Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T17:40:37.219Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2009

Mark C. Murphy
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

The modern period is usually dated as beginning roughly in 1789, the year not only of the French Revolution but also of the opening of the new federal government in the United States and correspondingly the securing of that country's new nationally oriented commercial society. Within a short period of time, “modernity” saw democratic revolutions, authoritarian revolutions, and the explosive growth of industrial society. There are now many who think that the modern period has run its course and is giving way to a new form of “postmodern” civilization.

Modernity, with its factories and steam engines, its mass culture and its creation of weapons of immense destruction, has long been the object of both admiration and dislike. Its admirers tend to see it as marking progress beyond what preceded it: human life has been lengthened in industrial society, many of the great masses who were formerly excluded have become empowered, wealth has increased, and freedom has become the great watchword across the globe. (Even the capitalism-critical Marxists bought into their own version of the idea of progress.) However, modernity has also been the object of intense, emotional attack, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany, criticizing modernity became a genre unto itself. Even before the onset of industrialization, people like F. H. Jacobi were already expressing dismay in the emerging trust in reason to solve all our problems and were criticizing all Enlightenment thought as potentially “nihilistic” (a termJacobi coined) – enlightened reason, so Jacobi's claimwent, could tear things down, but it could not satisfactorily build anything up to replace it.

Type
Chapter
Information
Alasdair MacIntyre , pp. 176 - 200
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×