ABSTRACT
According to a conventional view the modern age differs from the medieval period in that all life in the latter age was dominated by authority, whereas since the Renaissance, rational reflection, the self-awareness of the critical, autonomous individual has supplanted mere belief. This idealistic outlook places authority and reason in brusque contrast to each other. The Middle Ages appear as a pyramid whose contours were firmly established by dogma, so that not only no thought outside the autoritarian belief could be conceived but the rules determining economic life as well as the particular features of political organization were formed by the canonical teachings of the Catholic church. At the same time there arose a social world that, while not free from human suffering and affliction induced by the new order, nonetheless, as a result of attenuation of the power of religious author-ity, by posit reason as the final criterion for decisions, could claim to hold the key to resolving all difficulties in human life. This view, which today [1934] has been threatened by totalitarian countries, has been a major power in the history of thought. The dominant motif of classi-cal bourgeois philosophy and the beginnings of modern science is the declaration of war against all belief in traditional authority for having retarded progress in social and individual life. Belief in authority per se is considered by the modern period to be a mere opinion, supersti-tion, emotional bias, mere habit—in sum, an unproductive adherence to tradition that continually threatens the development of culture. At the beginning of the bourgeois age Decartes’s philosophy, through the category of doubt, endeavored to ban authoritative factors controlling thought and history.
