Sure, China was an outlier, but the pundits confidently predicted that economic growth would eventually bring liberal democracy in its wake there too. Pretty much everyone was signing new trade agreements and opening up borders. Freedom was in the air – not only for people but for markets and commerce too. With communism defeated, democracy spreading and the market roaring, the victory of liberal values seemed assured. In the chapters of recent history, the period from 1989 to 2009 could be titled the ‘Age of Liberal Hubris’. Liberal intellectuals are prone to a superiority complex, believing that history is marching on their side, ushering in ever-widening individual freedoms and dissolving stifling constraints of religious piety, national pride, tribal loyalty and even family obligation. John Stuart Mill wrote that some of Comte’s proposals ‘could have been written by no man who had ever laughed’.Ĭomte’s attempt to turn rationalism into a religion is an unusually vivid example of a general habit in modern liberal thought: triumphalism. Most of Comte’s contemporaries, however, even those who admired his work in other fields, were not converted. Temples of Humanity sprang up in cities across England, as well as the United States and Brazil (the Porto Alegre temple is apparently still functioning). Rather than crossing themselves, for example, congregants would tap themselves in three places on their heads, signifying love, order and progress. There was no God, but to be human was divine. His Religion of Humanity would channel the natural desire for worship towards scientific and humanist ends. I n the middle of the 19th century, Auguste Comte, the French positivist thinker and forefather of sociology, devised a new faith.
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