Lost Modernities - Subtext

Subtext

Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. S.C.G. Middlemore, Trans. 10^th ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

Burckhardt is one of the seminal historians of European modernity. While he wrote a number of highly regarded works in the mid-19^th century, Renaissance has survived best. Briefly, Burckhardt worked in Zurich when the positivist historians noted above were in the ascendant in the academic world. His work explicitly rejected their deterministic approaches, arguing that the writing of history was more art than science, closer to poetry than physics, and should be readily intelligible to people without advanced degrees (attempt to read Hegel for a full appreciation of the benefits of this approach). More specifically, Burckhardt argued that in renaissance Italy antiquity explicitly melted before an onslaught of modern ideas, created by a hybridization of classical Greek thought, a return to nature, and Italian kulture. It can serve as a baseline for thinking of a clear demarcation between antiquity and a “modern” world, obviously originating in Europe.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man.

Fukuyama argues that ultimately the ideal or mentally constructed world will come to rule over the physical one, and that as a result we are all destined to live in capitalist, liberal democracies. The most recent model of what is sometimes referred to as the neo-Hegelian school, Fukuyama’s historical end lies in the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that he was working for the US State Department at the time. Woodside attacks Fukuyama more effectively than most, in that he posits the existence of institutions often seen as unique to capitalism and democracy existing comfortably in pre-capitalist monarchies. Obviously, if political liberalism is not necessary for meritocratic institutions to function, then the exclusive tone of much 20^th century political discourse needs to be reexamined with this different perspective in mind.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

Giddens argues that we live in a “modern world” which emerged in mid 17^th century Europe, and subsequently spread around the world. While the possibility of a post-modern existence continues to exist, thoroughly modern problems continue to vex current societies. Giddens sees modernity as offering unprecedented material advantages to consumers, but also the possibility of totalitarian government and environmental destruction, making it at best a mixed blessing. With regard to Woodside, we have a narrative positing modernity as an exclusively European creation imposed upon the rest of the world. Again, this is precisely the sort of Eurocentric narrative Woodside attempts to problematize.

Hegel, Georg W. F. The Philosophy of History.

Hegel was the founder of the positivist school of historical thought. He argued that history progresses inevitably through a series of stages, guided by natural law, until finally producing the society of 19^th century Prussia. Hegel argued that the mechanism for progress was the creation in any given social order of a thesis and an antithesis, which combined to form a new order or synthesis. The progression was natural and inevitable, a matter of science rather than contingency. The weakness of the approach is suggested by the fact that Hegel saw society ending with his own, and is largely undermined by Woodside’s observation that the governmental institutions of 19^th century Europe had been achieved, and were soon to be rejected, in Asia.

Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2^nd ed. Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978).

Marx was a positivist author who expounded a novel approach to history. Building on Hegel, he proposed that history moved through distinct and discernable phases, leading to inevitable revolutions as the contradictions of a given historical phase became insupportable. Marx diverged from Hegel in that he believed that capitalism merely the most recent stage in the inevitable historical progression toward communism, a society in which social class was the defining characteristic of personal identity. According to Marx, once the working class had gained ascendancy over those who sought to oppress them, the state structure which served as nothing more than an instrument of class oppression would no longer be necessary, and would cease to exist. Marx holds an interesting place in the narrative we are constructing, in that all of the Asian states Woodside addresses embraced his philosophy prior to turning toward science and capitalism, yet Woodside barely addresses this phase in his narrative of their political evolution.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Pomeranz argues that as late as 1750, there was little significant difference between rapidly industrializing Britain (or did Britain require the resources of all Europe to fuel its economic transformation?) and the Yangtze delta in China. Explicitly attacking existing efforts at writing exclusively Eurocentric or world-historical narratives, Pomeranz attempts a direct comparison between the two regions. He explains the relative success of Britain/Europe as a product of British access to vast amounts coal, which the Yangtze delta did not. Or put differently, that the difference between modernity and antiquity rests in the use of high-concentration energy sources in the form of fossil fuels. Pomeranz then offers us yet another competing perspective on what constitutes modernity.

