ABSTRACT
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, fundamental changes overtook the ways in which people in Western Europe understood the world. While these changing patterns of thought were most clearly articulated by philosophers, scientists, and writers, the decline of tradition and faith and the rise of reason was much more widespread in these societies (Toulmin 1990: 12). Indeed, this period was characterised by a variety of attempts to transform a social structure based upon the ruler’s proximity to God into one founded on a rational moral and legal code. For this reason, the efforts that were made to define the relationship between reason and morality in the later eighteenth century are of the greatest possible interest. The idea of a moral order has been fundamental to modernity. The moral order is the ideal to which modernity appeals, the point at which sequences of historical development are presumed to eventually arrive. The imperative to create an orderly nation-state, founded on a rational legal code that could discipline the base natural drives of the population, was bound up with the same forces that produced the discipline of archaeology. This kind of social arrangement could be assumed to be the destination of all humanity, because the moral sense is universal, rather than culturally relative.
