Unraveling the Dialectic of Modernity
For more than two hundred years, the West was driven forward by the tension between two competing archetypes: the bourgeois and the bohemian, or put less arcanely, the businessman and the artist. But as we reached the end of the twentieth century, something changed in our society and the opposition between these two opposing worldviews ceased to be operative. This has left us in a No Man’s Land of stagnation and petty, yet acrimonious, bickering over the spoils of a decaying system.
I call the process that brought us to this place in history The Dialectic of Modernity.
The goal of this publication is to discover what is at stake in our present day debates by exploring how we got here: the profound changes in orientation inaugurated in early modernity, then the turn that took place in the eighteenth century through the thought of the now mostly forgotten figure Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By bringing to light the origins of our present day discourse, my hope is that we will then be able to see beyond the constraints it places upon us to build something new.
