Modern world

During this time earth-shattering changes occurred in politics, industry, society, economics, commerce, transportation, communication , mechanization, automation, science, medicine, technology and culture which transformed the "Old World" into the Modern or New World, culminating in the Nuclear Age, the Sexual Revolution, the Information Age and finally a Leisure Age[?]

The years 1500 - 1750 are in rough outline the times of the Early Modern Period[?] being the years following the European Renaissance.

The modern world was basically shaped by three great Revolutions:

1. The American Revolution of 1776.
2. The French Revolution of 1789.
3. The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

These events in turn sowed the seeds for:

• The Russian Revolution of 1917 and contributed to the great wars of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, such as:
• The American Revolutionary War
• The Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and ultimately;
• The First World War (1914 - 1918) and
• The Second World War (1939 - 1945).

The American and French Revolutions ended the role of omnipotent monarchies to do as they wished in the world. Henceforth the world would become a "Modern" place where Democracy, and Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity[?] became the new standards of government and of the rules of society.

Men such as the Emperor Napoleon introduced new codes of law in Europe based on merit and achievement, rather than on a class system rooted in Feudalism. The modern political system of Liberalism (derived from the word "Liberty" which means "Freedom") empowered members of the dis-enfranchised Third Estate. The power of elected bodies swept aside traditional rule by royal decree. A new attachment to one's nation, culture and language produced the powerful forces of Nationalism . This in turn ultimately contributed to new very modern ideologies such as the ideology of: Fascism; Socialism and Communism

Taken to an extreme, the desire to demolish all vestiges of the past and create a classless society, resulted in the abuses of Communism following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which executed the Czar and his family, created the Soviet Union, transformed serfdom, and forcibly modernized Mother Russia. In Germany, once the Kaiser had abdicated in 1918, chaos ensued, paving the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

The new republic of the United States of America granted the vote to citizens, and placed reins on government based on the new Constitution and creating a system of checks and balances between the three different branches of government of the legislature, judiciary, and executive headed by a President who won a national election.

The mechanical and scientific inventions that were discovered, studied and implemented changed the way goods were produced and marketed. For example, modern machines in Great Britain speeded up the manufacture of commodities such as cloth and iron. The horse and ox were no longer needed as beasts of burden. The newly invented engine powered the car, train, ship, and eventually the plane produced rapidly each year. Artificially created energy powered any motor that drove any machine that was invented. Raw goods could be transported in huge quantities over vast distances and manufactured quickly and then marketed all over the world, making Great Britain into a very wealthy country.

Progress continued as Science saw so many new scientific discoveries. The telephone, radio, X-rays, microscopes, electricity all contributed to rapid changes in life-styles and societies. Discoveries of antibiotics such as penicillin brought new ways of combating diseases. Surgery and drugs kept on making progressive improvements in medical care, hospitals, and nursing. New theories such as Evolution and Psychoanalysis changed humanity's "old fashioned" views of itself.

Warfare was changed with the advent of new varieties of rifle, cannon, gun, machine gun, armor, tank, plane, jet, and missile. And weapons such as the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, known along with chemical weapons and biological weapons as weapons of mass destruction actually made the devastation of the entire planet Earth posssible in minutes. All these are among the markings of the Modern World.

New attitudes to religion, with the church diminished, and a desire for personal freedoms, induced desires for sexual freedoms, which were ultimately accepted by large sectors of the Western World. Theories of "free love" and uninhibited sex were touted by radicals in the 1960s, spawing a hippie movement.

Equality of the sexes in politics and economics, women's liberation movement[?], gay rights for homosexuals and the freedom afforded by contraception allowed for greater personal choices in these intimate areas of personal life.

The combination and confluence of all these evolving extreme political, economic, industrial, scientific, medical, technological, psychological, and cultural changes continue to produce what we know today as the Modern World.

Famous people

The Modern world replaced the old Biblically oriented value system , the monarchical system of government, and the feudal system , with new democratic and liberal ideas in politics , science , psychology , sociology ,and economics derived from the writings of people such as:

(Note: The list below is not comprehensive by any means. To name all the thinkers and personalities who helped shape the modern age would be a voluminous undertaking. This selection is meant as a profile of the way major thinkers contributed to the creation of the world as we know it today.They are listed chronologically by year of death.)

• Nicolaus Copernicus ( 1473 - 1543 ) Refutes geocentric theory , places Sun at the center of our solar system , Church is outraged.
• Galileo Galilei ( 1564 - 1642 ) Wrote Starry Messenger[?] reinforced Copernicus' heliocentric theory. Used early telescope to discover planets , mountains on the moon , sun spots ,and The Milky Way in space.
• René Descartes ( 1596 - 1650 ) Wrote Meditations on First Philosophy[?] and Discourse on Method.Rejected Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions; Boosted rationalism
• Baruch Spinoza ( 1632 - 1677 ) Elevated scientific pantheism and rationalism
• John Locke ( 1632 - 1704 ) Refutes Divine right of kings Role of tolerance in government
• Isaac Newton ( 1642 - 1727 ) Wrote Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica or PrincipiaRevolutionized mathematics, optics , and physics laid the foundations for modern science
• Voltaire ( 1694 - 1778 ) Wrote Candide opposing Leibniz's " metaphysical optimism " .Author and Philosopher freethinker before the French Revolution
• Jean Jacques Rousseau ( 1712 - 1778 ) Wrote Social Contract :All men are born free and equal , rights of citizens and Will of the people[?]

