[oblio]

> It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm.

Nobody can know the future, but some things are clear:

1. We are a lot more interconnected than in the past (every human civilization that wants to interact with others can do so... or was even forced do it, not very long ago).

2. We are a lot more self-aware than in the past, en masse.

3. We are a lot more structured in our large scale scientific approaches, and we have a lot more science centers working in parallel, widely distributed around the world.

Assuming peaceful conditions and no Venus-style global warming, things will stay hectic for the foreseeable future.

[ch4s3]

I'm not sure how you would measure something like self-awareness.

I don't think interconnectedness presages rapid social change. We could just as easily settle into a sort of long quiet period where people are more or less accustomed to the way society is organized and institutions have been reformed to adapt to present day issues. After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map. It isn't impossible to imagine a situation where WWI didn't happen and the Belle Époque stretched for a long period of time.

[oblio]

> After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map.

That's one way to look at that period with rose tinted glasses :-)

There's a reason Marx & co wrote things during that time.

WW1 was just a more violent outburst of many frustrations, national, social, etc.

[ch4s3]

I’m not looking at it with any judgment positive or negative. I’m just saying it is imaginable that the institutions of the period could have persisted had WWI not happened.

Marx wasn’t writing during the late 19th century. The Revolutions of 1848 were the backdrop of their work.