The course provides a conceptually critical and interdisciplinary examination of the core constituents of the cultural evolution that lead to the revolution of modernity in the West. Modernity is in fact a series of revolutions that gradually began to take place about 500 years ago in every domain of human life, at both the material and intellectual level, and is considered to be the great achievement of the West and its identifying mark as a cultural paradigm.
This first part of the course will examine the development axis of the religious constituent (Christianity), the urban constituent (modern Metropolis), and the political constituent (the centralized state, nationalist and civil), and the inter-relations, as well as the rivalry between these constituents, in order to comprehend the nature of the dramatic changes which occurred in each of these arenas – the Protestant revolution, the Urban revolution, and the political revolution. We shall furthermore investigate the meanings and implications of these radical changes for the purpose of arriving at some basic observations regarding the whole project of Modernity and Modernism and the Post-modernist reaction to them.