It would be no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing today a crisis which seems to undermine the very foundations of our civilization. The world order of sovereign, independent states is being questioned under the pressure of globalization from the outside and nationalistic-populism from within. While globalization demands surrendering sovereign power in favour of intense international collaboration, large segments of society experience it as unwelcome interference in their well-being, expressing growing distrust in parties and in bureaucratic and intellectual elites that tend to support globalization. Moreover, distrust of the elites also means that the fact-based truths upon which modern political and scientific discourses have been founded since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are being undermined. Thus, overriding scepticism towards the liberal democratic process—based on rational and free debate—that has shaped modern sovereign states for a long time is rapidly growing, while quasi-authoritarian regimes, basing themselves on strong nationalist sentiments of the demos and striving for ethnic homogeneity, also confer new power upon religious establishments. These phenomena seem to shake the socio-political, cultural, and intellectual order known as modernity.

The present civilization crisis, as I understand it, provides us with an opportunity to revisit the political, social, and intellectual processes that took shape in 1550–1650, giving birth to the idea of sovereign states and their relation to religion and science, namely to the roots of the consensus around the modern world which is now being shaken.