The cost of buying in

Back when I was
co-directing a six-year study of militant religious fundamentalisms around the
world, critics used to ask me to define "modernity" and "modernization." To
many, mass media were the best symbols of the "modern." Yet as we studied
fundamentalists in a score of nations we were struck that in every case they were more at home with
the use of such media than were the "modernists" with whom they were at war. So
modernists and moderates yielded air space to them.

One could make a similar
case about capitalism, not God's ancient way of organizing economies but an
invention of early modernity, credit for which might go to John Calvin or Adam
Smith.

Light thrown on the
paradoxes of modernity shines in Daniel T. Rodgers's Age of Fracture, as quoted in Robert Westbrook's review in Bookforum (not
available online). Here are some
lines that scored: