SPRING 2000
HISTORY 450-801
M: 6:00-8:30—DU-229
antisemitism,
imperialism, & totalitarianism
Zouhair Ghazzal
CC-545, M: 5:30-6:00
LT-926, T:5:30-6:00
voice/fax: (312)
803-0532
The
purpose of this weekly seminar is to discuss the links between antisemitism,
imperialism, and totalitarianism. In her groundbreaking work, The Origins of
Totalitarianism
(originally published in 1951), the Jewish and German born political
philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had just moved to the US to escape the
atrocities of Nazism, was the first to link the three historical phenomena of
antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism together in what now constitutes
the full text of the Origins. At one level, the interrelations between such
phenomena is pretty obvious (even though not much has been done in the research
which has been accumulating in the last two decades, to reexamine the
conceptual links and analyses proposed by Arendt). For one, even though
antisemitism was a widespread ideology throughout Europe by the turn of the
century, it was nevertheless only the Nazi totalitarian regime which began
systematically arresting and deporting Jews to the concentration camps (the
fascist Vichy government constituted for its part a brief interlude, probably
more important to French society itself than the rest of Europe). For another,
both imperialism and totalitarianism denote a crisis of the European
nation-state. In fact, the traditional nineteenth-century role of the
nation-state could not fit anymore with the rapid expansion of capitalism and
the need for new markets: thus imperialism also marked the end of the idea of
the nation-state. On the other hand, both Bolshevism and Nazism mocked the
traditional nation-state either as bourgeois or as “narrow” in its
scope (e.g. favoring one class over another); and both sought extra-national
experiences in their own terms either by means of an internalization of the
labor movement for the Bolsheviks, or through military expansionism for the
Nazis, both of which wrecked apart many of the European nation-states. More
tellingly perhaps is the fact that both Soviet and Nazi totalitarianisms mocked
all the legal, political, and social values of the traditional European
nation-state. In short, the phenomena of antisemitism, imperialism, and
totalitarianism, all combined, were what brought the first serious set of
crises in Europe, which culminated with the two world wars, since the
dissolution of the old feudal states and their gradual replacement with the
modern nation-states.
The
intermediary Absolutist states still operated with the old feudal notion of the
Sovereign whose body was the body politic, which was an outcome the King’s Two
Bodies doctrine—the finite physical body and the everlasting body
politic—and whose quintessential figure was the British monarchy. It was
the explosion of such a doctrine that led the passage to the modern
nation-state. The new doctrine, which focuses on the rights of the individual rather than those of
the Sovereign, found its expression in the philosophy of the Aufklärung
and the Droits de l’homme et du citoyen of the French
Revolution. In fact, the modern nation-state acknowledges individual rights,
which are protected both legally (by means of a modernized judicial apparatus)
and politically (universal suffrage). Not only is there no more Sovereign as
representative of the body politic, but the society-of-individuals needs to
protect itself from the abuses of the state and its bureaucracy, hence the
notion of “civil society” and that of the “public
sphere,” which assumes individuals communicating freely on public
matters—a revival of the Greek polis, but with extended
rights and duties. The nation-state assumes “autonomous”
individuals, which have rights and duties towards the state and towards each
other. Those individuals are also legally protected, and one essential aspect
of their political rights is the right of free expression, which in turn leads
to universal suffrage. Thus individuals enjoy the right to question all the laws,
and the political and social practices of their nation. Nothing is divine
anymore and nothing is sacred either, but anything could be the scrutinized by
any of the individuals of the nation-state. The nation-state thus assumes a
minimal degree of homogenization, which is first established on a de facto
basis by means of language. Thus, all the European nation-states are by
definition each tied to a single language, and when, as the Swiss case shows, a
dominant language is impossible, federalism imposes itself as a political
necessity.
Antisemitism,
which as an ideology grew strongly in Europe during the last three decades of
the nineteenth century, and had already begun few decades earlier in Russia,
resulted from the impasse that the majority of the European Jews found
themselves in vis-à-vis the nation-state. In fact, the Jews, despite
their heterogeneous formation, behaved like a “nation” without
territory, and which was spread all over Europe (and the world); and spoke in a
mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish, in addition to the various European national
languages. The nation-state, however, does not accept the idea of an individual
whose primary loyalty goes to a group, be it religious or otherwise. The
dilemma of the Jews was one of assimilation versus preservation. Assimilation
would have implied a full subservience and loyalty to the nation-state, hence a
complete integration so that the Jewishness of those individuals would have become their
second nature, or a private matter, if you wish. Moreover, the
nation-state—at least in principle—is unable to deal with groups as
such since its legal and political systems protect individual rights only. What
complicated matters even more forcefully was the fact that the old feudal
states, out of which the modern nation-states emerged, dealt for the most part
with the Jews, whose moneylenders were mostly needed and appreciated, as
special status groups. Even though the financial expertise of the Jewish
moneylenders was still appreciated, the nation-state general policy was one of
multiplying the financial resources of the state, hence the Jews became one
possibility among several, and the big Jewish families ceased to be protected
by a feudal prince or privileged by the early modern European states. Needless
to say, however, the Jews were not a coherent group, and with the loosening of
the bonds between the Jewish financiers and the state, it looks as if the Jews
were pushed in toto to assimilate within a middle class status.
This
course will therefore focus on the historical links, in the last two centuries,
between antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. Even though our focus
will be mainly on a theme rather than a geographic area, most of the readings
concentrate on Europe, and even when other societies are concerned (e.g. Egypt,
or the South Pacific islands), it is in their relationship with a form of
colonialism or imperialism (e.g. the British). However, it would definitely be
worth examining our conceptual framework for the American societies beginning with
the late nineteenth century. How does antisemitism in the US differ from its
European counterparts? Is there a US imperial experience similar from the
French and British (the Philippines and Mexico during the nineteenth century,
and more recently, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, etc.)? And finally, even though the
US never went through a totalitarian experience as such, how does the US relate to totalitarian
societies beginning with the Nazi and Soviet regimes, up to many of the
societies in the world today?
GENERAL
There are weekly
readings that you’re expected to discuss collectively in class. Your
participation is essential for the success of the course. You might be also
occasionally requested to prepare a presentation on a chapter or book which are
part of the weekly assignments. Class presentations and discussions shall
count as one-fifth of the total grade.
Presentations should be improvised and 5 to 10 minutes long. Do not prepare a
written presentation. The purpose of presentations is to let you check on your
readings and give you the opportunity to perform and ask questions publicly. In
addition to the routine weekly presentations, students are requested, after
submission of a first-draft, to make a short presentation on their papers.
Besides
the two-draft research paper (see below the section on papers), you’re
expected to submit three interpretive essays. The final grade will be
calculated on the basis of one-fifth for the paper and one-fifth for each
interpretive essay. All interpretive essays are take-home. The purpose of the interpretative
essays is to give you the opportunity to go “beyond” the literal
meaning of the text and adopt interpretive and “textual”
techniques. A failing grade in all interpretive essays means also a failing
grade for the course, whatever your performance in the paper is. All essays
and papers must be submitted on time according to the deadlines set below. If
you’re absent from class for a deadline, you may e-mail your essay-paper
as an attached file in MS Word format, or fax it to the number above, or drop
it in my mailbox (CC-502, LT-910).
|
Class
presentations & discussions, and e-mail discussion list |
20% |
|
First
Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Second
Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Final
Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Term
Paper |
20% |
READINGS
• Weeks 1,
2, 3 & 4 (January 17, 24, 31 & February 7):
Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism
(Harcourt).
• Week 5
(February 14):
Marrus &
Paxton, Vichy France & the Jews
(Stanford).
February 14: first interpretive essay
• Week 6
(February 21):
Jürgen
Osterhammel, Colonialism
(Markus Wiener).
• Weeks 7
(February 28):
Timothy
Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt
(California).
March 6-11: Mid-Semester Break
• Week 8
(March 13):
Nicholas Thomas,
Entangled Objects
(Harvard).
March 13: second interpretive essay
• Week 9
(March 20):
Marshall
Sahlins, Islands of History
(Chicago).
• Weeks
10, 11 & 12 (March 27, April 3 & 10):
François
Furet, The Passing of an Illusion
(Chicago).
March 27: first draft deadline
April 3: preliminary presentation of
first-drafts
• Week 13
(April 17):
Ernest Gellner, Encounters
With Nationalism
(Routledge).
April 17: final interpretive essay
• Week 14
(April 24):
Discussion and presentation of
term-papers
(if you’re unable to meet for
this last session, make an appointment: you’ll not receive a grade unless
you’ve completed a presentation of your paper.)
Tuesday, April 25: final draft deadline
PAPERS
You
are requested to write one major research paper to be submitted during the last
session, Tuesday, April 25. You will have to submit, however, a first draft of
this paper on Tuesday, March 28. The first draft should be as complete as
possible and follow the same presentation and writing guidelines as your final
draft, but it won’t be graded. Only your final draft will count as one-fifth
of the total grade.
The purpose of the first draft is to let you assess your research and writing
skills and improve the final version of your paper. It is advisable that you
choose a research topic and start preparing a bibliography as soon as possible.
I would strongly recommend that you consult with me before making any final
commitment. It would be preferable to keep the same topic for both drafts. You
will be allowed, however, after prior consultation, to change your topic if you
wish to do so.
You
may choose any topic related to the social, economic, political, and cultural
history of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. Papers should be
analytical and conceptual. Avoid pure narratives and chronologies and
construct your paper around a main thesis.
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of
Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987. Intended for students and other writers of papers not written for
publication. Useful material on notes and bibliographies.
Keep
in mind the following when preparing your preliminary and final drafts:
·
once
you’ve decided on a paper-topic and prepared a preliminary bibliography,
send an abstract and bibliography of your topic to the class-list <h104h450-l@luc.edu>
(see below). Your abstract should include: (i) title; (ii) description; (iii)
sources; (iv) methodology (e.g. suggestions on how to read sources).
·
preliminary
drafts should be submitted on time, November 2. If you’re unable to
attend class that evening, drop your draft in my mailbox (LT-910, CC-502).
·
preliminary
drafts should be complete and include footnotes and an annotated bibliography.
·
do
not submit an outline as a first draft.
·
incomplete
and poorly written first drafts will not be accepted, and you’ll be
advised to revise your first draft completely.
·
if
you submit a single draft throughout the semester, you’ll receive X as a
final grade (WF on your transcript).
·
the
oral presentation is an essential aspect of your grade; if you can’t
attend the last session, request an appointment.
·
your
final draft should take into consideration all the relevant comments provided
on your earlier draft.
·
if
you’re interested in comments on your final paper and interpretive essay,
request an appointment by e-mail.
Please
use the following guidelines regarding the format of your papers:
·
use
8x10 white paper (the size and color of this paper). Do not use legal size or
colored paper.
·
use
a typewriter, laser printer or a good inkjet printer and hand in the original.
·
only
type on one side of the paper.
·
should
be double spaced, with single spaced footnotes at the end of each page and an annotated
bibliography
at the end. (The bibliography that follows in the next section is annotated.)
·
keep
ample left and right margins for comments and corrections of at least 1.25
inches each.
·
all
pages should be numbered and stapled.
·
a
cover page should include the following: paper’s title, course number and
section, your name, address, e-mail, and telephone.
E-MAIL
DISCUSSION LIST
An
open e-mail discussion list is available: each message—whether mine or
from any student—will reach anyone else on the list, so that every
subscriber could directly write to the list.
History 104 & 450:
<H104H450-L@luc.edu>
The list
includes students from two History courses. History 104 is a core course on
Asia from a historical and anthropological perspectives. History 450 is a
graduate course on antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism.
The
purpose of this electronic listserv is to discuss issues relevant to both
courses, and current political and social matters as well. The focus, however,
shall be primarily on the readings themselves since they represent our primary
source for dealing with the complexities of these civilizations.
To
join the list, please send an e-mail message to:
listproc@luc.edu
and
include as your e-mail message (leaving the Subject: field blank, if possible):
subscribe
H104H450-L first-name last-name
e.g.,
Janine Doe—you would type in:
subscribe
H104H450-L Janine Doe
GroupWise
Users at Loyola University Chicago: Please preface the 'listproc' address (or
subscription address) with 'internet:' in the To: field. For example:
To:
internet:listproc@luc.edu
Once
you’ve successfully subscribed (you’ll receive a confirmation
message with instructions), send all messages to the list’s address:
H104H450-L@luc.edu
Your
message will be automatically forwarded to all the list’s subscribers.
You should also receive a duplicate of your own message.
To
unsubscribe send an e-mail to listproc@luc.edu with the following message:
unsubscribe
h104h450-l first-name last-name
Do
not send any mail to my private address <zghazzal@midway.uchicago.edu>,
except for appointments or personal problems regarding the course. Suggestions
for term-papers topics should be posted directly at the class-list.
Problems
in joining the list? Questions? Send an e-mail to Brian Kinne
<bkinne@luc.edu>.
notes from it services:
From:
"Jack Corliss, Loyola University Chicago" <jcorlis@orion.it.luc.edu>
Please
note that about 96% of all registered students have e-mail accounts, on the
GroupWise e-mail system (university e-mail system). We no longer encourage
students to obtain Orion accounts unless they plan to do personal web page
design and development.
Of
course, students can use whatever e-mail account they have to subscribe and
post to the class discussion list including AOL and Entereact. If you want to
send attachments to the students on the list then they should find out their
e-mail system handles attachments.
You
should also know that as of May 1997, anyone using the computer workstations in
any of the University computing centers and public-access labs are required to
have university network access account (which we call the UVID). This is
required whether the student plans to access the Internet resources, their
GroupWise or Orion e-mail, use word-processing to write their papers, whatever.
Therefore,
students are assigned these accounts automatically. However, if a student does
not remember his or her university network access account/password, and
registered late this year, then the student will need to go to the computing
center to have the password reassigned or a network access account set up
(usually takes 24 hours).
WHAT
I HAVE JUST PRESENTED ABOVE IS VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Please be prepared
to direct the student to one of the computing centers if he or she does not
know nor remember the network access account or password.
Please
note that some students may know this network access account as the GroupWise
account and password—an unfortunate nomenclature—but most likely
this is one and the same. Previously, we referred to these as GroupWise
accounts but now we are calling them university IDs (or UVID), or university
network access accounts.
The
computing centers have had to deal with this last semester, so please do not
hesitate to refer any students to the computing centers for assistance, or they
can call the Help Desk at 4-4444 and the Help Desk staff will re-assign a network
access password.
RECOMMENDED
READING
Historiographical
Methods
History &
the Social Sciences
The
works of “social scientists” like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Durkheim,
Michel Foucault, Habermas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Hannah
Arendt, Norbert Elias, Georges Dumézil, and Sigmund Freud, had a
tremendous impact on the writing of history throughout the twentieth century.
Jacques
Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (University of
Minnesota Press, 1994). This is the best and most challenging book I have read
in recent years which describes very aggressively the current status of the
most recent historiographical methods. Rancière argues that Michelet was
the real precursor to the Annales school (something that Lucien Febvre
acknowledged and was the first to see clearly). First, Michelet was probably
the first to have voluntarily stepped out from a pure history of kings and
political events into some kind of “social history” and showed a
great interest into this category which he broadly defined as “Le
Peuple” (the people); second, Michelet was sensitive to the document as a starting point for
his analysis: he created this unique method of reading into a document by creating
his own narrative out of them and by listening to their silences. But Michelet
could only create a dynamics out of a narrative where the Hobbesian Monarch
does not play anymore the central role by transforming France as the real Subject of
history—something that the Annales could not keep up with anymore. The Annales in fact transformed its
historical “topics” into objects of research. In other
words, France, for example, becomes an object of research like European
feudalism or the Mediterranean. Thus by stating that every entity in the social
world is worth being an object of scientific research, the Annales has ipso facto robbed
traditional historiography, including that of Michelet, from its deepest
foundations. Which leaves us today, towards the end of an eventful twentieth
century, with a big problem: How can we rehabilitate the role of the
subject—that is, any subject of democratic societies—in
historical processes?
Hunt,
Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989. A collection of articles that discusses the new “cultural
history,” a recent trend that focuses on the importance of language in
understanding political and social trends—the “linguistic
turn.”
Momigliano,
Arnaldo. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991.
Palmer,
Bryan D. Descent into Discourse. The Reification of Language and the Writing
of Social History.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Reddy,
William M. Money and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of Historical
Understanding.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A critical study on modern
historiographical trends related in particular to social and economic history.
Scott,
Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988. Wallach relates gender to history and language and thus
joins the “linguistic turn” school that focuses on the importance
of language in structuring social and economic movements.
B.
H. Moss, “Republican Socialism and the Making of the Working Class in
Britain, France, and the United States: A Critique of Thompsonian
Culturalism,” Comparative Study in Society and History, 35(2) 1993, 390-413.
This essay is an attempt to analyze the impact that had Thompson’s Making
of the English Working Class on studies of labor movements in France,
England, and the United States, on the one hand, and the weaknesses of such
“culturalist” analyses (as opposed to the Marxist and neo-Marxist)
on the other. Moss concludes that what these studies have unknowingly confirmed
is the traditional and Marxist view that socialism arises when intellectuals
bearing collectivist ideas join with workers undergoing a process of
proletarianization.
Carrard,
Philippe. Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from
Braudel to Chartier.
Parallax Re-visions of Culture and Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992. Excellent introduction to the Annales tradition in historiography. More
broadly, Carrard shows that the discipline of history is now marked by
fragmentation and that histoire totale (in the strong sense of the project) is dead.
Editorial.
“Histoire et sciences sociales. Un tournant critique?” Annales
É.S.C. 2
(April-March 1988): 291-293. A key editorial of the Annales in which a “crisis” in
contemporary historiography was admitted for the first time and a rapprochement
with the rest of the social sciences is now considered as essential for the
writing of a new (more fragmented) history. The notion of
“document” is also questioned and a more “textual”
approach seem to be suggested. Some of the responses to this editorial have
been collected in the special issue of November-December 1989 celebrating the
60th anniversary of the Annales.
Dominick
LaCapra, History & Criticism
(Cornell University Press, 1985). With essays on Ginzburg, mentalité history, and the history of criticism,
LaCapra’s enterprise in providing a critical perspective on contemporary
historiography is probably the best in US academia today.
Michel
de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), English trans.
The Writing of History.
Greeks
The works of Moses Finley (Ancient
Economy, Use and Abuse of History, World of Odysseus, Ancient Slavery and
Modern Ideology),
Detienne (Gardens of Adonis),
Vernant (Myth & Society),
and Vidal-Naquet (Le chasseur noir),
and few others, have transformed the field of ancient Greek history from the
traditional linguistic and philological approaches of the old texts to social
and economic history—the Annales type, and also the Frankfurt School
cultural pessimism (for Finley in particular).
David Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and
Society. The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Cohen poses the difficult and often omitted problem of the relationship between
law, the norms, social practices, and ideology, and in order to study the
“hidden” and “unavailable” sphere of social practices
from the classical Greek literature, he assumes that contemporary Mediterranean
societies, studied by anthropologists, have roughly similar practices that the
Greeks. He then confronts his texts with what they hide to see if all this
makes sense. Even though Cohen ends up with some interesting results concerning
the private and public, women, adultery, homosexuality, the law, and the polis,
in ways different from previous scholarship, many will find his extrapolations
and cut-and-paste technique from the new to the old highly controversial.
K.
Dover, Greek Homosexuality
(New York, 1978), is the most classic work on the subject of Greek “homosexuality.”
Romans &
Early Christians
Peter Brown, The Body and Society.
Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christanity (Columbia University Press, 1988). In
nineteen chapters, and basing himself on original manuscripts, Peter Brown is
very successful in describing attitudes of early Christians towards the body
and sexuality. Augustine, in the last chapter, provides the summa of the endless variations of the early
Christians and their errings: fulfillment (salvation) is only achieved in the
“city of heaven.” What Christianity has introduced to the Greek and
Roman world-views is the duality between mind and body, a dualism we still live
with in different forms whether Cartesian or Freudian. The mind
“controls” the body, its appetites and drives, hence the mind
controls the body’s sexuality. To the early Christians, this meant sexual
renunciation and virginity in order to preserve the integrity of the soul.
Brown demarcates Roman sexuality from the Christian in his introductory
chapters: Roman sexuality looks at women, slaves, and barbarians as inferiors,
hence sex with women was riddled with anxieties and it was common for men to
have sex with their slaves. Brown, however, does not see Christian renunciation
as caused by Roman “tolerance” and he never provides his readers
with a sharp answer to the historical causes of Christian asceticism. Instead,
he portrays to us the variations of the Christian model, and, with this, a view
of religion as an agglomeration of infinitesimal efforts comes up, or, in other
words, how disparate views become public and create an institution—the
Church. Brown also provides an account of a
religion—Christianity—as a social movement with no state control. Brown,
however, seems locked up in his texts and I would have wished more social
history on the Roman family and marriage, the social roots of the early
Christians, and the Church and its clergy. Brown’s tone seems also to
belong to the 1980s, under the influence of Veyne and Foucault, which looks at
sexuality as a discourse, or rather, as a discursive practice. Also by Peter
Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (California University Press, 1967), The Cult of Saints (Chicago University Press, 1981).
Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews,
and Christians (Wesleyan
University Press, 1987).
Ramsay
MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, A.D. 100-400 (Yale University Press, 1984).
Wayne
A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (Yale University Press, 1983).
Robert
L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale University Press, 1984).
Robin
Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians
(Harper & Row, 1986).
John
Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago University Press, 1980).
Written as a contribution to “gay” history within a late
twentieth-century political agenda, Boswell seems to have much more talent in
“gay activism” than intellectual history and textual analysis in
which he doesn’t seem much interested. If you don’t mind a
cut-and-paste method in analyzing texts, then there’s a chance that you
might like the Boswell style.
Medieval Europe
Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s
Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton University Press, 1957). In a
first brilliantly written chapter, Kantorowicz argues that the King’s Two
Bodies doctrine achieved its full maturity in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
England during the reign of Elizabeth I, but was much weaker in its development
on the Continent. Briefly, what the King’s Two Bodies doctrine implied
was that the King had two bodies, his own temporal body subject to sickness,
passions, and death, and an immortal body, the “body politic,”
which was constituted of all the bodies and souls of the subjects of the
Commonwealth. The novelty was much less in the duality of the system than with
the notion that the immortal part was the “body politic,” that is,
it was made up of all
the citizen’s wills and desires as represented by the Monarch. Needless to say that
such a theory prepares for more elaborate Hobbesian and Lockian systems of
representation. Having sketched what he calls the King’s Two Bodies
“legal fiction” in its mature phase, Kantorowicz will devote the
rest of his book to a reconstruction of the variations of the King’s Two
Bodies doctrine since the eleventh century. The turning point here was the
twelfth-thirteenth century, with Frederick II, when the King was not seen
anymore as the impersonator of Christ but as the sole legislator of Positive
Law. An overwhelming study which breaks up many academic barriers and which
sees “legal fiction” as constructing “reality.”
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of
Purgatory (Chicago
University Press, 1984 [1981 for the French Gallimard edition]). This is a longue
durée history of
the Purgatory, roughly from early Christianity till the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries when the Purgatory has achieved a more or less completed structure
(even in its poetic form through Dante). Le Goff, however, is eager not to make
his history “evolutionary,” that is, he insists that the history of
the Purgatory remains unpredictable despite early signs (with Augustine in
particular) of a desire to spacialize something between hell and heaven. This creation of an
additional space of judgment and repentance shall be expressed differently from
one period to another, but by the thirteenth century one thing is certain: the
Purgatory integrates well in the European societies where the judicial now
plays a dominating and intermediary role between the “body politic”
and “society” (or “civil society,” civitas). Le Goff’s method is very much
“textual,” and even though he does well in integrating his material
with the social trends of each period, one would have wished more social
history, in particular for the thirteenth century when several things seem to
come together: the political, religious, judicial, and economic.
Modern
Europe: Populations, Material life & the Economy
Fernand
Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II,
trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1973 [first French
edition published in Paris by Armand Colin, 1949]). Picking up where Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre (his “Maître de thèse”), Braudel
constructs a thesis around the Mediterranean as an object of study for what
became the cult book of the Annalistes: it’s not anymore Philip II who
occupies the center of the stage, but the Mediterranean as a complex object of
geography, economics, and cultures at the age of Philip II. Actually,
Braudel dismisses the person of the King altogether as someone who was not even
conscious of the importance of the Mediterranean: “I do not believe that
the word Mediterranean itself ever floated in his consciousness with the
meaning we now give it, nor that it conjured up for him the images of light and
blue water it has for us.” With this, Braudel created a fundamental rule
for both historians and social scientists: the historian does not have to
identify with the “subjects” of history anymore—distance from
what shines at the surface has become the golden rule (but wasn’t it so
for Marx and Freud?). But the book, half a century later, has also aged
tremendously: Braudel never took seriously the claim he has set up for himself
and for the discipline of history as “La Reine des sciences sociales,”
and he never borrowed much anyhow from the languages of the social sciences.
The Mediterranean
leaves us struggling with an array of questions concerning the role of the
“subject” and “culture” in history.
Norbert
Elias, The Civilizing Process (Blackwell, 1994). Originally published in
Germany in 1939 in two separate parts, The History of Manners and State Formation
and Civilization,
The Civilizing Process sees the sixteenth century as the period which created a
new set of courtly manners very different from the “uncivilized,”
barbaric and violent Middle Ages: manners in which shame and individuality have
become crucial. In order to explain this sudden shift, Elias develops a theory
of state formation which conceptualizes the Absolutist states (the new
“monopolies”) as having totally eclipsed the old Feudal states
based on territorial divisions. Elias’ analysis combines what he calls
the psycho-genetic and socio-genetic levels of human experience—another
terminology for the Weberian notion of subjective and objective meanings of
social action or the Freudian ego and super-ego split. In his conceptualization
of European history since the Middle Ages, Elias departs from the Weberian
thesis that Protestantism was one of the elements which made capitalism
possible (in the Civilizing Process, the role of religion is not even
debated—it is simply absent), and from Marxism which looks at
superstructures as a “final-analysis-reflection” of economic
infrastructures (Elias looks at state-formations as having a logic of their
own).
Reddy,
William M. The Rise of Market Culture. The Textile Trade and French Society,
1750-1900.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Scott, Joan Wallach. The
Glassworkers of Carmaux. French Craftsmen and Political Action in a
Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Eric
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (1988).
