The Time of Law: Eighteenth-Century Speculations

In the great shift from the theocentric to the skeptical ordering of knowledge that is Enlightenment, one way of knowing stands out as preeminent, as the exemplar for the entire mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of epistemological contest in a discursive daguerreotype whose silvered surface still bears witness to this monumental change. Without this moment modernity, as such, is unthinkable; science, in its broadest sense, groundless, floating free from the certainty that knowledge is knowable. No systematic study of economy and society, language and literature, indeed no human sciences, sciences of the earth—in short nothing that we have inherited as the lexicon of human understanding—would be possible. That moment is June 5, 1756, the day Charles Viner died, and the way of knowing that enables the entire architectonics of modernity is what we have come to recognize as the law.