Product Description

In the 17th century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next 300 years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavour, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda - its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304464 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 235 pages

Customer Reviews

WHAT'S NOT SO RATIONAL ABOUT RATIONALISM
It might be hubris for a scholar to think he can, seriously, summarise 400 years of intellectual and political life in just 209 pages. But Stephen Toulmin has done this, and with great wit and charm. First published in 1990, it led one reader to spend hours in an elegant bar in Manhattan extolling its virtues as a guide to strategy, when it isn't in any sense a "business book". I came back to it recently, prompted by a chat with an architecture student and a sense that I had overlooked something in the French philosophical debate over structuralism and deconstructionism. Toulmin writes about a hidden agenda behind the philosophical tradition we know variously as modernism or rationalism. Its roots lie in the 17th century, when Descartes' declaration cogito ergo sum set the philosophical world on a path of reason and order. Newtonian physics built upon it, and from there the Enlightenment, and one might well argue - as Toulmin merely suggests - almost all of modern economics. But this rational approach, which dominated thinking in strategy until about the time of Toulmin's book, arose from deeply emotional roots - the scars of the religious conflict behind the Thirty Years' War. More - http://www.futureviews.blogspot.com

The Quest for Certainty
Excellent analysis of the origins of modernity. Toulmin demonstrates how the discovery of 'scratch' has been made possible by history. Then, the same counts for the 'end of modernity'. That is where Toulmin unfortunately stops: as if this time were indeed the realization of postmodernity, and if that (pm), meant indeed the end of believe in scratch. It could have been better, but still: less than 5 stars would be an underrating because of its enormous importance to understanding why man of today thinks the way he thinks. Cosmopolis should be obligatory material for just *every* academic student.