Shirk, Susan L. China: Fragile Superpower. (Oxford University Press: New York, 2007).

Shirk is included here because she offers a very different vision of the driving forces behind the modern Chinese state. Where Woodside sees the triumph of Western science and business practices, Shirk argues that the Chinese state in the 21^st century has become a prisoner of nationalist political extremists who must be appeased because they cannot be suppressed. Stable domestically, but vulnerable to events on an international stage the domestic polity has not been prepared to view with adequate perspective. Her argument, that the Chinese government has become trapped by the collapse of communist ideology as a motive force and the political cocoon created by pervasive press censorship is not entirely at odds with Woodside, but places the motive forces in a very different place.

Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Trans. 4^th ed. (Oxford Univertisy Press: New York, 1981).

Weber (pronounced “Vayber”) was a German sociologist whose work was inspired by a visit to the United States around the turn of the century. His most pertinent writings for our purposes address the tension between the inherent leveling effect of a democratic society, and the need to maintain an increasingly specialized bureaucracy of highly sophisticated professionals, mandarins if you will, necessary to operate the increasingly intricate machinery of the state. Weber argues that the creation of specialists produces imperatives antithetical to democracy, creating inefficiencies and agendas which better serve the needs of state institutions than the general public. Weber is generally considered to be a groundbreaking thinker in the Western tradition, but as Woodside observes, his work was anticipated by Chinese authors writing centuries before him.

Lost Modernities - Text

Text

In Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History, Alexander Woodside examines the rise of meritocratic bureaucracies in China, Korea, and Vietnam starting in the 900’sCE. Woodside’s purpose is not merely to illustrate the evolving mechanics of these bureaucracies in Asia, but to challenge prevailing Eurocentric narratives of how to conceive modernity. Modernities begins with the Chinese effort to improve its government by transitioning from rule by a hereditary aristocracy to rule by a non-aristocratic bureaucracy selected through competitive examination. As the bureaucratic system spread into the neighboring state/regions of Vietnam and North Korea, Woodside argues that the creation of bureaucratic government created a new set of problems which had to be dealt with even as they solved others.

Amongst those challenges was the spread of the belief that problems such as poverty were created by, and therefore reflective of, the quality of government rather than a product of, say, weather. The belief that public organization could alleviate food shortages lead to a system of public welfare based on the stockpiling and systematic redistribution of rice in times of famine, but agricultural surpluses were inadequate to eliminate famine entirely. The misinterpretation meant a continuous, effort to return the government to a purer vision of the Confucian order , generally with mixed success.

While many were probably saved by this rudimentary public welfare system, it required a highly sophisticated bureaucratic structure to maintain it. Over time, the bureaucracy tended to see its tasks as goals in themselves rather than as functions of a higher authority. So the population was counted because the bureaucracy had a large staff for counting the population, not because the emperor needed to know how many people lived in a given province for tax purposes. The army of clerks and support staff necessary to execute such tasks could also generate their own priorities, as they remained in place for their entire careers but were supervised by bureaucrats transferred at regular intervals.

Further, Woodside argues that the sheer efficiency of the bureaucratic structure played havoc with the traditional loyalty system that had allowed the population to identify with their leaders in the aristocratic state. As these leaders were not elected by appointed on the basis of their performance on exams, the population had little emotional investment in the faceless men who collected their taxes. His contemporary analogy for this phenomenon is the European Union, an organization of appointed representatives barely understood and little regarded by their supposed constituencies.

In terms of the world-historical narrative addressed in the first section of this document, Woodside is implicitly challenging the positivist perspective, pointing out that all three societies rejected their meritocratic examination systems in the early years of the 20^th century when they proved unable to prevent Westernized states from battering their way into East Asia territories and economies.

