Two names stand out in particular in forming the modern mindset. The other is Sir Isaac Newton, the great British physicist, who thought he could define the whole universe following a mechanistic model. And we define knowledge as something rational, objective, certain, and fundamentally good. It is better to know than not to know. We live our lives seeking to amass knowledge, so that we can create a better environment for ourselves and control the world so that we can have it there as an object for us.
Modernism assumes that all knowledge of the world is knowledge of an object.
We are not participants. We come as neutral observers. We seek to describe the world and figure out the laws that make it work. In politics, a number of thinkers have argued that this modern, rational approach reached its conclusion in the totalitarian regimes of this century, which objectified the human person to the extreme. You can certainly make a case that Nazism and Stalinism are the political workings-out of Enlightenment assumptions.