Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity by Stephen Toulmin, 209 pages

In Stephen Toulmin's exhilarating history of ideas, "cosmopolis" is defined as a worldview that unifies the vision of the social world of humanity with the world of nature.  The medieval cosmopolis, which combined a Ptolemaic astronomy that understood the earth as lying at the bottom of the cosmos with a theological social orientation dominated by the Church, faded into an urbane skepticism during the Renaissance.  This was replaced, in turn, by a new cosmopolitical vision, joining together Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics.  Toulmin identifies this union as the wellspring of modernity, noting that, contrary to the standard account, it represented a narrowing rather than a broadening of mind.  The late twentieth century, in this view, represents the dawn of another skeptical age, wherein the embryo of the next cosmopolis will form.

Toulmin's argument is marred by some questionable judgments (that Baroque art was "histrionic and grotesque", for example) and exaggerations (while not as oppressive as often imagined, the Middle Ages were hardly as open-minded as he implies).  More incredible is his too-easy identification of postmodern nihilism with Renaissance humanism.  Yet the greatest difficulties are raised by his enthusiasm for the adoption of ecology as the new model for social order, in which he is seemingly oblivious to the obvious problems of invoking biology as a political principle.  Nonetheless, these problems are ultimately forgivable, if only because his book is so rich in audacity and explanatory power.