No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
The term “modernity” is often introduced by means of a storyline moving from one to another of opposed terms. One thinks of Sir Henry Maine's status and contract, Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft, and Henry Adams's Virgin and the dynamo. In such narratives, modernity comes with an increasing awareness of the fluid and apparently random nature of events characterizing modern existence (other terms, such as anomie, alienation, and disenchantment, also come to mind). Darwin's description, in chapter 4 of The Origin of Species, of the process of natural selection offers a defining instance of both change and its haphazard nature. While he doesn't use the phrase “random variation,” Darwin, as he apologetically notes at the beginning of chapter 5, uses the word “chance” repeatedly to name the occasional and sometimes critically important biological changes that he can't explain.
1 See, for instance, Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar; Daston, Lorraine, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1983)Google Scholar; Porter, Theodore, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar; Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Kavanagh, Thomas, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar; Bell, David, Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text (Lincoln, NB, 1993)Google Scholar; Monk, Leland, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modren British Novel (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; Packer, Barbara, “Emerson and the Terrible Tabulations of the French,” in Capper, Charles and Wright, Conrad E., eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Boston, MA, 1999), 148–67Google Scholar, Hamilton, Ross, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar; Belletto, Steven, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 2–3.
3 Lears, Jackson, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York, 2003) (references to this text are included parenthetically in the essay)Google Scholar.
4 James, William, Writings: 1878–1899 (New York, 1992), 447Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 466.
6 James, William, Writings: 1902–1910 (New York, 1987), 1312Google Scholar.
7 James, Writings: 1878–1899, 564; James, Writings: 1902–1910, 619.
8 Rorty, Richard, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983), 583–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Howells, William Dean, “Pernicious Fiction,” in William Dean Howells, ed. Kirk, Clara Marbury and Kirk, Rudolph (New York: American Book Co., 1950), 359–63, 361Google Scholar.
10 See, e.g., Peirce, C. S., “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly, 12 (Nov. 1877), 1–15Google Scholar; and James, William, Habit (New York, 1890)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
11 O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners (New York, 1969), 124Google Scholar.