Living at the end of a great historical cycle, we take for granted that the way things are currently organized, is the way they have always been organized. Ours is the natural order of things. One reason we think this is that we can only really know our age. We can read about prior epochs, but we cannot truly know what it was like to be alive in those times. It will always feel alien to us. The other reason is that a product of our epoch is the linear theory of history. All of the events of the past led to this point in time.
The linear thinking of our age is why a guy like Francis Fukuyama could write a book titled The End of History and not be laughed out of the room. The truth is, the West has gone through a number of cycles, that had a beginning, middle and end. The feudal period is the easiest example. It was born out of the ruins of Rome, flourished through the middle ages and then collapsed in the Enlightenment. The period between the scientific revolution and the French Revolution, was the great transition from old epoch to the new.
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