James Faubian, following the view of Max Weber, correctly observes: The existential threshold of modernity [is found] in a certain deconstruction: of what [Max Weber] speaks of as the “ethical postulate that the world is God-ordained”.… The threshold of modernity may be marked precisely at the moment when the unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely preordained social order began to decline. Modernity emerges … only when what has been seen as an unchanging cosmos ceases to be taken for granted.4
