The Development of the Liberal Tradition, Part 2

Abstract

In the previous section, we attempted to show in what sense the transition from the traditional order of the Middle Ages to the modern world was a revolutionary one, both within Western Europe and on the world stage itself. Within Western Europe, the initial disintegrative effect of the transitional process was seen most clearly in what Frederick Watkins has called the “crisis of secularization.”¹ This prolonged period of religious strife, which reached its height in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, was in good part the consequence of the decay of the religious unity of the Middle Ages. It was largely in reaction to the widespread disintegration which accompanied the revolutionary collapse of the traditional society that modern absolutism was born.