The Mightie Frame
Epochal Change and the Modern World
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20001772 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nicholas G Onuf (0000-0001-7212-8917, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Publication date | 2018-07-19 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Mightie Frame (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780190879808.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2882980273 |
| ISBN | 9780190879808 |
| Open Library | OL28648790M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things , this book tells a story about epochal change in the modern world. While both books are concerned with how we moderns think about ourselves and our world, this book emphasizes the conceptual links in the ways we think, talk, get things done, conduct ourselves, and run societies. Both tell the story as a succession of epochs or ages separated by great ruptures. First is the Renaissance as the age of similitudes, ending around 1650. In its wake is the classical epoch as the age of tables, succeeded around 1800 by the modern epoch as a time of exponential growth and changing scales. Then follows the modernist age, beginning around 1900, which Foucault failed to identify as such but this book treats as the modern epoch turned inside-out. Last comes Foucault’s “end of man,” c. 1970, a time of rupture and renewal—or not. Despite Foucault’s rhetoric of rupture, modernity has changed within the confines of a “mightie frame” (a turn of phrase borrowed from John Milton). From epoch to epoch, the mighty frame has gained features that continue to function even as they recede from view, all the while fixing the limits of possible knowledge for modern minds and the conditions of rule in the modern world. These two sets of conditions constitute modernity as we know it now, give us clues about what comes next, and point to a plausible ethics for a time of uncertainty, stasis, and, quite possibly, decline
Art · Astronomy · Drama · Epistemology · Epoch (astronomy) · Literature · Modernity · Rhetoric · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Philosophy · Constructivism (Philosophy) · International Relations
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |