A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's History of Modern Europe (1789–1792)

The chronological boundaries of the collective monograph cover a long historical period, which extends to the era of European Modernism and continues to the modern (current) history of European Postmodernism. The key thesis of the team of authors of the monograph is the idea of systemic belonging of Ukraine to European civilization as its component, which interacts with other parts of the system. The first chapter of the peer-reviewed collective monograph "European receptions of Ukraine in the XIX century" shows the reflection of the Ukrainian problem in the German-language literature of the first half of the XIX century, taking into account new archival document, the development of Ukraine’s relations with other Slavic peoples is traced, and the peculiarities of Ukrainian-Bulgarian relations are considered as a separate case study. An interesting paragraph of the collective monograph devoted to cultural, educational and scientific cooperation of Dnieper Ukraine with European countries. This information illustrates well how the Industrial Revolution radically changed the face of the planet, brought new scientific experience that gave room for the development of the capitalist system, and with them, the Industrial Revolution brought social problems, environmental disasters that still cannot be solved. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) formulated the "iron law of wages", according to which workers can receive only a living wage. The second chapter of the collective monograph "The Ukrainian Question and Ukraine in the European History of the Twentieth Century" presents an integrated narrative of Ukrainian national history in the light of the European history of the two world wars and their consequences. The First World War, or the Great War, undoubtedly became a turning point in European history and, accordingly, in the national histories of European countries. The historical experience of the Ukrainian national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people for the right to European development is covered in the paragraph of the collective monograph "Ukrainian Diplomatic Service 1917-1924". The vicissitudes of Stalin's industrialization and collectivization and their impact on the Ukrainian SSR's relations with European states in the 1920s and 1930s are highlighted in terms of continuity of ties with Europe. A separate regional example of the situation is covered on the example of the history of Transcarpathia on the eve of World War II. The third chapter of the collective monograph "Independent Ukraine in the European integration space" highlights the features of Ukraine's current positioning in Europe. After the collapse of the USSR, ideological obstacles to the development of globalization were overcome. The American political scientist F.Fukuyama in his work "The End of History" concluded the final victory of liberal ideology. This section of the peer-reviewed collective monograph also highlights the position of the international community on the Crimean referendum in 2014, analyzes the policy of Western European countries on the Ukrainian-Russian armed conflict on the example of the policy of Germany, France and Austria. The research result is a separate model of reality, which is reproduced with the help of a certain perception and awareness of the historian. In this sense, the author's team of the monograph has achieved the goal of creating a meaningful narrative that highlights the place of Ukraine at different stages of modern and postmodern European history. From the point of view of the general perception of the narrative offered to the reader, the authors of the collective monograph managed to harmonize individual stylistic features in a conceptually unified text, the meanings of which will be interesting to both professional historians and students and the general readership.

Any discussion of the historiography of European integration needs to address its integration within the larger discipline of (Modern) European history since the French Revolution, especially its contemporary history since World War II, its linkages with other disciplines with a focus on the present-day European Union (EU), and the benefits and pitfalls of cross-disciplinarity. This is understood here in a general sense as the attempt to overcome disciplinary boundaries to better understand the complexities of European integration and EU politics. Arguably, this dimension of research on integration history is especially crucial as this historical sub-field on the whole has been quite isolated within Modern European history and European Studies. With the exception of a few monographs like Alan S. Milward’s (1992) revisionist account, most works on European integration history including the edited books published by the Liaison Committee and articles in the specialized Journal of European Integration