History: Major Contentions    A guide to the major assertions in this section

Premodern Authority     When viewed through the lens of warrant, history fractures along the fault line of reliance on and suspicion of authority. An examination of its glory days and decline.

Modernism’s Midwives     A review of the major players in the desperate attempts to replace authority with some working correspondence justification for truth and goodness.

Why Invent a Social Contract?  An accident of history distorts our own view of government

The Victorian Rift   The moral tumult that unsettled Victorian life has not been resolved.

Modernism and Its Discontents     The rise and fall of the two dominant modes of warrant in the modern age: reason and carefully examined experience with a special focus on modernism’s temptations to self-destruction.

The Calamity of the Human Sciences     Perhaps modernism’s greatest failure has been its elevation of the human sciences as the equal of the natural sciences, an error postmodernism has made far worse.

Postmodernism Is Its Discontents     An examination of how the virtual circle became postmodernism’s jury-rigged replacement for modernism’s warrants for truth, goodness, and beauty claims.