Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World (Praeger Series on the Early Modern World)
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Product Description
While few intellectuals today accept the notion that the world is literally about to end through a prophesied supernatural act, between 1500 and 1800 many of Europe's and America's most creative minds did believe it. Perhaps most surprisingly, apocalyptic expectations played a central role during this period in creating secular culture �arguably the signal achievement of the post-medieval West. The topic is much with us still, as many on the religious right look to the end of days, a goal that seems closer than ever.
Apocalyptic ideas and expectations shaped the world in profound and enduring ways. In the Early Modern era, a deeply religious set of ideas proved instrumental in enabling people to see their world through prisms other than that of religion. The apocalypse underwrote the Reformation in the 16th century, the English Revolution in the 17th century, and the American Revolution in the 18th century. This book explores such themes through an examination of a range of major figures and events from the period. Why was the apocalypse � so alien to us today �so pivotal to the creation of our culture and to what we are? Only by seeing its central and often creative role historically within western civilizations can we meaningfully assess its significance to the current world. Only by grasping apocalypse then, can we truly understand apocalypse now.
</p>Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World (Praeger Series on the Early Modern World) Review
Most academic books today promise little, and deliver less. If youread Amazon's "product description", taken almost verbatim from the
first page of Prof. Williamson's latest book, you will see that,
whether you end up agreeing with him or not, he at least promises a
great deal; he provides us with nothing less than a new and original
explanation of how and why the modern world in which we still live
arose precisely when and where it did.
Williamson, one of the world's leading authorities upon apocalyptic and
millennialist thought, addresses a question which has vexed even the
greatest historians, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Tawney, Giddens, Toulmin,
and Berman spring to mind. Building on the insights of these and many
other historians, Williamson goes beyond all of them to claim that the
widespread dissemination of apocalyptic and millennialist expectations
that accompanied the seismic events of the Reformation was central to
the rise of all modern forms of consciousness and social life.
The book thus promises great things. Does it also deliver? Obviously a
complete assessment of the work is impossible here -- even were I
qualified to write one, which I manifestly am not. In my opinion,
however, the work delivers admirably. Williamson shows how our
distinctively post-medieval conceptions of secular, social and material
history, our radically egalitarian politics, -- which precipitated the
British, American and French Revolutions, -- the invention of the
extra-metropolitan republic, the rise of rationalism and empiricism, --
and therewith the scientific and industrial revolutions, -- and many
related phenomena all stem from apocalyptic and millennialist thought.
The crucial argument that the widespread dissemination of apocalyptic
expectations spawned by the Reformation led inevitably to a new
emphasis upon time [and hence in turn to modern modes of history] is
established early on and strengthened throughout the work. The related
claims that those who saw themselves as preparing to do imminent battle
with Christ against Antichrist, who thus understood themselves as
elected "saints," all "equal in the eyes of God," would naturally
develop egalitarian forms of revolutionary politics, and work to create
the world's first extra-metropolitan republic, -- eventually Great
Britain -- to challenge the rigid and oppressive hierarchies of the
Catholic empires of the Antichrist, these claims are also explicated
well at the outset and hammered home with examples culled from five
centuries. More difficult to assess, especially in a book review, is
Williamson's explanation of how the meticulous attention to Biblical
prophecy necessitated by apocalyptic expectations led to the rise of a
new examination of the previously scorned, "workings of nature," and
thus, ultimately, to modern science. Suffice it to say that the work
clearly establishes that mass apocalypticism leads inherently to a
strong emphasis upon THIS world, the "city of man," in Augustine's
terms, where all of the decisive cosmic events foretold in Revelations
are soon to unfold, and that all saints thus needs to understand the
natural and social terrain if they are to play their cosmic parts
successfully. Williamson establishes not only these central theses,
but develops as well many subsidiary arguments and observations, some
of which are as intricate as they are ingenious.
I hope I have adumbrated my case that this book delivers cogent
arguments, supported by copious evidence, in support of its primary
claims. As the work is organized chronologically, the linkages
between an ever-changing apocalypticism and the various other
conceptualizations of the last three centuries become more complexly
mediated and can hardly be assessed here.
All in all, this is a truly seminal work, one of the most significant
studies of integrated social and intellectual history to appear in our
time. Presented in an engaged, at times even polemical style, the work
is bound to stir up controversy. But however one may ultimately judge
the merits of its arguments, the work is clearly far too important to
be ignored, at least by anyone seriously interested in the origins of
the modern world.
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