Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World

Stephen Trombley

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781782390381
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World profiles fifty landmark philosophers, scientists, political, social theorists and spiritual leaders whose ideas have defined the age we live in.

Stephen Trombley's Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World traces the development of modern thought through a sequence of accessible profiles of the most influential thinkers in every domain of intellectual endeavour since 1789.

No major representative of post-Enlightenment thought escapes Trombley's attention: the German idealists Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; founders of new fields of inquiry such as Weber, Durkheim and C.S. Peirce; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; political leaders from Mohandas K. Gandhi to Adolf Hitler; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics.

Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World offers a crisp analysis of their key ideas, and in some cases a re-evaluation of their importance as we proceed into the 21st century.

Contents

Introduction

1. Immanuel Kant

(1724–1804)

2. John Stuart Mill

(1806–73)

3. Johann Gottlieb Fichte

(1762–1814)

4. G. W. F. Hegel

(1770–1831)

5. Auguste Comte

(1798–1857)

6. Henry David Thoreau

(1817–62)

7. Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

(1804–72)

8. Charles Darwin

(1809–82)

9. Søren Kierkegaard

(1813–55)

10. Karl Marx

(1818–83)

11. Arthur Schopenhauer

(1788–1860)

12. C. S. Peirce

(1839–1914)

13. William James

(1842–1910)

14. Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844–1900)

15. F. H. Bradley

(1846–1924)

16. Gottlob Frege

(1848–1925)

17. Sigmund Freud

(1856–1939)

18. Émile Durkheim

(1858–1917)

19. Henri Bergson

(1859–1941)

20. Edmund Husserl

(1859–1938)

21. John Dewey

(1859–1952)

22. George Santayana

(1863–1952)

23. Max Weber

(1864–1920)

24. G. E. Moore

(1873–1958)

25. Bertrand Russell

(1872–1970)

26. Martin Buber

(1878–1965)

27. Albert Einstein

(1879–1955)

28. José Ortega y Gasset

(1883–1955)

29. Karl Jaspers

(1883–1969)

30. Martin Heidegger

(1889–1976)

31. Gabriel Marcel

(1889–1973)

32. Ludwig Wittgenstein

(1889–1951)

33. Herbert Marcuse

(1898–1979)

34. Gilbert Ryle

(1900–76)

35. Hans-Georg Gadamer

(1900–2002)

36. Jacques Lacan

(1901–81)

37. Karl Popper

(1902–94)

38. Jean-Paul Sartre

(1905–80)

39. Hannah Arendt

(1906–75)

40. Simone de Beauvoir

(1908–86)

41. Ferdinand de Saussure

(1857–1913)

42. A. J. Ayer

(1910–89)

43. Willard Van Orman Quine

(1908–2000)

44. Jürgen Habermas

(b. 1929)

45. Roland Barthes

(1915–80)

46. Michel Foucault

(1926–84)

47. Noam Chomsky

(b. 1928)

48. Jacques Derrida

(1930–2004)

49. Richard Rorty

(1931–2007)

50. Julia Kristeva

(b. 1941)

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Introduction

The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) once observed that European philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato (c. 428/7–c. 348/7 BC). If this is the case, then modern philosophy might be more accurately described as a series of footnotes to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Plato raised the big questions of philosophy – and Aristotle (384–322 BC) created the first philosophical system – but Kant is the first great system-builder of the modern period, taking into account the impact of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

. . . all thought, whether straightaway (directe) or through a detour (indirecte), must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

(trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, 1998)

For Kant, philosophy is about man having reached the age of intellectual maturity, when the universe can be explained through thinking rather than revelation. He was profoundly influenced by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), whom Kant credits with awakening him from a ‘dogmatic slumber’. In his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) Kant said that, after reading Hume, ‘I could proceed safely, though slowly, to determine the whole sphere of pure reason completely and from general principles, in its circumference as well as in its contents. This was required for metaphysics in order to construct its system according to a reliable plan.’ This groundwork led to Kant’s masterpiece, his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, substantially revised in 1787). Inspired by Enlightenment thinking about freedom – and experiencing the effects of war first-hand when his hometown of Königsberg was under Russian occupation during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) – Kant argued that knowledge and freedom went hand in hand. He explored these themes in two further critiques: the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgement (1790). The Critique of Pure Reason identifies laws that govern science, while preserving free will. The Critique of Judgement considers aesthetic judgements, and teleological questions about the purpose of natural organisms and systems.

One of the most enduring aspects of Kant’s philosophy is his ethics, with its categorical imperative. The categorical imperative says that I must act in such a way that the action I am choosing should become a universal law that should be applied to anyone else finding themselves in similar circumstances. Here Kant argues against a consequentialist ethics like utilitarianism. Utilitarian ethics say the right course of action is that which gives the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism is consequentialist because it urges me to seek the best consequences, which, Kant argues, is no more than my animal self would do. For Kant utilitarianism is not a moral theory because it does not take sufficient account of the difference between animals and persons, i.e., mind. In seeking the categorical imperative for our actions, we are using what Kant calls pure practical reason to arrive at a maxim that would govern our actions. This is called deontological ethics: finding and observing a moral rule, rather than defining good by its consequences.

Kant’s philosophy of transcendental idealism – in which the perceiving subject partly assigns meaning to the external world – would set the agenda for the further development of German idealism and much of twentieth- and twenty-first century continental philosophy.

