EUROPEAN HISTORY
, INTRODUCTION: MODERNITY
1. Course introduction
→ Deconstructing European history: Why study history?
→ The long 19th century – modern Europe
→ Modernity as a paradoxical concept
2. Course practicalities
→ Weekly topics and syllabus
→ Study materials and exam
CHAPTER 1: DECONSTRUCTING EUROPEAN HISTORY
Deconstruct = critically interrogate a particular concept, historical event, development, social
phenomena etc.
1.1 DECONSTRUCT EUROPE: PLACES & SPACES
- Borders of Europe fluctuate in time
Depending on the historical period, the borders of Europe fluctuate
Ex. Turkey becomes part of the NATO -> gets included in the map
- Deconstructing Europe: looking at it as
A continent
▪ The symbolic geography of Europe versus the physical geography
of Europe
A civilization
A memory
An inheritance
A responsibility
1.2 DECONSTRUCT HISTORY: WHY STUDY HISTORY?
- To escape the present, nostalgia
longing for “what is forever lost”
risk: the “pastness of the past” and overstating rupture/discontinuity
- to learn lessons from the past- how to deal with moral dilemma
risk: biases in what counts as ‘great men and women in history’
▪ who are the people that made history & the names we remember? -> bias
- to identify structural laws – teleology (Marx/Fukuyama)
read history in function of main current issues, looking into the past to explain the
present
risk: causality and the risk of overdetermination
- for political or ideological processes
examples:
▪ a selection mechanism in higher education -> knowing means belonging to a
higher group -> distinguish the uneducated
▪ nationalist projects -> the natural character of the nation-state
, ▪ post-colonial processes “reclaiming of the past”: tackle the biases of who the
great men and women of history were
risk: conflation science and politics
→ if there are so many pitfalls, why bother study history?
why study history if there are so many pitfalls?
1. To understand change and how “the present” came to be
Understand continuity and change
Understand unprecedented and turbulent times
Understand institutionalization and revolution/transformation
Fake news: today and in the past
▪ John Adams, 2nd US president: “there has been more new error propagated by
the press in the last ten years than in a hundred years before 1789.”
2. Put the present day into perspective, to dismantle its “for granted” (obvious, or natural)
character
To acknowledge the power struggles that are the basis of todays institutions, ways of life, etc.
To question the uniformity of the European experience
To “provincialize” Europe (or the European experience)
▪ to account for multiple paths/meaning of “modernity”
▪ “modernity” does not only originate in Europe
- Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008): critique on “historicism”
Historicism = the idea that “to understand anything, it has to be seen both as a unity and its
historical development” , as if there is a singular, linear trajectory to modern civilization
= an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices
(including ideas and beliefs), by studying their history
Historicism and the limitations of linear and singular conceptions of history
▪ imaginary waiting rooms: one man’s present becomes another man’s future
▪ Ex. John Stuart Mill (1806 -1873) on liberty/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, native Americans or Africans were not yet civilized
enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and
civilization had to elapse before they could be considered to be prepared
for such a task
Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned native Americans, Africans and
other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting-room of history.
Of particular relevance for the 19th century – “The birth of modern Europe”
▪ A tendency to mask the heterogeneity of the “European experience”
▪ A tendency to attribute a singular meaning to “modernity” and a singular
trajectory to “modernity”
, CHAPTER 2: 19 TH CENTURY MODERNITY
The long 19th century – E. Hobsbawn
→ 1789 the collapse of French absolutist monarch --- the eruption of the first world war in
1914
▪ From a society of orders (“estates”) to a society of classes
▪ Popular sovereignty 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 the masses in politics
- The normative pulse of Europe’s narrative of “modernity”
The 19th century is often conceived as the era that put the ‘enlightenment ideals’ into
practice
But… What is Enlightenment?
▪ There is no official answer
▪ because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and
closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or
creed – Steven Pinker
- I Think, therefore I am – Descartes
= demarcation narrative that separates the modern European man from the ‘pre-modern’
- Henry Martyn Lloyld (2018)
“white knights” present a selective reading of the enlightenment:
▪ Enlightenment thinkers, especially French intellectuals, placed a high value on the
role of sensibility, feeling and desire
▪ Hegel (1770 – 1831): emphasis on rationality produces citizens who are
alienated, dispassionate and estranged from nature
▪ David Hume (1711-1776): morality is grounded in sense-experience: we judge
the good/beautiful directly and without the need of reason
19 century romanticism, nationalism and fascism
th
▪ “science can explain everything, but understands nothing”
CHAPTER 3: THE MEANING OF MODERNITY
a category of historical • modernisation = the transformation from a rural,
periodisation agrarian society to a secular, urban, industrual society
a quality of social • modernity = the self-definition of a generation about
its own technological innovations, governance, and
experience socio-economic
an (incomplete) project • modernity = a paradoxical form of temporality
