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Summary for European History
- Cours
- European History
- Établissement
- Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
Summary of European history for the first year of business economics.
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Business Economics- Bachelor 1: European History summaryEuropean History lecture 1
1. Deconstructing European History
Deconstruct: critically interrogate a particular concept, historical event,
development, social phenomena etc.
Deconstructing Europe: Places and spaces of Europe
Europe as a continent: the symbolic geography of Europe vs the physical
geography of Europa.
As a civilization (western civilization)
As a project: Europe as an unique undertaking
As a memory
As an inheritance
As a responsibility to protect.
Deconstructing History: Why study History?
2. Why study History?
To escape the present, nostalgia, a longing for “what is forever lost” -> risk: “pastness
of the past” and overstating rupture/discontinuity.
To learn lessons from the past and to deal with moral dilemma. History helps us to
put the past into perspective. -> risk: biases in what counts as “the great men and
women of history”.
To identity structural laws, teleology (Marx/Fukuyama) -> risk: causality and
overdetermination.
Political or ideological purposes -> risk: conflation science/politics. Examples:
selection mechanism in higher education, nationalist projects, post-colonial
“reclaiming of the past”.
3. Reasons to study history
1) To understand change and how “the present” came to be
Understand continuity and change
Understand institutionalisation and revolution/transformation
“For every institution or value that disappears or is changed, another remains
the same”.
Turbulent times -> Turbulent means chaotic, disordered, characterized by
conflict -> war in country.
“Fake news” -> algorithmic media, Today but also in the past (= John Adams
(1735-1826), 2nd US president: “more new error propagated by the press in
the last ten years than hundred years before 1798”.
2) Put the present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” (obvious, or
natural) character
To acknowledge the power struggles that are basis of today’s institutions,
ways of life.
, To question the uniformity of European experience.
To “provincialize” Europe: to account for multiple meanings of “modernity”.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008): critique on historicism (= the idea “to understand
anything, it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development. As if
there is a singular, linear ( same across time and space) trajectory to modern
civilisation.
Of particular relevance for the 19th century -> “birth of modern Europe” A
tendency to mask the heterogeneity of “European” experience, A tendency to
attribute a singular meaning to “modernity” and a singular trajectory to modernity.
4. Historicism and limitation of linear and singular conceptions of history.
Imaginary “waiting rooms”: one man’s present becomes another man’s future -> e.g.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): on liberty/on representative government.
Proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued
against giving native Americans or Africans self-rule.
According to Mill, Indians (Native Americans) or Africans were not yet civilised
enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and
civilisation (colonial rule and education) had to elapse before they could be
considered prepared for such a task. Mill’s historicist argument consigned
Native Americans, Africans and other nations to an imaginary waiting- room
of history.
5. The long 19th Century (E. Hobsbawn)
1789 the collapse of French absolutist monarch -> the eruption of the First World
war in 1914 ( not necessarily starting point 19thC)
From a society of orders to a society of classes.
Popular sovereignty ( 100 years before everyone had the right to vote, before
French revolution only politics was priviledge) and new modes of political
legitimation.
Economic and social transformation
Demographic explosion and mass migration
Dramatic changes in the political landscape: birth of new European powers
(unification of Italy and Germany), The consolidation of nation-states and
imperialism, The incorporation of masses in politics.
6. 19th century modernity
The normative pulse of Europe’s narrative of “modernity” -> the 19 th C is often
conceived as the era that put “Enlightenment ideals” into practice -> no official
answer to “What is Enlightenment” because the era named by Kant’s essay was
never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like Olympics.
I think therefore I am -> René Descartes.
Henry Martyn Llolyd (2018) “We need reboot of Enlightenment”.
, “white knights” present a selective reading of Enlightenment. Enlightenment
thinkers, especially French intellectuals, placed a high value on the role of
sensibility, feeling and desire.
Hengel ( 1770 -1831): emphasis on rationality produces citizens who are
alienated, estranged from nature.
David Hume (1711-1776): morality is grounded in sense-experience: we can
judge the good directly and without need of reason.
19th C romanticism, nationalism and fascism -> “science can explain
everything, but understands nothing”.
7. Modernity, what is in a name?
1) A category of historical periodisation ( dividing historical time: for and after
French revolution, cold war).
The modernisation paradigm (sociology, 1960s).
Modernisation = transformation from traditional, agrarian society to
secular, urban, industrial society.
Macro-structural changes: Rationalisation, industrialisation and
urbanisation (from feudalism to capitalism), Birth of nation-states and
institutions of democratisation (representative democracy, modern
bureaucracy).
Micro-individual changes- birth of “modern man”: reason-giving rather
than tradition and habit, individualism, freedom and formal equality, faith
in social/scientific/technological progress and human perfectibility and
rationality.
2) A quality of social experience, a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about
the present.
Modernity = self-definition of a generation about its own technological
innovations, governance and socio economics, a particular relationship to
time, characterised by intense historical discontinuity, openness to the
novelty of the future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about
the present.
Modernus: “of today” (as opposed to something that has past).
Reinhart Koselleck (1979) futures past -> “der Moderne”, “les temps
modernes”, “Nieuwe tijd”: temporal distinction -> yet one claiming a
distinctive breach with the past.
a historical consciousness and its transformation into general
model of social experience -> ability to conceive of a future as
distinct from present and past.
18th C. Enlightenment: a qualitative claim about the newness of
times, valorising substantive changes
3) An (incomplete) project.
, Modernity = a paradoxical form of temporality -> all modernities grow old.
To remain “off today” modernity needs to constantly re-establish itself in
relation to an ever- expanding past.
As a result of such “updates” modernity: becomes less of a concept to
describe a historical period, becomes more of a qualitative criterion to
express a desired present/future.
“Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category” ( Theodor
Adorno 1903-1969)
As part of the project of “updating” our relationship to the past there is a
tendency to: Associate meanings of “modernity”, “modern man” with
normative values, ideals and beliefs. Re-interpret the past as a logical and
orderly path to cherished present. (linear account of history)
Define modernity in term of “progress” -> defined in terms of projection
of certain people’s present as other people’s futures (singular account of
history) or “development”
European history french revolution
1. Context
Not the first revolution in its kind -> Glorious revolution (1688-1689, England): the
abdication of catholic king and replacement by Protestant King and the American
Revolution (1775-1783): the American independence from Great-Britain.
Impact of these revolutions: England -> breach with tradition of “divine right to rule”,
if no roman Catholic could be king, then no kingship could be unconditional. USA ->
rights of representation and revolt against “unjust” rule.
John Locke (1689) Two Treatises of Government two main premises: no
government can be justified by one’s appeal to the divine right of kings, legitimate
government needs to be founded on the consent of the governed.
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