Alexander
Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge (Mass.),
1962).
Lawrence
Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (1558-1641) (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1965).
Intellectual
Movements in Modern Europe
Thomas
S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University
Press, 1962).
Latour,
Bruno and Steven Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of
Scientific Facts.
London: Sage, 1979. A book that belongs to what we now qualify as the new
“anthropology of the sciences,” i.e. a discipline (or
sub-discipline) that focuses on how the natural hard-core sciences are produced
and manufactured within the laboratories, élite teaching colleges, staff
recruitment, and the professional journals that transmit and conserve
scientific knowledge. A big step from the “idealized” Khunian
paradigmatic view of the sciences that became dominant in the last three
decades.
Shapin,
Steve and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Airpump. Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. In the line of the
“anthropology” of Bruno Latour, this book tries to connect the
political ideas of the father of “Absolutism” in the Anglo-Saxon
world with those of the natural experimental sciences.
Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951). The
enlightenment within a Kantian perspective. A book that remains a classic.
Peter Gay, The
Cultivation of Hatred. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume 3 (New York: Norton,
1993). This is the third volume after “Education of the Senses”
(1984) and “The Tender Passion” (1986), and is fed by some rich
insights. Gay argues that the Victorians were prone to mix cruel aggression and
ferocious erotic pleasure; thus our Victorian legacy is a struggle to deal with
the joys of aggression. The book also ends with a subtle analysis of the
development of “professionalism” and the way all these finer specialties
became finely guarded. Unfortunately, the bulk of the book forgets from time to
time such rich insights and the reader is left with a bunch of facts that
ranges from the very obvious to the sophisticated.
Carlo
Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins, 1980).
Ginzburg argues that the heretical thoughts of Menocchio, his sixteenth-century
miller, were the effect of an old rural popular culture despite the fact that
Menocchio was an avid reader of some medieval texts. In a footnote added later
as a response to critics (pp. 154/5), Ginzburg claims a circularity—or
complementarity—between élite and popular cultures. Looked upon
retrospectively, two decades after the publication of the original Italian
edition, which made a sensation, Ginzburg’s thesis on popular culture is
neither convincing nor interesting. Going through Ginzburg’s 62 short
partitions, one is more puzzled by the Church’s insatiable willingness to
force Menocchio “confess” than by a popular culture which we can
hardly see and perceive.
Keith
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
1971; reed., Penguin Books, 1991).
Denis
Mack Smith, Mazzini (Yale University Press, 1995). The best biography available
of one of those whose contribution weighted the most on the events that led to
the “unification” of Italy in 1860 under Victor Immanuel. Mazzini
was described by Nietzsche as “the man I venerate most,” and
denounced by Marx for “false sublimity, puffy grandeur, verbosity and
prophetic mysticism.” But in fact Mazzini gave only grudging approval to
unification as it actually happened, even after Venetia had been incorporated
in 1866 and Rome in 1870. He had wanted Italy to be made from below, for it to
be socialist and republican (in his particular senses of those words) and to be
reconciled with the papacy. Mack Smith is also the author of Cavour and
Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1954;
1985); Garibaldi
(London: Hutchinson, 1957); Victor Immanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento (Oxford University
Press, 1971); Italy and Its Monarchy (Yale University Press, 1990); Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1981); Cavour (London: Methuen, 1985).
The
French Revolution
Edmund
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1969. A great classic.
Alfred
Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (London, 1964).
François
Furet & Mona Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard University
Press, 1989). A “dictionary” of the French Revolution organized in
thematic and biographic articles.
Roger
Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 1990. Focuses on ideas
and their “public” circulation before and after 1789.
Alexis
de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1955. A great classic
by the author of Democracy in America. Tocqueville was among the first to argue
that much of what is usually attributed to the Revolution, namely the
centralization of the state and its bureaucracy; the advancement of the
“bourgeoisie” as a class, etc., were already part of the policy of
the old monarchical regime.
Sewell,
William H., Jr. Work and Revolution in France. The Language of Labor from
the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. A classic on
the French guilds, manufactures and labor force, and the first major historian
to apply the Thompsonian problematic to France. An attempt to explain the rise
of socialism and the making of the French working class. Sewell chose to
highlight the culturalist theme and argued that “socialism” was
essentially a cultural reconstruction of an eighteenth-century guild tradition
of moral collectivism.
Sonenscher,
Michael. Work and Wages. Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century
French Trades.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Robert
Darnton, The Literacy Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982).
Barry
M. Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790 (Cambridge University
Press, 1993), addresses the subject of political crime in the first year of the
French Revolution.
de
Baecque, Antoine. Le corps de l’histoire. Métaphores et
politiques (1770-1800).
Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993.
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the
French Revolution
(University of California Press, 1992), analyzes the images and familial models
that inhabited revolutionary France.
United
States
Peter
Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), is an
excellent introduction to the subject of slavery with an annotated bibliography
for further reading.
Robert
W. Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: the Economics of
American Negro Slavery (New York, 1974).
Charles
A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United
States
(Free Press, 1963 [1913]). First published in 1913, Beard’s radical
interpretation brought the Constitution of the United States from its political
“idealism” to its economic roots. Scrutinizing the Constitution in
light of economic forces, he proposed for the first time that this
politico-legal document was shaped by a group of men whose commercial interests
were best served by its provisions.
Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s analysis of the American
democratic system remains my favorite in its simplicity and complexity. The
“democratic spirit” is traced back to the first Europeans settlers
who were suspicious of all the monarchies they had left behind and were thus not
that eager to replicate on the new continent political systems which they saw
as potentially corrupt because based on rigid hierarchies between individuals,
classes, and status groups. Tocqueville then goes on to show that this basic
idea of democracy—that all men have the right to be
“equal”—is reproduced at every level. Thus, several laws were
promulgated in the 17th and 18th centuries in New England and the North-East in
particular forbidding large property holdings. In education, this meant the
focus on “practical” matters rather than on formal and abstract
issues, a major weakness, according to Tocqueville, because it weakens artistic
and scientific creativity. The legal system is analyzed in terms of the
“power of judges” to overrule previous decisions and interpret the
Constitution (another particularity of the American system is that a singles
Constitution frames both the political and judicial). But the greatness of
American democracy has its dark side too, and in a concluding chapter, Tocqueville
is more than cautious about a type of democracy, which despite all its merits,
also creates simple-minded individuals and mediocre spirits who have no choice
but to leave “government” to a group of professionals.
J.
C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832. Political Discourse and
Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge University Press, 1994). One
of the latest attempts in the search for “a deeper understanding of the
causes” of the Revolution. Clark makes three general claims: (i) that the
years between 1776 and 1787 gave rise to a new dissenting conception of liberty
which was the principal source of the ideas of popular sovereignty that some
colonists employed against the traditional idea of absolute sovereignty; (ii)
that 1776 may be understood as a revolution of natural law against common law;
(iii) that the American Revolution was in essence “a rebellion by groups
within Protestant Dissent against an Anglican hegemony.”
Carl
J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics. Greece, Rome, and the American
Enlightenment
(Harvard University Press, 1994). Ever wondered the influence of Greece and
Rome on the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution? The addiction of the
Founders to classical allusion has never been denied, but in the work of many
recent historians its importance has been questioned. Richard’s book is a
refutation of such doubts. It was in America that the historical and the
legendary figures of antiquity could serve as real models for conduct rather
than oratorical embellishment. Though Greece and Rome were equal partners in
the colonial educational curriculum, it was to the Roman republic that the
Founders turned for a model when they came to frame their constitution.
Athenian democracy, criticized by Thucydides, condemned by Plato and
disapproved of by Aristotle, inspired in them a fear of the tyranny of the
majority. They favored instead what they believed was the “mixed
government” of the great days of Rome, the era of the Second Punic War.
Should we then be surprised that very few people participate in the democratic
process today?
Music
& The Arts
Theodor
W. Adorno, Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago University Press, 1993). A
major study by one of the leading Frankfurt School giants that focuses on one
of the most important Viennese musicians at the turn of this century. Adorno
shows that Mahler’s music is the expression, in its artistic form, of the
“end” of the false “totalities” that he found in
metaphysics (by contrast, Beethoven would look very much Hegelian). Knowledge
of Mahler’s nine symphonies is, of course, a must for understanding
Adorno’s analysis. For a broader account of modern music see
Adorno’s Quasi Una Fantasia. Essays on Modern Music (Verso, 1993).
History &
The Social Sciences
Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron,
Monique de Saint Martin, et al, Academic Discourse (Oxford: Polity, 1994). The authors make
the claim that “academic discourse” is a rare commodity, some kind
of “cultural capital,” in the hands of professors-researchers who
find it contrary to their interests to propagate and “popularize”
especially among students and other faculty members who might not have access
to types of discourse unknown to them and who are thus left in the dark on
recent trends and discoveries in the arts and social sciences. Unlike other
critiques from the political left, the authors argue that universities exert a
conservative social influence not by transmitting an intellectual heritage but
by failing to transmit it. While the left and the right continue to bicker over
whether the academic culture students absorb is too traditional or too radical,
Bourdieu and his colleagues question whether students absorb the academic
culture at all. Thus, it is quite common for professors either to claim that
their students “cannot understand sophisticated theories,” or that
it would be better, in a class-context, “to avoid larky expressions and
the like,” or to pretend that “they are already
‘familiar’ with such-and-such an approach.” Academic
discourse ends up a “cultural capital” in the possession of the
happy few who can afford it. The book, written and published in the mid-sixties
on the basis of extensive research on the French educational system, needs to
be “re-adapted” to an American context. My impression is that in
the United States, a particular kind of academic discourse, which borrows
extensively from the French gurus (among them Bourdieu, Lyotard, Derrida, and
Foucault), is more common in the Ivy League and the top-twenty-colleges than in
other, more provincial, higher education institutions. But even in the Ivy
League, it remains to be seen how much of the academic discourse which Bourdieu
and his colleagues have in mind is transmitted and “absorbed.”
The State
Bourdieu,
Pierre. “Esprits d’État. Genèse et structure du
champs bureaucratique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (96-97 1993): 49-62. A
brilliant exposition on the “origins” of the modern European state
from a historical and sociological perspectives.
Islam
& The Early Empires—General
The
Qur’ân
is the holy book of the Muslims (in all their different factions and sects)
delivered by God in Arabic to the community of believers (umma) through the
“medium” of the Prophet Muhammad in sessions of
“revelation” (wahî). Thus Arabic is not only the language of
the Qur’ân (and the Sunna), but also a divine language, the
language of God. All translations of the Qur’ân are thus considered
as illegitimate and inaccurate. There are several such
“translations”/“interpretations” available. A classical
one would be that of A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford University
Press). For a recent “reading” of the Qur’ân, see
Jacques Berque, Relire le Coran (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).