History (JEIH) are seldom referenced in general histories of twentieth century or post-war Europe or, for that matter, by social scientists working on the EU. As we will see below, this sorry state of affairs to some extent reflects the weaknesses of these genres and research traditions. To an equally large extent, however, it is due to the fact that for a long time, much research on the history of European integration, especially the federalist hurrah historiography and the conventional diplomatic history of interstate negotiations, has been conceptually underdeveloped.KeywordsEuropean UnionPolitical ScienceEuropean IntegrationCommon Agricultural PolicyEuropean Economic CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Notes on Contributors

Surveying European Women's History since the Millenium:A Comparative Review Karen Offen (bio) Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga. Gendering European History, 1780–1920. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000. 230 pp. ISBN 0-7185-0131-4 (cl); 0-7815-0132-2 (pb). Lynn Abrams . The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789–1918. London: Longman, an imprint of Pearson Education, 2002. x + 382 pp. ISBN 0-582-41410-5 (pb). Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, eds. The European Women's History Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 380 pp. ISBN 0-415-22081-5 (cl); 0-415-22082-3 (pb). Gisela Bock . Women in European History. Translated by Allison Brown. The Making of Europe Series. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. x + 304 pp. ISBN 0-631-23191-9 (cl); 0-631-19145-3 (pb). [End Page 154] Mary S. Hartman . The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. ISBN 0-521-82972-0 (cl); 0-521-53669-3 (pb). Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson. Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Gender and History. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. viii + 208 pp. ISBN 0-333-67605-X (cl); 0-333-67606-8 (pb). Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Søland, and Christina Benninghaus, eds. Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750–1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. x + 312 pp. ISBN 0-253-34449-2 (cl); 0-253-21710-5 (pb). Deborah Simonton , ed. The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700. London: Routledge, 2006. xvii + 397 pp. ISBN 0-415-30103-3 (cl); 0-415-43813-6 (pb). Ann Taylor Allen . Women in Twentieth-Century Europe. Gender and History. New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ix + 208 pp. ISBN 1-403-94192-0 (cl); 1-403-94193-9 (pb). Attempts to survey modern European women's history have come a long way since the 1970s. From Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (1977; 1987; 1997), to the remarkable five volume History of Women in the West, edited and overseen by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (English edition, 1992–94), via Patricia Branca's brief, role-centered Women in Europe since 1750 (1978), Priscilla Robertson's eccentric and entertaining An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1984), and Marilyn J. Boxer's and Jean H. Quataert's innovative thematic approach in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (1987; 2000), we can now draw on a vastly broader scope of knowledge about women of every rank, religion, and situation (urban or rural).1 These edited essay collections, while chronologically comprehensive, never pretended to be synthetic or truly comparative as did Bonnie G. Smith's 560 page synthesis Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989).2 Undoubtedly the most ambitious synthetic effort to date is A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser (1988; 2000).3 There is no doubt that women's history is infinitely richer, vastly more informed, nuanced, complex and comprehensive, reflecting the diversity of the women being studied as well as the mass of findings. But have we arrived at a truly comprehensive, comparative history of European women? We now know enough to launch studies that explore similarities and differences, along with change over time and space. Yet comparative work that bridges more than two countries remains at an early stage. The expertise of most Anglophone scholars, largely national and monolingual (or, at best, bilingual) limits their capacity to work in the primary sources of more than a few prominent European countries, a handicap that becomes increasingly apparent as women's history scholarship in Hungarian, Russian, various Slavic languages, and Greek advances. Reliance on secondary works, especially in English or French, becomes increasingly necessary and increasingly problematic. Scholars based in Europe, notably Anne Cova, now spearhead efforts to encourage comparative analysis among other European-based women's historians. With few exceptions, however, these [End Page 155] colleagues remain bounded, even more than we Anglophones, by the...

