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.