Rethinking the Modern and Modernity with Jacob Taubes
Monika Krause
What the paper says
Jacob Taubes’s book Occidental Eschatology (1947) offers a unique framework for examining cultural patterns across the line often construed as separating ‘the religious’ from the ‘non-religious’. This article highlights the implications of the application of this framework for our understanding of modernity: With Taubes, the ‘modern’ conception of history, totality and sovereignty can be traced to the emphatic distinction between ‘world’ and ‘God’ in the Hebrew Bible. In this perspective, ‘the modern’ appears as a cultural element that is analytically dissociated from any particular later historical period and from any cultural or geographical context, such as ‘the West’. Messianic thinking appears integral to the modern rather than as a source of fundamentally opposing insights. Competing appeals to reject the world are a source of instability and violence in modernity. Further research can address how the modern is linked with other cultural elements and with institutional arrangements in different contexts.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.