The best general discussion of political and economic developments, diplomacy and wars, literature and the arts is H. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1830-80 (Longman, 1966) and J. Roberts, Europe, 1880-1945 (Longman, 1967). D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon (Longman, 1957; Penguin, 1970) still provides a useful discussion of the interplay between conditions, events, personalities and ideas over the period, while T. W. Riker, A History of Modern Europe (N.Y., Knopf, 1949) presents the evolution of institutions. Both books have useful bibliographies. Equally sound and valuable in its assessment of European civilization is the work of G. Bruun in The European Inheritance, vol. 3, ed. E. Barker and others (Oxf., 1954); here the appended documentary extracts provide a guide into contemporary materials. A discussion of the significance of economic factors is E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (Weidenfeld, 1962). A correlation of political and economic factors in post-1870 European history is given in T. K. Derry and T. L. Jarman, The European World, 1870-1945 (Bell, cl and schl edn, 1951). Also valuable for the study of the post-1870 period is M. Bruce, The Shaping of the Modern World, 1870-1939, vol. 1, 1870-1914 (Hutchinson, 1958). Stimulating for its interpretation of political and diplomatic aspects of the period is J. McManners, Lectures on European History, 1789-1914 (Blackwell, 1966) and L. B. Namier, Vanished Supremacies, 1812-1918 (Penguin). A more detailed account, with additional information on the interaction of foreign policies, is offered in the important American series, the Rise of Modern Europe, ed. W. L. Langer (Harper, cl and pb), of which the following volumes are relevant: F. B. Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1815-30 (1953); R. C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852-71 (1951); and C. T. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1901 (1941). Of considerable value on every aspect of nineteenth-century European history are the chapters in the New Cambridge 901 Modern History, vol. 9, War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793-1830 (1965), vol. 10, The Zenith of European Power, 1830-70 (1960), vol. 11, Material Progress and World-wide Problems, 1870-1901 (1962) and vol. 12, The Shifting Balance of World Forces, 1898-1945 (2nd edn 1968). Reference to documentary evidence for the study of the history of particular countries is given in the section on national histories. For reference to historical atlases, R. Muir, Historical Atlas, Medieval and Modern (G. Philip, 11th edn 1969) is recommended, together with W. E Brown and A. W. Coysh, The Map Approach to Modern History, 1789-1939 (U. Tutorial P., 3rd edn pb 1954).

The sociological theory of secularization has long served as the dominant explanation for what has happened to religion in modern European history, but the theory has fallen out of favor in recent decades. New theories and models have emerged, many of them focusing on religious change in modern European history and on what makes religion in Europe exceptional when compared with the United States and the global South. In this article, I provide an overview of the debate over secularization in Europe, surveying its nineteenth-century origins, the emergence of the theory of secularization in the 1960s, and the alternative theories and models arising from a variety of disciplines since the 1980s. I argue that the best understanding of modern European religious history is one that takes seriously both religious decline and religious change. I conclude with brief reflections on the future of secularization studies and particularly on the two themes that hold the most promise for enhancing the secularization debate: gender and immigration.

Journal Article Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth Century: Weber's Protestant Capitalist Get access Margaret C. Jacob, Margaret C. Jacob Margaret C. Jacob is a professor of history at UCLA and is working on science, religion, and the cultural foundations of early industrialization. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen. Matthew Kadane has studied early modern British and European history at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he worked with Margaret Jacob, and under the direction of Tim Harris at Brown University, where he is finishing his doctoral dissertation, “The Watchful Clothier: The Diary of Joseph Ryder, 1695–1768.” He is currently editing a forthcoming edition of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Matthew Kadane Matthew Kadane Margaret C. Jacob is a professor of history at UCLA and is working on science, religion, and the cultural foundations of early industrialization. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen. Matthew Kadane has studied early modern British and European history at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he worked with Margaret Jacob, and under the direction of Tim Harris at Brown University, where he is finishing his doctoral dissertation, “The Watchful Clothier: The Diary of Joseph Ryder, 1695–1768.” He is currently editing a forthcoming edition of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 1, February 2003, Pages 20–49, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.1.20 Published: 01 February 2003

Periodisation and modernity: an introduction

This essay offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, the author discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. He argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe—and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the essay also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.

