Remi Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western society has rejected traditional theophilosphical ideas in favor of human authority and autonomy, ultimately causing the erasure of divinely ordered humanity.

Introduction Part One: Preparation 1. The Best Of The Living Things 2. Domination 3. Three Incomplete Prefigurations 4. Metaphorical Dominations 5. The New Lord Of Creation 6. Attempts And Temptations Part Two: Deployment 7. The Formation Of The Modern Project 8. The Beginnings Of The Realization 9. The Master Is There 10. Moral Dominion 11. The Duty To Reign 12. The Iron Rod 13. The New Meaning Of Humanism 14. The Sole Lord Part Three: Failure 15. Kingdom or Waste Land? 16. Man, Humiliated 17. The Subjugated Subject 18. Man Remade 19. Man Surpassed and ... Replaced 20. Checkmate? 21. Lights Out Conclusion

"Amid the continuing stream of books about modernity, Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man stands alone. His treatment of the modern age is at once complex and unified, rooted in stunning erudition and an ability to construct a compelling narrative. Completing a trilogy that includes previous books on antiquity and the middle ages, Brague provides an account of the sources—textual, political, economic, and ecclesial—of our current world for which there is no substitute and no current competitor." —Thomas S. Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture, Baylor University "No one ranges over the history of ideas like Rémi Brague. The Kingdom of Man is not just an index of Brague's astonishing learning but a pulsing inquiry into the dreams of our modern imagination. Those dreams, contends Brague, re-worked reality itself and proposed a human innocence that is proving far from benign." —Graham James McAleer, Loyola University Maryland

For a long time, modernity was not merely lived, but also conceived, as a project. Descartes wanted to entitle the Discourse on Method: “The project of a universal science that can raise our nature to its highest degree of perfection.” Nietzsche characterized his time as “the age of attempts.” Two centuries earlier, in one of his first works (1697), Daniel Defoe indicated that the fashion was all for projects, to the extent that one could call the time “the age of projects.” Above all he had in mind the speculations of transatlantic commerce, such as the one that had just ruined him, since commerce was “in its principle, all project, machination and invention.” In 1726, Jonathan Swift satirized the members of the Royal Society under the features of the distracted passengers of the flying island of Lagado, whom he ridiculed with the name of projectors, in that way also performing a self-critique because he confessed to having been “a sort of projector in his youth.” The embodiment of this type, after the Spanish arbitristas of the seventeenth century, was the Abbé de St. Pierre and his Project for rendering peace perpetual in Europe. However, in itself the word projector had nothing pejorative or ironic. One could claim it for oneself, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to a more serious anthropology, man is a being who is not merely unrealized, but “projected.” Thus Fichte: “All the animals are fully developed and complete, man is but a sketch and a project.” Heidegger defined the life of Dasein as a “project,” then deepened the idea by making the project no longer a human initiative, but a fundamental trait of Being. Sartre took from it the definition of man, who “is nothing other than his project”; and contemporary ethicists conceive of the history of the individual as a “life-project.” The word “project” is not without its teachings. Its Latin form does not correspond to a word in the Roman lexicon. The Romans knew the adjective projectus, with the meaning of “preeminent,” often with a pejorative nuance, “excessive.” But the substantive is not found in Antiquity. A pro-ject is above all what its etymology declares: a –ject (from jacere, to throw or toss), a movement in which the thing in motion (the “projectile”) loses contact with what set it in motion and pursues its trajectory. Ancient physics did not find a place for the phenomenon in its explanatory schemes, except by means of very implausible theories. Oddly enough, Modern Times, the age of pro-jects, are also the time when, in physics, one began to make –ject as such conceivable. Napoleon, the very type of modern man, i.e., “Faustian,” sensed this, he who compared himself to “a bit of stone thrown into space.” Three ideas fundamental to modernity can be derived from this master-image of –ject. A project implies 1) vis-à-vis the past, the idea of a new beginning which causes the forgetting of everything that preceded; 2) vis-à-vis the present, the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject; and 3) for the future, the idea of a supportive milieu that prolongs the action and assures its successful completion (Progress). The modern project bears two faces turned in opposite directions, one towards below, to what is inferior to man, the other above, to what is superior to him.