"Causality in human affairs is always bound up with seemingly countless contingent factors interacting with one another in an aleatory fashion. It takes some intellectual daring to speak of causes in this way, but particularly when the causal argument runs through something as complex and elusive as culture."

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2017/08/18/anatomy-of-an-economic-revolution/

"The Industrial Revolution resulted from a repudiation of the ancients—but not just the ancients. The “Great Enrichment” of the late 18th and 19th centuries was a fully “modern” rejection of the cultural inheritance of the Renaissance, to say nothing of the medieval synthesis."