I feel fortunate to be able to discuss the topics presented in these articles. Their temporal focus on the 17th century is fortunate as well. European history should make much greater use of the research on 17th-century Muscovy than it does now. A recent textbook on European history in the early modern period, defined as beginning around 1450 and ending with the French Revolution, demonstrates this. Without much explanation, the author divides the long period she treats into two blocks, one of which comprises the 17th and 18th centuries. The implicit rationale for this choice is the rise of the modern sciences. For all its merits, this synopsis of early modern European history treats Muscovite or Russian history only briefly and not always adequately. (1) This is a pity, because a closer look at Muscovite history would show the reader a different 17th century, one little affected by the sciences but that offers many points of reference for a comprehensive study of early modern European history. The articles presented here deal with a range of topics: economic expansion in a premodern framework; the logic of the transfer of military technology; the everyday experience of a religious and secular culture that was divided along lines of rank and status; and royalty, and modes of identifying the ruler as well as oneself, at a specific stage in the development of writing. The authors include questions about economic agency and material culture, thereby building a bridge to the better Soviet historiography on Muscovy, which still remains to be integrated into present-day scholarship. But these works can also help integrate Muscovite history into the mainstream of the historiography on the early modern period, notably the study of state building. Analyzing the early modern concept of Policey and its significance for Russia, I would like to present one of the various possible ways of doing this. My view is, of course, a limited one: I am mainly, though not exclusively, referring to trends in the German research on the period, and hence also to works dealing with the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire. To begin, a few words about how these articles extend and modify central themes of the existing research on Muscovy. Isolde Thyret studies a large monastery's successful strategies of land acquisition in an age when monastic landownership was subjected to legal restrictions. Her protagonists act as aggressive entrepreneurs within a traditional system of exchange. The behavior of these self-confident clerics is somewhat reminiscent of the entrepreneurship of the 17th-century Stroganov family: while expanding into Siberia, they used means to sponsor icon painting in a distinctive style. (2) Thyret builds on the theme of self-confident clerical lordship (Herrschaft) recently discussed by Georg Michels, (3) but she adds important new aspects. The abbots showed a remarkable instinct for economic expansion at the expense of other church institutions. Stressing that the abbots pursued not only economic but also spiritual aims, the author elaborates on the topic of piety and expansion (in the sense of strategically acquiring the means to enhance one's economic potential) and shows that over all, Orthodoxy could motivate expansion as effectively as Calvinism could. Like any stimulating case study, this one leaves the reader with questions about possibilities for generalizing the results: if successful entrepreneurship was typical of large monasteries, what was it that made the monks of another famous large monastery, Solovki, so discontented that they became fervent supporters of religious dissent? Donald Ostrowski deals with the importation of new arms technology into Muscovy. For earlier historians of Eastern Europe, it was important to discuss from whom their countries borrowed military technology, since this was seen as an important indicator of membership in wider cultural networks. …

The second chapter (‘An Unfinished History’) describes the construction of a canon of ‘European historians’ in the eighteenth century, as well as an enlightened narrative of European history. The chapter, moreover, will demonstrate how this historical narrative and the notion of ‘modern Europe’ was adapted by the French revolutionary Nicolas Bonneville in 1789 for revolutionary purposes, showing the political malleability and politicization of enlightened historiography in the revolutionary decade. The chapter will point to the similarities between the interpretation of European history by revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike, for instance related to the ideas of European freedom, pluralism, or moral and spiritual regeneration.

