fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Putting The Upstart In His Place

If the hypotheses developed in this book make some sense, the established view of modernity is challenged in at least two fundamental ways.  In the first place, the lineage of the modern turns out to be much less ancient and glorious than is usually suggested.  Modernity is an upstart rather than a scion of an […]

If the hypotheses developed in this book make some sense, the established view of modernity is challenged in at least two fundamental ways.  In the first place, the lineage of the modern turns out to be much less ancient and glorious than is usually suggested.  Modernity is an upstart rather than a scion of an old and celebrated line.  Just like any parvenu on his way to the top it has fabricated a grand genealogy, whereas in truth its ancestry is ‘buried in the dirt’.  But if the roots of modernity in the world are much less secure than we have long thought, that leads to the further question how deeply modern the modern really is.  Concentrating, as the ruling approach does, on the new in the old, a blind spot for the old in the new is a priori built in.  If the demise of the old, as the author believes, was a matter of rhetoric rather than reality, if the old was driven underground rather than extinguished, if the old represents something deeply engraved in our souls, the romantic suggestion that we have become estranged from ourselves needs to be taken much more seriously than most of us, who define ourselves as moderns, are prepared to admit. ~Andreas A.K. Kinneging, Aristocracy, Antiquity and History: Classicism in Political Thought

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here