The Allure of the Modern posted by Richard Seymour

The word 'modern' appeared first in English toward the end of the sixteenth century. To begin with it meant little more than the present time, but it slowly came to carry a sense of novelty. 'Modern' meant something that had never existed before. The idea was conceived that the future would be different from the past. (John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern, 2003).

Korsch cites Bacon, from the Novum Organum: "'Recte enim veritas temporis filia dictitur non auctoritas.' On that authority of all authorities, time, he had based the superiority of the new bourgeois empirical science over the dogmatic science of the Middle Ages." (Korsch, Karl Marx, cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1927-1940).