ANCIENT: Edessa ‘the Blessed City’. By J. B. Segal ANCIENT: Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of st. Augustine. By R. A. Markus ANCIENT: Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps. By George Galavaris MEDIEVAL: Life in Anglo‐Saxon England. By R. I. Page MEDIEVAL: The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. By A. P. Vlasto MEDIEVAL: It is a pleasure to welcome a new edition of Cecily Clark's edition of the Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154 MEDIEVAL: The Age of Chivalry. Manners and Morals 1000–1450. By C. T. Wood MEDIEVAL: The Knight and Chivalry. By Richard Barber MEDIEVAL: Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli Sociorum s. Francisci. The Writings of leo, Rufino and Angelo Companions of st. Francis. Edited and translated by Rosalind B. Brooke MEDIEVAL: Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. By Thomas F. Glick MEDIEVAL: English Historical Documents: vol. iv, 1327–1485. Edited by A. R. Myers MEDIEVAL: Bernardo Giustiniani. A Venetian of the Quattrocento. By Patricia H. Labalme MEDIEVAL: The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. By Roberto Weiss MEDIEVAL: The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580. By D. S. Chambers MEDIEVAL: The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance. By Robert S. Lopez MEDIEVAL: Geoffrey Trease's the Condottieri EARLY MODERN: The Foundations of the Modern World 1300–1775. By L. Gottschalk, L. C. Mackinney and E. H. Pritchard EARLY MODERN: Monastic Iconography in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. By Joan Evans EARLY MODERN: Tudor Royal Proclamations. Edited by Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin EARLY MODERN: Theatre of the World. By Frances A. Yates EARLY MODERN: La Plume, la Faucille et le Marteau: Institutions et Societe en France du Moyen age a la Revolution. By Roland Mousnier EARLY MODERN: The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640. By Davis Bitton EARLY MODERN: Les Oeconomies Royales de Sully, Volume 1, 1572–1594. Edited by David Buisseret and Bernard Barbiche EARLY MODERN: Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century. By Alan Everitt EARLY MODERN: Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy. Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth‐Century France. By Brian C. Armstrong EARLY MODERN: God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. By Christopher Hill EARLY MODERN: Donald Veall takes a good subject in the Popular Movement for law Reform, 1640–1660 EARLY MODERN: Michael Landon also begins his the triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678–1689 EARLY MODERN: Robert Harley, Puritan Politician. By Angus McInnes EARLY MODERN: New Cambridge Modern History Volume vi: The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1715/25. Edited by J. S. Bromley EARLY MODERN: The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited with an Introduction by W. E. Minchinton EARLY MODERN: Britain After the Glorious Revolution 1689–1715. By Geoffrey Holmes and others THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States 1648–1789. By E. N. Williams THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Anglo‐American Political Relations, 1675–1775. Edited by Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Muscovite and Mandarin. Russia's Trade with China and its Setting, 1727–1805. By C. M. Foust THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Philosopher king. the humanist pope benedict xiv. By Renée Haynes THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The British Empire Before the American Revolution. vol. xv. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the History of the British Empire, 1748–1776. By Lawrence Henry Gipson THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: In his study of Shipping and the American war 1775–83 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Parkers at Saltram, 1769–89. Everyday life in an Eighteenth‐Century House. By Ronald Fletcher THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The French Revolution. By François Furot and Denis Richot THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Biography is not a medium much used by present teachers of modern European history and Madame Roland and the age of Revolution by Gita May THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Napoleon and Paris. By Maurice Guerrini. Translated by Margery Weiner THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Power in the Industrial Revolution. By Richard L. Hills THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: The Textile Industry. By W. English THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Systèmes Agraires et Progrès Agricole: l'Assolement Triennal en Russie aux xviii e ‐xix e Siecles. By M. Confino THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The First Industrial Nation. An Economic History of Britain 1700–1914. By Peter Mathias THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy 1801–1825. By Patricia K. Grimsted THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Bureaucracy and Church Reform. the Organizational Response of the Church of England to Social Change 1800–1965. By Kenneth A. Thompson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau. By Michael D. Biddiss THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Marx Before Marxism. By David McLellan THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Baines's Account of the Woollen Manufacture of England. With a new Introduction by K. G. Ponting THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Victorian Crisis of Faith: Six Lectures. Edited by Anthony Symondson THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Popular Movements, C. 1830–1850. Edited by J. T. Ward THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Pauper Press. A Study of Working‐Class Radicalism of the 1830s. By Patricia Hollis THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The war of the Unstamped. The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836. By J. H. Wiener THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Free Trade: Theory and Practice from Adam Smith to Keynes. By N. McCord THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: The Dietary Surveys of Dr. Edward Smith. By T. C. Barker, D. J. 