R.
Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History. A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton University
Press, 1991), is a long annotated and commented bibliography thematically
organized. Recommended for all those looking at the best in the field for
sources available in English, French and German. Some references to primary
sources, mainly Arabic medieval sources, are also included. The problem with
this “inquiry” is that it excludes from its field of investigation
all publications in modern Arabic, as well as Turkish and Persian. In short,
this book is an excellent tool for a primary survey on the status of the Middle
Eastern Studies field in Europe and North America.
Marshall
G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago University Press, 1974), is a
landmark study on the “origins” of Islam and its historical
evolution into empires. Recommended for those interested in Islam within a
comparative religious and geographical perspective.
Ira
Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988), is a
complete fourteen-century history of Islamic societies. Chapters vary in depth
and horizon. No particular focus—Tedious to read.
Bernard
Lewis (ed.), The World of Islam (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), is a
thematically organized book with chapters on literature, jurisprudence, sufism,
the cities, the Ottoman and modern experiences. Includes hundreds of
illustrations and maps.
Watt,
W. M., Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953); Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956), both are classics describing the life of the Prophet and his
first achievements in Mecca and Medina.
Franz
Rozenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1952); 2d rev. ed., 1968.
Roy
Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton University
Press, 1980), an excellent book, based on primary sources from Southern Iraq
that describe the process and concept of bay‘a in early Islamic
thought.
Hugh
Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History (London: Croom Helm,
1981).
Jacob
Lassner, The Shaping of Abbasid Rule (Princeton University Press, 1980).
Lassner,
Jacob, Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: An Inquiry into the Art of
‘Abbâsid Apologetics (American Oriental
Series, number 66.) New Haven: American Oriental Society. 1986.
The
History of al-Tabarî (State University of New York Press, 1989), is a
multi-volume series of the translation of the “History” of
Tabarî, one of the major historians and interpreters of the
Qur’ân of the early Islamic and empire periods.
al-Shâfi‘î,
Risâla. Treatise on the Foundations of Islamic Jurisprudence, translated by Majid
Khadduri (Islamic Texts Society, 1987). Shâfi‘î was the
founding father of one of the four major schools of Sunni jurisprudence and the
Risâla
contains some of his major theoretical foundations on the notions analogy, qiyâs, and the ijmâ‘, consensus of the
community.
Martin
Lings, Muhammad. His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (Rochester, 1983).
Newby,
Gordon Darnell, The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the
Earliest Biography of Muhammad (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1989).
Maxime
Rodinson, Muhammad
(Pantheon, 1971), is an interesting interpretation of the early Islamic period
based on a social and economic analysis of the Arabian Peninsula at the dawn of
Islam.
M.
A. Shaban, Islamic History. A New Interpretation, 2 vol. (Cambridge
University Press, 1971), is an attempt towards a new interpretation of the
‘Abbâsid Revolution of the eight century as a movement of
assimilation of Arabs and non-Arabs into an “equal rights” Empire.
Mohammad
Hashim Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge, 1991). See
also the great classic of Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan
Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).
Ignaz
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law (Princeton University
Press, 1981).
Fred
Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton University Press, 1981),
reconstructs the early Islamic Conquests (futûhât) from a wealth of
Arabic chronicles and literary and ethnographic sources.
Bernard
Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago University Press, 1988),
discusses the notion of “government” and “politics” in
Islamic societies.
Patricia
Crone, Slaves on Horses. The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge University
Press, 1980); id., Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton University
Press, 1987), questions the thesis concerning the “trade boom” in
seventh-century Arabia.
Mahmood
Ibrahim, Merchant Capital and Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990),
links the rise of Islam and the Islamic state with the emergence of a
mercantile society in Mecca and views the Arab expansion as the means by which
merchants consolidated their political ascendancy.
Ann
Lambton, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia. Aspects of Administrative,
Economic and Social History, 11th-14th Century (The Persian Heritage
Foundation, 1988).
Dominique
Urvoy, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (Routledge, 1991). Henry Corbin, Avicenna
and the Visionary Recital (Princeton University Press, 1960), is an analysis and interpretation
of Hayy ibn Yaqzân.
Salma
Khadra Jayyusi, editor, The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
See also L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago University
Press, 1990).
The
Ottoman Empire
•
REFERENCE
For
a general social history of The Ottoman Empire, see H.A.R. Gibb and Harold
Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Volume One, 2 parts (London: Oxford University
Press, 1950-57).
For
a general chronological history of the Ottoman Empire, see Stanford Shaw &
Ezel Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols., (Cambridge,
1977). See also M. A. Cook (ed.), A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730 (Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
Paul
Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1963). A short monograph on the
nature of early Ottoman expansion.
For
a narrative account of the rise of the Ottoman Empire viewed from the
standpoint of historical geography, see Donald Edgar Pitcher, An Historical
Geography of the Ottoman Empire. From earliest times to the end of the Sixteenth
Century with detailed maps to illustrate the expansion of the Sultanate (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1972).
George
Young, Corps de droit ottoman, 7 vol. (Oxford, 1905-6) contains selections from the Ottoman judicial
code.
Halil
Inalcik & Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the
Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). In four chronological
sections, the contributors provide valuable information on land tenure systems,
population, trade and commerce and the industrial economy.
China
Joseph Needham, Science and
Civilization in China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. 1-3, 1956-1959).