ABSTRACT
At the center, the very heart, of what we call “Western civilization” is the twofold idea of science and reason: civilization’s Enlightened Reason may, indeed, represent more than any other idea its own progressive history and its capacity to bring about a world free from prejudice and superstition. But it is especially through the use of scientific knowledges and the technologies they spawn that Western peoples have come to believe that they possess the capacity to live better lives and in more humane conditions and to achieve the equality they doubly claim as both the foundation and the hope of their democracies. The perfectibility of the entire human race, particularly the hope of its freedom from prejudice, domination, and brutality, has been-almost without interruption from the eighteenth century-inextricably bound up with the very idea of science. Indeed, Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to this idea of perfectability, of “selfformation or cultivation,” as “perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century,” giving Enlightened Reason “a fundamentally new content,” and creating the very “atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the nineteenth century” (1975, p. 10). This “progressive” idea has inevitably stemmed from the economic features of Western societies: industrial capitalism’s requirement of change and movement and its consequent emphasis on “the virtues of ‘newness’” and inevitable progress (Wallerstein 1990, p. 37). But the origins and development of the idea of progress are rooted just as much in classical civilization’s fascination with knowledge and its faith in “objective knowledge” (Nisbet 1980).
