260905: Cosmopolis (Book Review)

05 Sep, 2026

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

—John Donne, 1611

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

—William Yeats, 1919

A majority of Americans believe that communities are eroding, families, neighbourhoods, even the polity…

—Charles Taylor, 2007

When the tower of civilizational structure sways in high winds—or is battered by artillery—or becomes site of unspeakable horror, a Tower of London—then its citizens devise a means of retrofit, renovation, or a new foundation…

And now we back into a new millennium, eyes lowered, and unable to imagine what future forms our tower will take. Stephen Toulmin, in Cosmopolis (1990), argues that Europe’s most significant renovations, the last 500 years, took place in the 17th and 20th centuries. They mark, respectively, the Enlightenment project of modernity, and the roll-back of that project, in light of its Great War failures.

The Enlightenment project—epitomized by Descartes and precedented by Plato—was defined by its quest for exactitude and logical rigor—by its quest for axiomatic foundations, high-leverage abstractions, and universal certainties. It was rationalist, formalist, and “thin,” in the Geertz sense—that is, decontextualized and disembedded.

The Enlightenment project replaced an earlier Renaissance humanism—epitomized by Montaigne, and precedented by Aristotle—which was defined by flexibility, “thick” context, and skepticism (in the sense of intellectual modesty). Today, having partially returned to Renaissance humanism, we speak of “ecology” and “interdependence.” We celebrate “diversity” and profusion, where Cartesian critics perceive only confusion.

We can look to Mies van der Rohe for Enlightenment’s visual metaphor: van der Rohe, of course, is a builder of towers, and a late inheritor of the modernist project. van der Rohe’s glass and steel towers are built almost irrespective of their environmental, cultural, and historical context. van der Rohe is interested in formal geometries, abstraction, and universality. He is not interested in local flavor and flourish, in the psychology of his towers’ residents, in their religious histories and cultural norms and social imaginaries.

Founding Cosmopolis

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out… And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies…

—John Donne, 1611

By “Cosmopolis,” Toulmin means the Enlightenment idea that man could and would achieve its goals here on Earth, rather than in an Afterlife. The modern project was fundamentally optimistic, even Promethean—but it was birthed in the agonies of the 17th Century’s religious wars. Where 16th century Europe glutted on Spanish silver, enjoying steady economic growth, it fell into chaos after King Henry IV's 1610 assassination. Not just the Thirty Years’ War, but the Polish Deluge, French Fronde revolts, the Irish Rebellion, the English Civil Wars. Not just civil unrest and military strife, but a series of Great Plagues (1630, 1647, 1665) and serious famines coincident with the Little Ice Age. Toulmin to narrate: “Over the last thirty years [1960-1990], modern historians have reached a unanimous verdict about the social and economic condition of Europe [when the Enlightenment was birthed]… Far from this being a time of prosperity and reasonableness, it now looks like a scene from Lebanon in the 1980s.” Indeed, contemporary historians often refer to this period as the “General Crisis” in Europe, language which anticipates the 21st century “metacrisis.”

Indeed, Toulmin—seeking to understand Descartes as Descartes would never have understood himself, that is, as a psychosocial product of history and culture—Toulmin describes Cartesian philosophy, and its quest for axiomatic certainty, as an attempt to seek firm and neutral ground at a time when Europe was falling apart—“all in peeces,” made incoherent from religious schism, Copernican revolutions, and vying cosmologies. Toulmin: “One aim of 17th-century philosophers was to frame all their questions in terms that rendered them independent of context; while our own procedure will be the opposite—to recontextualize the questions” and their questioning minds." (In this way, we might turn Toulmin's argument on Toulmin, portraying him as equally a product of his age.)

This is in sharp contrast to medieval scholars’ Aristotelian sensitivity to the “circumstantial” (Toulmin) character of all practical issues: Questions of “medical diagnosis, legal liability, or moral responsibility” could not be easily settled by appeal to universal laws, but required a careful consideration of circumstance.

To Renaissance thinkers, appeals to axiomatic and universal certainties would have likewise read as dogmatism—precisely that folly which Erasmus and Montaigne, alike, had publicly mocked. Bacon adopted “a cool, nonjudgmental tone,” and wrote about life with “a nondoctrinal spirit.” Epistemological modesty was submitted as a Christian virtue: to be humble before God was to realize how limited one’s access to truth really is. Such humility implies a corrolary openness and charity to dissenting or unfamiliar views—while doctrinal certainty drove partisan divides and political disaster.