• Benjamin Franklin ( 1706 - 1790 ) Wrote Poor Richard's Almanack[?] .Architect of liberty and helped draft the American Declaration of Independence
• Adam Smith ( 1723 - 1790 ) Wrote Wealth of Nations[?] . Father of Classical Economics .Advocated laissez-faire market forces[?]
• Edmund Burke ( 1729 - 1797 ) Free trade and constitutional statesmanship against misgovernmemt[?]
• Immanuel Kant ( 1724 - 1804 ) Wrote The Critique of Pure Reason[?] in ( 1781 ).German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy . Explored role of knowledge and mind .Contributed to metaphysics , epistemology , ethics , and aesthetics .
• Georg Hegel ( 1770 - 1831 ) Wrote Elements of the Philosophy of Right in ( 1821 ) . Concepts of dialectics[?] , thesis[?] and antithesis and synthesis[?] central to Hegelian[?] philosophy.
• John Stuart Mill ( 1806 - 1873 ) Wrote Principles of Political Economy[?] advocating greater interaction between Labor and wealth
• Charles Darwin ( 1809 - 1882 ) Wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection .Theory of evolution and homosapiens[?] . Naturalism , botany
• Karl Marx ( 1818 - 1883 ) Wrote Das Kapital , Marxism ,Communism .Dictatorship of the proletariat
• Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844 - 1900 ) Wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power[?]. Criticized traditional Christian values such as guilt. Preached concept of will to power[?] and doctrine of the ubermensch[?] ("Superman" or "Ultimate Man") that was later twisted and abused by Hitlerian Fascism and the Nazis as a rationale for Germanic anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews
• Theodor Herzl ( 1860 - 1904 ) Wrote Judenstaat[?] ("Jewish State"). Father of modern Zionism . Laid down the political groundwork for the future State of Israel . Convened First Zionist Congress[?] ( 1897 ) in Basle, Switzerland establishing the World Zionist Organization[?] predicting a Jewish state within 50 years
• Leo Tolstoy ( 1828 - 1910 ) Wrote War and Peace and chronicled the tumultuous conditions in Russia, its pre-Revolutionary anarchy , nihilism and social turmoil. Preached a form of Christian peace.
• Max Weber ( 1864 - 1920 ) Wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( 1905 ) , Economy and Society ( 1914 ) , The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Pub. 1949 ). Forming sociology . Father of Social Sciences and study of the social system[?]
• D.H. Lawrence ( 1885 - 1930 ) Wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover and Sons and Lovers Promoted literary eroticism and sexual freedom. Fought efforts by censors[?] objecting to pornography
• Sigmund Freud ( 1856 - 1939 ) Wrote Interpretation of Dreams[?] , The Ego and the Id[?] , Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis . Medical doctor . Started as neurologist . Father of psychoanalysis . Revealing the hidden subconscious libido and thanatos and the workings of the id , ego and super-ego on human personality and behavior . Sought cures for modern neurosis and psychosis of neurotic and psychotic patients
• Leon Trotsky ( 1879 - 1940 ) Revolutionary Bolshevik leader and "Father of the Red Army". The Writings of Leon Trotsky[?] shaped Trotskyism
• Adolf Hitler ( 1889 - 1945 ) German dictator (1933-1945). Wrote Mein Kampf ( 1925 ) whilst in prison for a failed putsch , outlining his views which he put into practice. Doctrine of vicious Anti-Semitism , developed National Socialism ( Nazism ) , and wanted genocide against non- Aryan peoples
• John Maynard Keynes ( 1883 - 1946 ) Wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money[?] in ( 1936 ) key in modern economics on employment and supply and demand
• Mahatma Gandhi ( 1869 - 1948 ) Hindu philosopher and lawyer,proponent of non violent protest contributed to the end of British rule in India and Pakistan helping to end the British Empire
• George Orwell ( 1903 - 1950 ) Wrote Animal Farm and 1984 warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the state as Big Brother
• John Dewey ( 1859 - 1952 ) Wrote Democracy and Education[?] in ( 1916 ) Philosopher of pragmatism and Social Darwinism .
• Albert Einstein ( 1879 - 1955 ) Postulated E=mc2 .All matter is energy and light . Atomic theories helped the USA build the first atom bomb .Contributed to evolution of atomic energy , the atomic bomb , and nuclear weapons . Peace activist and warned about perils of nuclear war
• Carl Gustav Jung ( 1875 - 1961 ) Wrote Symbols and Transformation[?] ( 1912 ) , Psychological Types[?] ( 1921 ) , Psychology and Religion: West and East[?] , Psycholgy and Alchemy[?] ( 1944 ) , Practice of Psychotherapy[?]. Role of mythology , religion and God in psychology
• Winston Churchill ( 1874 - 1965 ) Wrote History of the English-Speaking Peoples[?] . Political saviour of Great Britain facing Nazism Strategic theoretician of the Atlantic Alliance[?] between Great Britain and the USA
• T.S. Eliot ( 1888 - 1965 ) Wrote The waste land in 1922 and The hollow men[?] in 1925 poet describing the frutrations of love and the emptiness of existence
• Walt Disney ( 1901 - 1966 ) Creator of animated movies , revolutionized story-telling by introducing fictional Mickey Mouse , Donald Duck , Goofy , Minnie Mouse , and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs loved and and immitated by millions of children and adults.Creator of pop culture .
• Bertrand Russell ( 1872 - 1970 ) {together with Alfred North Whitehead ( 1861 - 1947 ) }, wrote Principia Mathematica connecting with Pythagoras and Plato . Russell wrote The Problems of Philosophy[?] , Why I Am Not a Christian[?] ( 1927 ) and much more. Logician , mathematician philosopher of liberalism and an activist pacifist , in 1958 becomes founding President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament .
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn ( 1918 - ) Wrote The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation . Intellectual who rejected cruelties of communism in the USSR
• George Lucas Jnr. ( 1944 - ) Creator of the powerful science fiction Star Wars movie series that hundreds of millions of people in the world have incorprated into their own pop culture , watching the epic struggles between the father-son rivals Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker . American screenwriter , film director , producer , and mass media entrepreneur
• Steven Spielberg ( 1946 - ) Creator of movies : Jaws , E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial ( 1982 ) , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Indiana Jones , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Jurassic Park and Schindler's List ( 1994 ) about the Holocaust. It has been said of him that no movie director or producer has ever put together a more popular body of work.His works fill the popular imagination[?] of the modern world