In the world of commerce, the seminal work of Frederick Winslow Taylor The Principles of Scientific Management is considered to have influenced almost all subsequent thinking on management.[1]According to him “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.”[2]After bemoaning the fact that early 20thcentury American industry was suffering from defective systems of management and thus rampant inefficiency…

In the previous eight posts I have been trying to describe a number of basic principles which define the shape of the contemporary North American social imaginary. Taken together they both limit and empower by eliciting and overseeing the ways we live together, the things we value and consider worthy of pursuing. They are like the components of a language that make possible the expression of individual self-understanding within the common life…

The concern for one’s own opinion is also indicative of the Enlightenment’s turn inward. This first-person perspective, while anticipated by Plato and Aristotle, is rooted in the work of Augustine. His was a turn to the self. According to Taylor, “It was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought. The step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big…

The “modern”mindset also holds that “…as our knowledge becomes both broader and more unified, we will experience continued progress (and they have in mind not only technological progress, but also social, political, and moral progress).”Consider Condorcet’s [1743-1794] optimistic Sketch for A Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mindin which he declares that the whole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is this idea, that the general laws directing the…

Another characteristic of Enlightenment thought, also related to the reductionistic methodology, is the notion of consilience. In essence, this is the conviction that all knowledge is unified, i.e., there is one, single pool of interrelated knowledge that can be accessed by anyone using the right methodology. Wilson speaks of the strong form of this idea, namely total consilience, which holds that nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which…

As might have been expected, Enlightenment thought promoted more than the innocent use of reason. It turned into an insistence, a demand, for the freedom to criticize. According to Peter Gay, the Enlightenment’s thinkers defined philosophy as the organized habit of criticism. The philosophes’ glorification of criticism and their qualified repudiation of metaphysics make it obvious that the Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason but a Revolt against Rationalism. The claim…

I come now to the third of the six principles that provide the basic operating principles for the contemporary social imaginary. In this case I want to explore the implications and consequences of the reductionist methodology developed by Enlightenment thinkers. Obviously, the use of human reason was (would have to be) governed by certain methodological considerations. This has turned out to be a basically mechanistic, empiricist, and reductionistic method. Hauptli explains this…