Volume 37, Number 6 · April 12, 1990
The Past in the Present
By Quentin Skinner
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
by Stephen Toulmin
Free Press, 228 pp., $22.95
Stephen Toulmin has always been a philosopher of extraordinary range and confidence. Over the past forty years he has published a steady stream of important books, encompassing such diverse topics as the logic of explanation, the uses of argument, the place of reason in ethics, and the historical development of modern science. But he has now tackled perhaps his most ambitious theme of all. Although his new work, Cosmopolis, is relatively brief—Toulmin himself describes it as an essay—his aim is nothing less than to lay before us an account of both the origins and the prospects of our distinctively modern world. By charting the evolution of modernity, he hopes to show us what intellectual posture we ought to adopt as we confront the coming millennium.
Review, 2750 words
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