The age of revolutions

The age of Enlightenment was also the age of revolutions. The English civil wars (1642–51) pitted parliamentarians against royalists. The American Revolution (1775–83) saw New World colonists rebelling against the rule of the English king, inspired by the ideas of the English philosopher John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) on the social contract; this was the creation of the United States of America. The French Revolution was fuelled by Enlightenment political ideas about the rights of citizens. King Louis XVI (1754–93)was executed and today France is a democratic republic, although there were several slips twixt cup and lip.

The execution of kings (England executed Charles I in 1649) was the final nail in the coffin of rule by divine right. By 1848 it was truly the Age of Man, but the first cracks in the new post-Enlightenment social organization began to show. New science led to new technology and the Industrial Revolution. Machines now mechanically multiplied the amount of goods that were formerly manufactured by hand. Workers left their agrarian lifestyle (and the agricultural market) and swelled the cities, where the factories were located. Overcrowding, disease and crime followed, all fuelled by poverty as laboured worked long hours for low wages. They suffered a new kind of fatigue, new injuries and new insults to their sense of self-worth. Meanwhile, the owners of manufacture – capitalists – grew richer. The gap in earnings between the rich industrialists and the poor, exploited workers made conflict inevitable.

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845)

(trans. W. Lough, 1969)

Europe in 1848 was the year of revolutions, with uprisings in France, the Italian and German states (those countries were not yet unified), Hungary and Ireland. One result of the Enlightenment philosophy that brought science, technology, politics and jurisprudence was a new capital-based ownership class, a middle class of managers and a working class of the exploited. Philosophy replied. The socialism of Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) was a direct response to the misery that accompanied capitalism and the accumulation of wealth by a few at the expense of the many.

Because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that universality which encloses the particular within in it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1870)

(trans. A. V. Miller, 1977)

After a long run in which Kant was the dominant German philosopher, having been variously interpreted by idealists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was next to erect a complete system of thought. His focus was on creating a unified theory of everything through reason; his historicism and concern for the interrelationships of social and political entities and questions greatly influenced Karl Marx and Max Weber (1864–1920). This strand of thinking was one of four that would come to dominate the twentieth century: (1) political ideology, (2) biology and genetics, (3) psychology, and (4) post-Newtonian physics.

Fascism

Germany’s National Socialists or Nazis were a fascist party – polar opposites of the Karl Marx-inspired socialists. Fascism is sometimes said to be a tendency rather than a systematic programme, and, indeed, it is difficult to point to a coherent philosophical explication of Nazi ideology (some attempts are simple catalogues of prejudice). Fascism, as it developed in different countries – Italy, Germany, Spain – was a ragtag assemblage of extremist beliefs, popularized during a time of deep financial crisis. For Germans suffering under the weight of the Versailles treaty, fascism defined itself by its choice of scapegoats: Jews, socialists and US consumerism. Important components of German fascism include extreme nationalism, the idea of Aryans as the ‘master race’ and a militaristic pursuit of empire. The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) did not place economics high on his list of priorities, possibly because the industrial demands of world domination would mean plenty of factory work, as well as guaranteed consumption of its products by the military (after the appropriation of the wealth of conquered nations). The libertarian economist Sheldon Richman defined fascism as ‘socialism with a capitalist veneer’.

Socialism in practice

The work of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels culminated in the economic and political philosophy of socialism. Socialism was adopted by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), who implemented a form of it which became the official socialism of what would eventually become the Soviet Union after Russia’s October Revolution of 1917. Marx and Engels viewed social organization as the result of historically determined economic relations. For them the story of modern humankind was the conflict of labour and capital, which, of necessity, demanded a radical politics. The workers’ paradise that Marx and Engels had in mind when they wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 proved in the twentieth century to be an unattainable utopia. The rise of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) to the leadership of the Soviet Union led to as many as 20 million deaths, as a result of famine, purges and deportations.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto(1848)

(trans. Samuel Moore, 1888)

Soviet citizens were guaranteed work, but their quality of life, in terms of material comforts, was nothing like that enjoyed in the West, where capitalism was producing record profits and ushering in a new world of prosperity for Americans and, eventually, Europeans. Also, while the United States and much of Europe enjoyed democratic elections, leadership in the Soviet Union was imposed on the masses. Membership of the Communist Party was restricted to a privileged minority and an elaborate police state kept the population in line.

The price of totalitarianism

With the establishment of totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, intellectuals in those countries found themselves in danger. Their role was often simply to agree with a system that was both morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest. As the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in Germany in 1933, preparing the ground for the horrors of the Second World War, both the United States and Britain benefitted from the arrival on their shores of philosophers and scientists fleeing for their lives. Eventually, the United States would be the first nation to develop a nuclear weapon using the science brought there by German refugees, including Albert Einstein (1879–1955). When the war was over and the US and Soviet victors moved in to cherry pick the best Nazi scientists to come and work for them, the United States got Wernhervon Braun (1912–77). Braun was the physicist and rocket designer who created the deadly long-range V-2 rocket that rained death and destruction on London. But he was not merely a rocket designer; he was also a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. The Americans grabbed him before the Soviets could, giving them the edge in ballistic missiles with which to project thermonuclear weapons at targets several thousand miles away. Braun was responsible for the rocket science that made the United States the first nation to put a man on the moon.

Communities tend to be guided less than individuals by conscience and a sense of responsibility. How much misery does this fact cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain, sighs and bitterness.

Albert Einstein, ‘The World as I See It’ (1934)

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