16th Century thought was therefore implicitly pluralist, with its emphasis on circumstance, particularity, ambiguity, and experience. It not only tolerated, but developed a taste for, the exotic and the foreign; Toulmin describes several of Montaigne’s texts as “omnivorous ethnography.” In ethics, the Renaissance humanists followed Aristotle’s counsel not to follow generality past “the nature of the case.”

The 17th Century disavows its predecessor’s pluralist humanism: “After the 1650s, Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists made ethics a field for general abstract theory, divorced from concrete problems of moral practice; and since then, modern philosophers have generally assumed that—like God and Freedom, or Mind and Matter—the Good and the Just conform to timeless and universal principles.”

There is thus a soft-c conservatism to Toulmin’s modernists. He re-describes the Enlightenment as a “Counter-Renaissance.” He cites John Donne’s views that Copernicus, Kepler, the Jesuits, and other intellectual innovations were “trouble-makers” (Toulmin) “disturbing the peace” (Donne) of “honest God-fearing England” (Toulmin). The world was falling apart, and certainty was required to stitch it together.

As Europe “crumbled,” and commoners looked to portents of the apocalypse, a replacement was needed for that “magnetic force” that had once fastened “sund’red parts in one” (Donne). Toulmin’s description of the 17th Century, as seen through Donne’s eyes, is strikingly contemporary: “Society is now narcissistic”; each “individual sees himself as unique and inimitable”; “the moral fabric of family and society have fallen apart.” If the Renaissance had led to this—then of what use was the Renaissance? A cultural and cosmological “integrity” was needed. The Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, are to Toulmin attempts at seeking such an integrity, and resolving disputes between differing perspectives, theologies, and ethics. Soon, Christianity itself (at least in England and colonial America) would seek to justify itself through rational methods, with divinities regularly seeking and proclaiming evidence of intelligent design (such as the infamous watchmaker analogy).

It is worth, here, pointing out that Toulmin refrains from condemning modernist abstraction as “bad,” and pre-modern indexicality as “good”—rather, he describes the Cartesian turn as productive in its time and place, but eventually outliving that usefulness and becoming sterile and unproductive (or downright destructive) by the early 20th century. Like all methods, the rationalist approach is well-formed to pick the fruits of certain problems; it is clumsy and destructive when put to other branches.

The Fall of Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, and the Cartesian quest for certainty, crumbles in the 20th century. Like all progress, intellectual progress is jagged: Heisenberg’s indeterminacy and Einstein’s relativity emerge early, yet logical positivism (a species of formalism) thrived well into the century’s midpoint. After the First World War, Yeats's pens his "Second Coming," retracing Donne three centuries prior. And like Descartes, many philosophers, artists, and social reformers attempt a clean-slate renovation of Western culture, falling back on first principles and avant-abstract formalisms. Society was a machine, in which such a cold-start was possible. Toulmin cites the “intellectual cool” of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, or the primary colors of Piet Mondrian. (Formalism would dominate the visual arts well into the 1970s, at which point it began slowly to be replaced by an increasingly political conceptualist charter.) Meanwhile, new political and ethical certainties, and new aspirant social bedrocks, were all proclaimed; doctrinal confidence, and dogmatism, surged throughout the 1930s.

There had been a partial renewal of humanism, with 19th century Romanticism; even the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites brought back the psychological depth and historicity of Medieval and early Renaissance art. But “from 1910 to 1960, then, a return to the values of the Renaissance… was deferred… Richness of feeling and content were suspect: formal rigor and exactitude were again the Order of the Day.” In van der Rohe’s Cartesian apartment buildings, “the diversity of history and geography, and the specific needs of particular human activities,” are rejected “in favor of universal, timeless principles.”

