The Belief in Modern Scientific Rationalism in Ian McEwan's "Saturday"

British novelist Ian McEwan's novel Saturday (2005) presents a perspective consistent with the historical outlook presented in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History? (1989) and Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations? (1993), two ground-shaking articles in the academic circles centrally asserting the victory of the Western liberal democracy over the other alternative ideologies such as fascism, nationalism, socialism and religion claiming universally valid objectivity. In this context, the Eastward spread of the Western values after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism which resulted in the absence of any political system having the potential to be an alternative to the liberal democracy is a subject matter forming the background of the analysis presented in this article; however, this article also presents a theoretical framework centred around the most essential issues discussed in the debates on modernity and post-modernity in the light of a contemporary novel including literary reflections of social and political developments. In this respect, the primary objective of this article is to examine the conflict between the belief in modern scientific rationalism, which claims that truth possesses universal objectivity and whose roots extend back to the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries, and post-modern subjectivism, which emerged in the second half of the 20th century, whose roots go back to scientific findings in the field of physics in the first half of the 20th century from the perspective employed by McEwan in his Saturday (2005).