Modernity's Double Birth: A Critique of Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis"

Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis" (1990) puts forward an intriguing assessment of the origins of modern Western civilization. He claims that one of its sources was a humanistic stress on tolerance with its respect for the diversity and complexity of the world, which stemmed from the perspective of anti-dogmatic Renaissance thinkers, such as Montaigne. But he also asserts that the 17th-century Scientific Revolution established a different sort of modernity, one that persisted until the later 20th century and was wedded to a rigid rationalism that sought absolute truth and control through a universal method of reasoning tantamount to a new scientific dogmatism. This second modernity, according to Toulmin, distorted our understanding of human reality and produced theoretical errors as well as practical, institutionalized tragedies. But Toulmin's historical account is at least partially flawed because of its neglect or misrepresentation of key evidence.