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By Walter Rodney AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600–1720. By Kwame Yeboa Daaku AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870. By John Peterson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: West African Countries and Peoples. By James Africanus Horton with an introduction by George Shepperson AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Pre‐Colonial African Trade. Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa Before 1900. Edited by Richard Gray and David Birmingham AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960. vol. i: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870–1914. Edited by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: Reluctant Rebellion. The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal. By Shula Marks AFRICA, ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA: The Administration of Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths. By I. F. Nicolson AFRIC

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

The Vitruvian Middle Ages and Beyond Wim Verbaal What do we mean when we speak of the Vitruvian Middle Ages? Does the history of Vitruvius in the west not start around 1415 when three humanists dug up the manuscript of the de Architectura from the graveyard that was the monastic library of St. Gallen? Are the Middle Ages not primarily, then, the prehistory of Vitruvius? Are they not likewise the post-histoire of classical thought and knowledge in general? Even when a broad scholarly public knows that questions such as those above are no longer founded upon any reality, the beliefs behind them still remain decisive in shaping the image and presentation of European cultural history and identity. One need only open at random any book on reception history or the classical heritage and the table of contents will invariably show the same leap from classical or late antiquity to the era of the early humanists—the period from which every history of modern Europe takes its departure. Even those scholars who realize that our knowledge of antiquity is largely determined by medieval textual transmission are hardly ever willing to take the Middle Ages into consideration when discussing the afterlife of classical culture or literature.1 Nonetheless, the Vitruvian Middle Ages do exist. The history of Vitruvius does not start in 1416/1417. The manuscript Poggio and his colleagues discovered in the monastery of St. Gallen was not the sole survivor from the age of antiquity. And Vitruvius had not stayed buried for almost a thousand years in the obscurity of ignorance and monastic [End Page 215] indifference.2 Already in 1967, Carol Krinsky had published an article in which she enumerated seventy-eight Vitruvius manuscripts dating from the eight or ninth to the fifteenth century. More recently, the voluminous study by Stefan Schuler (1999) offers an even more thorough range of manuscripts reaching into the nineteenth century, as well as an exhaustive list of references to Vitruvius during the Middle Ages: quotations, rewritings, mentions, and listings in catalogues. Actually, Edgar de Bruyne had already done part of this work in 1946 in his still fundamental Études d’esthétique médiévale (1946.244–61). His work remains unmentioned, however, by both Krinsky and Schuler. Yet in spite of this accumulated knowledge about the transmission of Vitruvius during the period known as the Middle Ages; in spite of all the quotations and references to his work by writers of this period; and in spite of his appearances in medieval libraries all over Europe, the question still has to be asked whether one is allowed to speak of a Vitruvian Middle Ages. How must the tag “Vitruvian” be understood for the period between the fall of the Roman empire and the discovery of the manuscript in St. Gallen? How Vitruvian were the Middle Ages? In what sense can Vitruvius be considered a formative force in this period? Does he in any way add to the understanding of these thousand years of western European history? These are the questions I wish to tackle. I will not pay much attention to the contents of Vitruvius, nor to his transposition into the practical field of architecture. Mine is the contribution of a literary scholar, not of a historian of architecture. Nor is it necessary to redo the work of Stefan Schuler and trace the reception story of the Vitruvian treatise. Rather, Schuler’s exhaustive work forms the starting point for my contribution. I offer an attempt to understand the reception of Vitruvius during the Middle Ages. This is not an easy task, because in spite of the widespread knowledge of cultural differences from either a global or a historical point of view, the Middle Ages remain the blankest space on many people’s personal map of knowledge, both for the general public and for most specialists. They offer the widest opportunity for the most abstruse prejudices and romanticisms, and very few, especially among classicists and literary scholars, dare to venture into these so-called dark ages.3 [End Page 216] As a result, these two categories of scholars remain the victims of one of the greatest and most admirable deceptions in history: the...

