The article is an attempt to map modern sensibilities and their emergence in early modernity. In doing so, the focus is on the great writers and thinkers of Renaissance and Baroque Europe: François Villon, Niccolò Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and William Shakespeare, whose thoughts and works best reveal modern cultural categories and moral concepts we live by. Since literature often exposes politics both as an art of government and as a mechanics of power better than any sort of political theory or political science based analysis, we always benefit immensely from an interpretive framework within which we can interpret modern predicaments not as something uniquely novel, but, instead, as something that emerged along with the great works of philosophy and literature. Hence, this is another focus on European little stories and grand narratives as constituent parts of modern politics.

As we learn from our political history, we can withdraw from our ability to empathize with other individuals’ pain and suffering. At the same time, we can get back to this ability – yet this doesn’t say a thing about our capability to be equally sensitive and compassionate about all troubled walks of life, situations, nations, and individuals. We are able to reduce human beings to things or non-persons so that they awaken only when we ourselves or our fellow countrymen are hit by the same kind of calamity or aggression. This withdrawal-and-return mechanism only shows how vulnerable, fragile, unpredictable, and universally valid human dignity and life are. This article is an attempt to map this mechanism theoretically through the concepts of guilt, adiaphora, and austerity.