Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. The standard account of Modernity dates its beginning to around 1630s. It believes that ... > the transition from medieval to modern modes of thought and practice rested on the adoption of rational methods in all serious fields of intellectual inquiry - by Galileo Galilei in physics, by Rene Descartes in epistemology -with their example soon being followed in political theory by Thomas Hobbes.