The coincidence of the passing of the great European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman with the British decision on Brexit, the American election to president of Donald Trump, the rise of fake news, and the normalization of what would have previously been extremist political views raises profound ethical questions and political challenges for not only Bauman’s home discipline, sociology, but also the wider humanities and social sciences.Although Bauman was a sociologist, he was not a social scientist in the Durkheimian mold of those who want to prove causal relationships between variables in the name of establishing social facts. Against the antihumanism of so much contemporary sociology, which has been able to uncritically serve the interests of the state because it considers ethical norms distortions of its value-free methodological mission, Bauman wrote through what C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000) called the sociological imagination. In Thinking Sociologically (Bauman and May 2001), what I consider his greatest book, simply because it seems to capture the essence of his sociological project, Bauman insists upon the primacy of the social relation in the name of the critique of the kind of brutal individualism that has taken over capitalist society, certainly since the 1970s when the postwar consensus between business and labor broke down. Reading Bauman’s work, one cannot escape the conclusion that his project is deeply political, profoundly human, and unashamedly critical of what he called the individualized society (2000) and the related apolitical turn in the social sciences where facts trump values and ethics every time. It is for this reason that Bauman was more than simply a sociologist and should be instead understood in the broader sense of European intellectual history, where the writer or thinker was never confined to a particular professional discipline that defined what could and could not be said. Against this limiting profane professionalism, the intellectual had a kind of ethical, political, and historical mission to teach, humanize, and critically engage in the world in the name of the good or the utopian possibility rooted in the human ability to make the world better. It is also for this reason that Bauman’s passing represents a serious ethical and political challenge to sociology, and to the wider humanities and social sciences, because he was one of the final representatives of this tradition steeped in European history and the horror of utopian projects gone awry. These projects based in naive idealism, the belief in objective truths, and the fantasy of the transparency and self-identity of facts that are somehow beyond critique are perversions of our capacity to make our world better brought about by a kind of antihumanist hubris and failure to understand history and the tradition of those who came before.Bauman’s very human opposition to this strain of brutal utopianism based in violent othering and the uncritical belief in objectivity and fact emerged from his experience of the Holocaust, which he later theorized in his book on the subject, where he drew upon the works of Max Weber and the Frankfurt School writers. But there was always more than history at stake in his work. In the current situation, the importance of Bauman’s history and place within a tradition of thought sensitive to the madness of inhuman utopia is founded upon the extremism of the present. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) Bauman outlines this madness, and it is possible to identify comparable tendencies in the populist politics of the Brexiteers, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Trump, who have had enough of globalization and want to return to a fantastical version of the nation by violently attacking others who have somehow corrupted their perfect worlds. In this sense the profound irony of the current political situation, and the reason Bauman’s passing is so important, is that the violent extremism of the present is the result of the ending of his modern history and the rise of a posthistorical society that has come to regard ethics, values, and human politics as passé and unnecessary simply because these seem self-evident. This is precisely how the postideological, posthistorical society emerged from the period running from the 1970s onward. The story here was that there is no need for politics and endless debate about ethics and the good, because we have realized the good in a truly human, liberal society—there is nothing left now but the working out of technical detail. However, what Bauman understood because of his roots in European history is that the value of humanity is never self-evident and that we must take care of even the strangest other on the basis that neglect of the embodied truth of our shared humanity in a kind of profane objective culture will quickly strip us of our ability to think ethically, politically, and critically. When we lose sight of our shared humanity and no longer care for the weak, the miserable, and the homeless, because we have vanished into the kind of bureaucratic calculus Weber associated with instrumental rationality, our social, political, critical, and ethical intelligence is impoverished, diminished, and destroyed, and there are no limits to our potential inhumanity. The idiocy of facts, figures, and uncritical, unethical, objective truths, therefore, opens up a space for violent attacks on strange others who are so much waste, trash, and useless (post)human material to be processed away.If the normalization of violent extremism, which we struggle to name because we have neglected our social, political, critical, and ethical responsibility in the period since the rise of neoliberalism where numbers