Week 1: Introduction - Tradition, Revolution, Modernity

Lecture 1: Reflections on Revolution(s) and Modernity (TH)

This lecture introduces and contextualises the historical trajectory of the course in relation to the present. Why is it a myth to think that ‘globalisation’ is a c.21^st phenomenon? In what sense, and with what consequences, do the political liberties in Britain today constitute a debt to France, and to the revolutionaries of the English Civil War? What is meant by ‘modernity’, and how does the debate about its meaning impact both on our lives, and on every academic discipline in the c.21^st?

How are we to understand the conjoined concepts 'revolution' and 'modernity'? If modernity is to be associated with the transcendence of tradition, the development of a process of rationalisation, the waning of myths and mysticism, the decline of religion, and the development of science in relation to the social and psychological and historical conditions of humanity, etc., then how does it relate to the characterisations and periodisations of social development? How does the ‘tradition-modernity’ couplet fit with the ‘feudalism-capitalism-socialism’ triad? Is modernity necessarily ‘capitalist modernity’ if it is to be a proper object of intellectual inquiry? What then of the concept of revolution? As an astronomical or engineering term, ab initio, how is it best to be understood to capture social and intellectual change? What are the differences between resistance and revolution, and between a ‘political’ and a ‘social’ revolution, and what is the relationship between revolution and insurrection?

This lecture traces the key moments, the revolutionary moments, addressed by a course that draws a line from the English Revolution of 1648, and the subsequent Civil War, through the Scientific Revolution of the c.16^th and c.17^th, and the further revolution in thought that was the European Enlightenment. It points to the key tensions that will be addressed in the course: to the emergence of the modern self, and its situation as moral and epistemological subject (Kant) or as social construct (Rousseau); to the creation of a new concept of race that will underpinned chattel slavery and colonialism, and which infected the thinking of most Enlightenment scholars, and which was resisted in the struggles for unqualified universalism and against slavery and imperialism; to the changing perception of women and the role of this half of humanity; and to the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ at different moments in this trajectory.

Those reflections set the scene for the political and social revolutions of the c.19th and c.20th, to the conflictual world of the c.21^st, in which new powers from Brazil through India and Russia to China contest the dominance of the USA and of the European Union, and as humanity seeks (partly by inflecting the ideas of the past) to develop a conceptual structure and a theoretical position from which to understand its precarious condition. It points to the way that the course focuses attention on the invention of the concept of ‘race’ and its use as part of an ideology of chattel slavery and colonialism, on the ideas of ‘woman’ and the place of women in society, and the transformations in those ideas, and to the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ at different moments of this trajectory. The lecture also addresses, if in passing, the Netherlands Revolution of 1566-1609, the American Revolution of 1776, the French revolt of 1830, the European Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, Meiji Restoration in Japan of 1868.

Lecture 2: Before the Enlightenment: Pre-modern Europe and its World-view (TH)

The lecture commences with a short address from a staff member from each of the Humanities Programme’s five degrees on the relation between this CTWT core course, and your degree option. They will explain, in outline, how the issues studied in each of the Programme’s degrees, and the development of the disciplines used to investigate them, cannot be properly understood without setting them against this political and historical and philosophical backdrop provided by the CTWT course.

The second half of the lecture is devoted to a consideration of the conditions of pre-modernity. The world-view of the people of pre-modern Europe rested upon the interplay of four main traditions. Scholars were aware of the legacy of the classical tradition and were engaged in its rediscovery (largely via commercial contact with the Islamic world which had flourished economically, socially and intellectually in the ‘Golden Age of Islam’ under the Abbasid dynasty between the c.8^th and c.11^th), preservation, translation and transcription. They were also fundamentally influenced by the Christian tradition through the Bible, and the interpretive traditions of the Church. At a popular level, the Christian tradition was often welded to a folk tradition to produce a form of ‘folklorised Christianity’.

The central characteristics of the period were, however, underpinned by a socio-political and economic system that came to be known as Feudalism. The territory of Europe was divided into essentially autarkic domains, ruled by an aristocrat, and in which the population depended entirely on the produce of the land. The peasantry were required to devote 25-40% of their produce (either in monetary tithes or in kind) to their lord. In return for this, the peasants received the protection of the warrior lord and his associates. Within this system grew the towns, however, and the trading and merchandising, and the markets which they created and on which they would come to depend, that were to transform the system out of which they had emerged.

Seminar questions:

What is a tradition? What role did traditions play in pre-modern thought? How does Berman characterise Modernity, and why? How, in his view, is ‘Modernity’ to be distinguished from ‘Modernisation’ and from ‘Modernism’?