Hollinger does provide some important historical background and some insights into the key questions at issue, which of course we have to sift through and synthesize as part of applying our outlook and methodology. In this view, science was to be left alone just as the market was to be left alone in classical political economy.
Somebody is going to have to decide-that's a very important point.
The Dynamics of Modernization , by the Princeton historian Cyril Black, identified 'the scientific attitude' as the most important single motor of the entire modernization process from early modern Europe to the present. Industry, technology, and democracy followed eventually in the wake of this distinctive mentality. The modernizing process was generally understood to entail the making of the entire world over according to the model of what the United States had become by the early and mid-1960s. This relates to questions bound up with the Enlightenment and how we have to, from our perspective, divide the Enlightenment in two. In previous talks, I spoke to what Marxism holds in common with the general thinking associated with the Enlightenment, and what we disagree with and have to make a radical rupture with.