dominate, is the contemporary problem for those who believe in a shared human future, it is clear that Bauman saw this coming in the good times when violence was deferred by economic growth and the mirage of universal prosperity. Consider Bauman’s own working context. In the Britain of the late 1990s, Bauman remained skeptical of the Blairite advance on Thatcherism because he thought that the ideology of the Third Way was unsustainable. While the other great sociologist of the period, Anthony Giddens (1998), advanced the theory of Third Way politics and became a kind of spokesman for the Blairite project by arguing that his theory of structuration was realized in the policy idea of public-private partnership that meant it was possible to have both social protections and rampant individualism at the same time, Bauman recognized the problem of the violent disembedding of the social self produced by this move. Against Giddens (1993), who celebrated the transformation of intimacy and a situation where human relationships were provisional and rooted in the vicissitudes of fleeting desire, Bauman (2003) wrote of the horror of liquid love founded upon the empty objective form of asociality Georg Simmel criticized in the early twentieth century and the Frankfurt School would later associate with the consumer society. For Bauman, what was lost in the advance of Western capitalist freedom celebrated by Giddens was deep human connection, respect, and a determination to care for others when times are hard and it would be easier to walk away.This is, I think, how Bauman’s project focused on the transformation of solid into liquid modernity emerged from his earlier books, including Postmodern Ethics (1993). While these earlier books are often considered superior to Bauman’s later works, primarily because of their deep theoretical engagement with the destruction of social relations in postmodern society, it is possible to find the same ethical, humanist critique of the individualized society at the heart of this range of books exploring different aspects of the liquid society. Read from this perspective, the problem of the liquid society is not simply that it is fluid and difficult to understand but also that it is provisional, fleeting, lonely, loveless, stupid, uncritical, and unethical, simply because there are no durable social relations able to survive the good times or, more important, the bad times, when we need to support and care for one another. In the thoughtless, liquid society there are no long-term social relations founded upon understanding, intelligence, empathy, compassion, and trust because these take time to evolve; instead, there is a high-speed, short-termist, provisional, alienated mode of objective asociality that, on the one hand, seems to globalize freedom on the basis that it is easy to extend such thin interactions across all borders but, on the other hand, creates immense levels of anxiety, loneliness, fear, and mistrust and a desire for some kind of thick communal engagement. What Bauman understood most keenly, in my view, is what happens when this primal desire for thick engagement develops in the context of an anxious, disembedded asocial situation devoid of ethical, human intelligence long since sacrificed to the computational logic of market principles. The result is the kind of sadistic violent attacks against objective, dehumanized others carried out by the Nazis in the name of a utopian ideology organized around hygiene and a better, cleaner society. However, in much the same way that the Frankfurters moved from Nazism to the critique of the consumer society, Bauman extended his critique of the modernity of the Holocaust to the horror of the liquid society and its discontents in the present.In the 1990s the neoliberals sanctioned objective violence on the grounds of the truth of market principles, and today we see the same tendencies developing in the thinking of the most extreme of the Brexiteers, who want to abandon Bauman’s great humanitarian project Europe to the rubbish heap of history, and Trump, who wants to take America out of the world and into a utopia of isolationism. The problem in each case is the fate of the other who is dehumanized, objectified, cast out, and destroyed in the name of the emergence of the new that rises up on the far side of critical intelligence, any sense of ethics, or human understanding of our inherent fragility, weakness, or vulnerability. Although Bauman was never naive and understood the real violence of both the neoliberal European Union and processes of globalization, he also recognized the destructive power of cynicism, despair, and hopelessness. As a result, he held onto the utopian possibility of humanity, human sociability, human intelligence, and our capacity to behave ethically, because he knew what happens when we lose sight of our capacity to recognize the ultimate value of life. This is, I think, Bauman’s legacy to sociologists, those working within the humanities and social sciences, and the people he tried to reach through his books that were written to be read by everybody: we cannot abandon human value for objective facts and some transcendental vision of the truth because this opens up a posthuman abyss for colonization by violent, extremist politics that thrives upon the idiocy of the anxious and fearful who have forgotten how to think. After Bauman, we have to save and take care of our social, critical, ethical, and, most important, human intelligence in the name of opposition to the brutal materialism of facts; the need to critique the apolitical, antihumanist space that fact-based thinking opens up; and finally, the possibility of resistance to the violent extremism that knows no truth and that grows up through the cracks in this deserted landscape.