"More than two centuries ago in the north Atlantic world, a dream was born: a dream of a world ruled by law, whose principles would be drawn from human reason. Science would continue improving the quality of human life; industry would create new products; and governments, established with the consent of the governed, would promote progress under law. Logic, reason, and fundamental principles of equality would replace tradition, family, and inherited wealth as sources of authority. All citizens would enjoy equality under the law. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the idea also arose that nations, as well as individuals, would enjoy equal rights, and hopes grew that they might settle disputes among one another by legal means. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt involved the United States in two world wars to make that happen, and Roosevelt enjoyed extraordinary, though hardly complete, success."
Also replaced, along with tradition, family, and inherited wealth as sources of authority, would be traditional religious institutions of all kinds, although replacing these institutions was certainly not, at first, a goal for the early men of reason; they were, after all, aristocrats, who were concerned more to improve the established order than to overturn it. Overturning it only came later in the dream:
http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/06/re-wuthnows-discussion-of-cultural.html
Also replaced, along with tradition, family, and inherited wealth as sources of authority, would be traditional religious institutions of all kinds, although replacing these institutions was certainly not, at first, a goal for the early men of reason; they were, after all, aristocrats, who were concerned more to improve the established order than to overturn it. Overturning it only came later in the dream:
http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/06/re-wuthnows-discussion-of-cultural.html
Just one of the more or less hidden problems with the dream, call it utopian but it is hardly my idea of a utopia, was that it, eventually, though not at first, came to imply a total world unified government structure, not a national, or even limited federal, civilizational, monarchic, or imperial, or merely multi civilizational, one.
From the beginning, this dream has tended, in practice, as the dream has gone on, century after century, first in the West and then in the rest, to gradually, and sometimes quite abruptly, break down traditional political and social structures everywhere, putting nothing comparable in durability in their place along the way.
This is part of the reason why we have something like world anarchy unfolding, increasingly, everywhere.
For example, Kennan, 1979, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: "The Austro-Hungarian Empire still looks better, as a solution to the tangled problems of that part of the world, than anything that has succeeded it." The die was cast by WWI.
Both the universalist liberal reasonist US, and the universalist communist regimes, have been enemies of traditional order in all societies, not merely their own, at least at first.
The Russian revolution, even, gradually settled into federalist Russian dominated nationalist totalitarianism; it did not start out that way.
WWI had scotched global communism with nationalism, even as it made possible by revolution a Bolshevik take over in Russia.
WWI should, logically, to use their own word, have scotched the dream of reason, too.
But WWI breathed new vigor into universalist liberalism by sweeping away several great Western traditionalist if somewhat liberal (England, Austria) empires, putting nothing much in their place but enhanced yet still weak globalist mercantile and financial connections, and a multitude of new illiberal nationalisms and puppets.
Certainly by the end of WWII, one would have thought that the very idea of universalist liberalism was dead as a mackerel.
Not in America. We globaized in a really big way, and encouraged everyone else to do the same, ostensibly to fight Soviet influence everywhere.
Yet, this globalization was also an economic and political war on the nation state (including our own) and on traditional empires, as such books as Sovereignty At Bay made amply clear somewhat later.
From the beginning, this dream has tended, in practice, as the dream has gone on, century after century, first in the West and then in the rest, to gradually, and sometimes quite abruptly, break down traditional political and social structures everywhere, putting nothing comparable in durability in their place along the way.
This is part of the reason why we have something like world anarchy unfolding, increasingly, everywhere.
For example, Kennan, 1979, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: "The Austro-Hungarian Empire still looks better, as a solution to the tangled problems of that part of the world, than anything that has succeeded it." The die was cast by WWI.
Both the universalist liberal reasonist US, and the universalist communist regimes, have been enemies of traditional order in all societies, not merely their own, at least at first.
The Russian revolution, even, gradually settled into federalist Russian dominated nationalist totalitarianism; it did not start out that way.
WWI had scotched global communism with nationalism, even as it made possible by revolution a Bolshevik take over in Russia.
WWI should, logically, to use their own word, have scotched the dream of reason, too.
But WWI breathed new vigor into universalist liberalism by sweeping away several great Western traditionalist if somewhat liberal (England, Austria) empires, putting nothing much in their place but enhanced yet still weak globalist mercantile and financial connections, and a multitude of new illiberal nationalisms and puppets.
Certainly by the end of WWII, one would have thought that the very idea of universalist liberalism was dead as a mackerel.
Not in America. We globaized in a really big way, and encouraged everyone else to do the same, ostensibly to fight Soviet influence everywhere.
Yet, this globalization was also an economic and political war on the nation state (including our own) and on traditional empires, as such books as Sovereignty At Bay made amply clear somewhat later.
