ABSTRACT

During the first half of the twentieth century many individuals began to question seriously the assumptions about human nature that had underlain the Enlightenment project and to explore the disjuncture between the modern faith in progress and the reality of modern life. The theory of relativity, developed by Swiss physicist Albert Einstein in 1905, was considered revolutionary precisely because it was premised on the belief that neither time nor space were fixed or distinct entities as Aristotle and Newton had assumed. It was during the 1950s that the modern Civil Rights movement began in the United States when blacks, in part inspired by inflated Cold War rhetoric that lauded the United States as the beacon of freedom and democracy, protested their own unequal treatment within the polity. Despite the many criticisms leveled against science, progress, and moral absolutism, it is important to remember that none of the authors whose work is included here accept the extreme relativist or historicist position.