HISTORIANS date the beginning of modern times to the period of the late Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. These tectonic shifts in the western mind resulted in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the liberal democracies of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This broad-brush picture is a familiar one, and it is, equally broadly, right; but interesting questions remain about the relationship between the strands involved. In this lucid and captivating study, argues that the growth of science and the growth of liberal democracy were not merely contemporaneous, but causally connected. The growth of science, he says,…
