This workshop critically discusses Floris Cohen’s latest work “How Our World Has Become Modern: A Threefold Revolution”. Eight scholars will offer critical reflections on the draft of Cohen’s book, followed by a response from and a discussion with the author. In his book, Cohen aims to explain how the modern world—so different from all earlier forms of human life—came into being and why it did so in a specific place and time. He argues that modernity emerged through three tightly connected Revolutions: the Scientific, the Industrial and the Humanitarian. Together, these transformations reshaped humanity’s understanding of nature, its capacity to produce wealth and through a hitherto unknown form of science-based technology, and its moral and political commitments to freedom, dignity and human rights. All three Revolutions unfolded in Europe between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, not by historical necessity or civilizational “superiority”, but through an in part patterned, in part contingent convergence of social, intellectual, political and institutional developments. The book traces how scientific knowledge enabled technological change, how industrialization altered everyday life on a massive scale, and how humanitarian ideas—far more fragile than science or machinery—redefined how humans ought to treat one another. Though these Revolutions had clear beginnings, their effects continue to shape the world today.

Beyond describing how, when, and where modernity arose, the book addresses the deeper and even more difficult question of why it did so. Rejecting explanations that reduce modernity to economic growth alone, it integrates the histories of science, technology, philosophy, politics, and humanitarian thought into a single comparative framework. By comparing Europe with other advanced civilizations, especially China and the Islamic world, the author aims to identify a limited set of historically grounded causes that together explain Europe’s distinctive trajectory. The book wishes to offer a coherent “big picture” account of how humanity stumbled—unplanned and unforeseen—into the modern world, and why that transformation remains both a source of unprecedented power and enduring moral vulnerability.

Floris Cohen is a Dutch historian of science best known for his influential work on the origins of the modern world. He specializes in the Scientific Revolution, comparative global history, and the long-term development of science, technology and human values. Cohen’s research combines detailed historical scholarship with broad synthetic interpretation, most notably in Quantifying Music. The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650 (1984); The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), and How Modern Science Came Into the World. Four Civilizations, One 17th Century Breakthrough (2010; accompanied by shorter versions meant for a broader audience in Dutch, English, German, and Chinese).

Programme

This is an invitational only event.