4. 18. See Immanuel Kant, "On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Speculations by One Very Eminent Author, Which This Author Himself Reprehended as Such," in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss and J. Schmidt, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11–16. 19. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell and James Gutmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 3–4. 20. See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait, in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33–8. 21. Ibid., 29. 22. Ibid., 33. 23. Ibid., 41–2. 24. For examples of the emphasis that Kant placed on the aesthetic, see On the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Allen W. Wood (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), preface, 6; On Eternal Peace and Other Essays, trans. and ed. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 12–13. 25. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 58. 26. Ibid., 46–7. 27. Ibid., 47. 28. Ibid., 48. 29. Ibid., 42. 30. The English translation uses "pleasures" rather than "interests" (Latin, "diversiones"), a usage that was probably influenced by Newton's popularization of the notion of "interest" in 1672. See The Prose Works of Isaac Newton, vol. III: 1672–1676, trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marc F. Nicol (London: Taylor and Francis, 1966), 2: 929. 31. In the late seventeenth century, this tradition became known as "Neo-Stoicism," a doctrine with