Perkinson provides an original historical interpretation that shows how our intellectual, political, economic, and social institutions emerged out of and are based upon the acceptance of human fallibility. However, ever since Plato, theorists have tried to flee from human fallibility in futile quests for certain knowledge, for legitimate government, for a just economy, and for a morality with a rational foundation.

These theorists ignore the fact that people in the West, by accepting their fallibility and relying on their experience, have actually constructed critical intellectual institutions that advance knowledge without justification, critical political institutions that lack legitimacy but create stable polities, critical economic institutions that promote wealth that is not based on the pursuit of self-interest, and critical social institutions that establish morality that does not have a rational foundation. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the triumph of theory over experience threatened to destroy those critical institutions. A provocative analysis that will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers involved with world civilization and sociopolitical theory.

A highly original interpretation of the history of Western culture that presents a first in-depth analysis of the cultural impact of communication. Explains how the media have helped bring about economic, political, social, and intellectual progress.

Adopting the currently unfashionable theory that Western culture has improved over time, Perkinson argues that media of communication have played a pivotal role in helping to make things better. He shows how human speech, when it first emerged, enabled people both to understand better the world they inhabited and to construct political, economic, and social arrangements that improved their life chances. With the invention of writing in Sumer, and especially following the invention of the phonetic alphabet in Greece, people were able to devise even better understandings and improved arrangements. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century led to the creation of the modern nation state, capitalism, an open society, and modern science.

According to this novel interpretation, media of communication encode the existing culture, thereby enabling people to become critical of it in ways not possible before. This criticism uncovers inadequacies, which, when eliminated, result in an improved culture. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of the history of communications and Western civilization.