tradition

Robert Adam
April 2008

Tradition has had a bad press for the last two hundred years. It all started in the eighteenth-century with the Enlightenment. In Europe, The Enlightenment was the beginning of the modern age. Scientific discoveries led philosophers and others to see the world as progressing to a utopian future founded on reason and invention. One of the major obstacles, as they saw it, was tradition: tradition in the church, tradition in government, tradition in society. Tradition was opposed to reason and progress. And this idea is still with us today.

French philosophers led the way in the Enlightenment but French society was amongst the most hidebound in Europe, and France was falling behind as the industrial revolution drove Britain forward. The outcome was the French revolution, the defining clash of tradition and modernity.