Kingdom of Man

The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project by Remi Brague, translated by Paul Seaton, 216 pages

The third part of Remi Brague's grand history of ideas, following The Wisdom of the World, which was centered in the classical world, and The Law of God, which focused on the medieval world, The Kingdom of Man looks at the modern world, or, as the subtitle significantly puts it, the modern project.  For Brague, this is the distinctive characteristic of modernity - that it sees itself as a project. This was itself the result of a shift of attitudes towards work - where classically freedom from work was the privilege of nobility, in the Renaissance it became the expression of human dignity and power.  The valorization of "useful" work above "useless" contemplation, while it begins by promising worldly abundance, ultimately positions man as an object rather than a subject, like all nature an unsatisfactory thing that exists only to be mastered and overcome, and thus the project of modernist humanism ends in the sacrifice of humanity to the project.

Brague's approach is entirely descriptive.  He does not consider the views of critics of modernity, nor does he explore alternatives to it.  Instead, he follows the logical development of modernism from nominalism to posthumanism from within, carefully tracing the origins and consequences of each idea, and illuminating a great many things even outside of his focus.