Woodside goes on to argue that a desire for the structured sort of society Confucianism and the bureaucracies had given to Asian societies has been replaced in recent decades with an uncritical acceptance of science and rationality in the form of Western business philosophy. While provoking, as Vietnam and China remain ostensibly communist, it seems arguable that the transition is at best incomplete, and the pervasive retention of state monopolies in the Chinese economy suggests that Asian states might be creating rather different state and economic models than the ones they find in Western states.

The overall effect of Modernities is to simultaneously trace continuities and discontinuities in the political cultures of the Asian states which adopted bureaucracies, and to challenge the centrality of Europe in world historical narratives addressing the development and utility of governing institutions.

Would you like to see some other opinions?

Other reviews which may prove interesting:

Katrina Gulliver (Cambridge University), Journal of World History, Dec 2007, Vol. 18 Issue 4, p526-528, 3p.

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jwh/18.4/br_2.html

Dingxin Zhao (University of Chicago), American Journal of Sociology, Jul 2007, Vol. 113 Issue 1, p268-270, 3p.

http://www.library.ohiou.edu:2145/doi/abs/10.1086/520893

Martina Deuchler, (University of London), American Historical Review, Feb 2007, Vol. 112 Issue 1, p164-165, 2p.

http://www.library.ohiou.edu:2145/doi/abs/10.1086/ahr.112.1.164

Wang Gungwu, (East Asian Institute, Singapore), Pacific Review, Winter 2006, Vol. 79 Issue 4, p657-658, 2p.

http://www.library.ohiou.edu:2063/olj/sites/pa.html

Lost Modernities - Context

Context

One of the long-running debates amongst historians, political scientists, and sociologists has been the argument over what constitutes modernity. For the purpose of addressing the arguments found in Alexander Woodside’s Lost Modernities, we will look at two broadly defined groups of thinkers who have approached this question in rather different ways.

Firstly, we will consider the larger group of historians who seek modernity in a certain set of social or political relationships which separate modernity from some earlier period. Authors such as Jacob Burckhardt, Anthony Giddens, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Max Weber have each posited different starting points, different institutional metrics of, and different dangers for, modernity which will be explored at greater length below. However, their approaches have several things in common. The key institutions that denote the transition from antiquity to modernity are all European in their origins, and all appear in Europe sometime after the turn of the 16^th century, from whence they make their way out to the rest of the world.

The second group of thinkers we will address are positivist historians such as Fredrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and more recently, Francis Fukiyama. What positivists have in common is a belief that history has an end, a point toward which social and political institutions are developing and at which, having achieved the pinnacle of socio-political development, they will crystallize into the best of all possible worlds. Again, these authors have very different conceptions of what the endpoint of historical evolution will be, but the notion of a rational progression to history leading to an ultimate (inevitable?) society sets them apart.

Despite the fact that most of these authors trained in Western societies, studied Western societies, and produced work relating primarily to Western societies, their thinking has informed dominant narratives in both Asian and World history to a curious degree. In some cases this is patently absurd- contact between educated European elites and East Asia during much of the 19^th century was only marginally greater than that between Europe and the surface of the moon. Authors such as Marx, who did occasionally reference China, did so informed more by rumor and assumption than by accurate scholarship, let alone first-hand experience.

Later authors have done a better job of attempting to include Asia in their theories of modernity, but have tended to fit Asia into those theories as an afterthought rather than beginning there and moving outward. In part, this is probably due to the fact that history has traditionally been taught with strict territorial limitations (American history, German history, Korean history, etc.) that makes addressing international movements across large spans of time more difficult.

Asian thinkers have produced a fair amount of work constructing their own historical narratives, but a number of factors have limited its influence on the dominant narrative. The 19^th and early 20^th centuries were politically unsettled across East Asia, dominated by colonialism and domestic unrest. To the extent that stability did return after World War II, historical narratives were filtered through communist ideology and tended to obscure as much as they explained. Only after the fade of communism has an energetic effort at new world-historic narratives really been attempted, and Woodside makes a helpful contribution to the debate.