But the Second World War—in which the extremist certainty of fascism and communism clashed—as well as the subsequent post-War abuses of power by the United States and Soviet Union—have a purgative effect, for society’s extremist instincts. Toulmin cites the 1960s as a re-blossoming of the Renaissance spirit, and compares Kennedy’s assassination to that of Henry IV. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring inaugurated a new emphasis on ecology and whole-earth thinking. Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations—a work of profound skepticism—shattered the positivist Anglophone consensus he’d help establish in his youth. Freud’s post-war reception mainstreams the notion of an irrational and emotional man, ruled by animal passions, who is not so easily remade as Protestant cultures of self-control and self-command had hoped. Man was interdependent—not just on his fellow man, or his tekne, but on the planetary atmosphere, and the behavior of invisible microbes. Scholars put new importance on issues of tacit knowledge, practical activity (e.g. ethnomethodology), process philosophy, virtue ethics, assemblage, and emergence. The idea of physics as a “master science” waned. By 1984, the Santa Fe Institute had been established for the study of complexity theory.

(For those of a LW rationalist and post-rationalist background, see e.g. James Scott's critique of high modernist legibility. Arguably, the post-rationalist and meta-rationalist arcs speedrun Toulmin's cultural history.)

Darwin, I think, deserves substantially more credit than *Cosmopolis *gives him. Toulmin barely mentions Darwin—he credits, instead, Dewey, Rorty, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Kuhn, Freud, and Carson for effecting the transformation. But there is no Dewey (nor Rorty) without James, and there is no James without Darwin, as Rorty himself—and Louis Menand—have argued.

What Darwin does is break up the Platonist project forever. Darwin’s world is not filled with essential, fixed types, obeying some higher form in the heavens. Rather, his creatures show infinite variety & variation; they are creative; they are in flux; and they are deeply subject to—indeed, ineradicable from—both their historical trajectory (“contingency”) and their environmental context. Their form is a solution to a problem-context; it cannot be understood otherwise. The pragmatic paradigm, and the success of tool metaphors, both owe a debt to natural selection.

Darwin is not the first to think this way. Emerson, in 1833, would write in his journals: “A lobster is monstrous to the eye the first time it is seen, but when we have been shown the use of the case, the color, the tentacula, and the proportion of the claws... he then seems as perfect and suitable to his sea-house, as a glove to a hand.” But Darwin’s work so definitely and completely re-defines the universe in the terms of flux and fitness, that we have spent the last 150 years accommodating The Origin of Species in our philosophical schemas.¹

Towers for the New Millennium

Our own machinic age lingers in earlier worldviews—within the engineering class, concepts like “alignment,” “intelligence,” and “coherent extrapolated volition” are frequently treated as singular, coherent, and timeless abstractions—even as cultural relativism has come to dominate the lip-service of the academic humanities and the professional managerial class. A deeper pragmatism will require both sides to budge on their dogmas—to recognize that the space of possible working solutions is, simultaneously, an almost miniscule subspace of all possible configurations—and also, immeasurably vast, in comparison with the subspace of existing solutions, which moreover, may be expanded through human creativity and world-remodeling.

The study of Artificial Intelligence itself plays out Toulmin’s arc in miniature: in the 60s and 70s, GOFAI paradigms still flourished, and there was hope that a positivist encoding of the world, as a set of explicit and axiomatic rules, might yield complex adaptive behavior. Such paradigms collapsed—felled as much through their own failed technical advancement as by the critiques of “post-modern” (in Toulmin’s sense) philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus.

Moreover, cybernetics—WWII-era intellectual programme to which post-War artificial intelligence is immeasurably indebted—opened the door to “ecological” (i.e. contextual, whole-assemblage) and post-structural paradigms.

Cosmopolis closes with a call to walk “face-forward” into the future—not with our heads down, or our backs turned, hoping the old paradigms hold; but active, envisioning, and updating. To continue our active inspections of the Tower; to continue demanding renovations: novel ideas, adaptive institutions, and futuribles. True enough, and uncontroversial in theory (though few seem forward-faced in practice). But Toulmin unfortunately stops here, unable to project much further than a continuation of late-20th century trends.²

Still, Cosmopolis offers a more hopeful world-picture than Taylor’s Secular Age. The past half-millennium, to Taylor, have been one long slide into disenchantment. Toulmin’s history is of a world coming back into its former riches, rediscovering the strangeness of the world, and the thrill of the strange. Both accounts are a bit too tidy, and a bit too neat for my tastes. But I would rather live in Toulmin’s world.