FALL 2002
HISTORY 395-03W
DU 119—T: 3:00-5:30
history & the
social sciences
senior colloquium: writing intensive
Zouhair Ghazzal
CC-507, T: 2:00-3:00
LT-926, Th: 5:00-6:00
(and by appointment)
(312) 915-6524
This
course will examine the writing of history—or its methodology—in
light of the contemporary social sciences. History as a discipline has been
traditionally divided and compartmentalized for the most part into regional
case studies. Thus, even though some rare historians have ventured into
thematic approaches, history remains a discipline where topoi are crafted along
national and nationalistic boundaries. The problem then becomes of whether it
is possible to achieve any kind of synthesis out of this myriad of regional
case studies. Back in the 1950s Fernand Braudel had already speculated that any
kind of synthesis within the various historical studies could not be possibly
achieved from within the discipline itself, and that history in order to
survive and remain competitive needs to borrow extensively from the various
other disciplines in the social sciences. With such an aim in mind, history
would become integrated within the social sciences and achieve its goal of
total synthesis not only for itself, but also for the other sciences as well.
This course would therefore like to explore the possibility of creating
methodologically oriented historical studies whose aim would be to go beyond
the current regional and national boundaries, while remaining open to the
methods adopted in the rest of the social sciences.
Reading Texts
Knowing how to approach
“documents” or any other “textual” material should be
at the center of the historian’s activity and approached as such. Some
disciplines, such as philosophy and literary criticism, have explicitly posed
the problem of reading texts, while in other disciplines—and history in
particular—the question is either totally eluded or, at best, marginally
posed. Yet, historians use a much greater variety of textual sources than, say,
philosophers and literary critics who usually limit themselves to the
“great texts” of various civilizations, even though western
civilization tends to predominate all the rest. In addition to the “great
texts,” historians usually include police records, court-documents, legal
codes, correspondences, personal files, biographies, newspapers, to name only
few of the sources common to the discipline of history. Here are some
preliminary suggestions (“rules of thumb”) to read documents as
totalities,
that is, as texts endowed with “meaning” rather than as pure
sources for collecting facts and data. The notion of
document-as-text-and-as-totality implies the following:
(i)
The notion of “text” or “discourse” (in the sense
implied by Foucault) presupposes that a “document” is more than a
combination of meaningful words, propositions, and statements. In fact,
“text” and “discourse” imply that
“documents” are drafted within an ideological and discursive
context which frames them within a structure, or matrix, or grid through which
they become readable. It is therefore the historian’s task to discover
(re-construct) and find “meaning” to such
“regularities” in the “texts” themselves, that is, to
discover what the general structures, forms, and rules of these discursive
formations are.
(ii)
Documents are usually so fragmented that they might look deceitful and
disappointing at first. One way to describe them would be to look at them as
“non-discursive” practices (again, in the sense of Foucault) or
more accurately as pre-discursive (pre-analytical) practices. If we limit the
use of “discourse” to a well established set of ideas, theories,
and concepts, then bureaucratic documents and the like with their fragmented narratives,
pieces of evidence, and their links to “practice,” fall
“below” the usually accepted criteria for “discourse.”
The historian, however, should not look at this problem as a handicap or
weakness. On the contrary, due to their intermediary nature between discursive
formations and social practices, documents are important in unraveling the
power-relations within a particular social context. Documents-as-text could
provide us with a body of knowledge very different from well established
discursive formations such as philosophy, literature, and the sciences, which
could signal, at a particular historical moment, the appearance of a theory, an
opinion, a practice unknown to more rigid or formal discursive formations.
(iii)
The notion of “text-as-totality” does not necessarily imply that
documents should be read line-by-line or that the meaning of words, statements,
ambiguous propositions, etc., should be systematically studied. What is more
important than the historical meaning of individual words and statements is the
use of language
by all the social actors. Historians quite often approach documents as made up
exclusively of statements on a true or false basis. However, as J.L. Austin had
noted in How To Do Things With Words, utterances (and statements) have a performative
(perlocutionary) effect, which consists in knowing how their reception came
through on the side of the hearer/audience.
(iv)
Whenever themes are explored, we should be aware that what we commonly do under
such circumstances is read such themes into the document. We thus
first read a document by placing it into the context of its own period, and we
then re-contextualize it for a second time in respect to our own period, and we
do so by referring the document-as-text to the themes which are most common (or
uncommon) to the social sciences.
(v)
What we are aiming at in the final analysis is an anthropological epistemology
of the documents-as-text: What kind of “thought” is implied in such
documents? What kind of discourse do documents carry regarding representations
of society, its institutions and practices, about the self and the other?
(vi)
The historian is thus left with a great deal of freedom to interpret, look for
themes, and reconstruct the general (global) meaning of a text. We should keep
in mind, however, that this freedom is limited by the structure of the
text itself: There is a logic to the text which we assume beforehand to be consistent and makes sense, which
means that any interpretation should be consistent in itself and in respect to the
text it is interpreting.
GENERAL
There
are weekly readings that we’ll 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. Presentations should be improvised and 5 to 10
minutes long. Do not prepare a written presentation. You’re also
requested, after submission of a first-draft, to make a short presentation of your
term-paper.
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 each paper draft and one-fifth for
each interpretive essay. All interpretive essays are take-home and
you’ll be given a week to submit them. 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.
|
First
Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Second
Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Final Interpretive Essay |
20% |
|
Preliminary paper draft |
20% |
|
Term Paper: In case the term paper grade is superior to
the preliminary draft, it will count as 40%. |
20% |
·
It
is essential that you complete all readings on time, and that you come to class
well prepared.
·
The
first, second, and final interpretive essays are all based on our weekly
readings. They all consist of a single essay for which you’ll receive the
appropriate questions at the dates below, and you’ll submit them in class
a week later.
·
For
all five papers follow the procedures outlined below in the section on papers.
·
Essays
and papers are to be submitted only in class. Do not send any material as an
attached e-mail file or otherwise.
·
It’s
your responsibility to submit all essays and papers on time at the deadlines
below. Late papers will be graded accordingly, and papers submitted a week
after the deadline will be graded F.
·
Each
non-submitted paper will receive the grade of F, and your final grade will be
averaged accordingly.
·
The
mid-term paper is a free-topic exercise that you should begin researching as
soon as possible.
READINGS
• weeks 1,
2 & 3: August 27 & September 3 & 10
R.I. Moore, The
first European revolution,
Blackwell 063122774
• weeks 4
& 5: September 17 & 24
Quentin Skinner,
The foundations of modern political thought, vol. 1, Cambridge 0521293375
September 24: First Interpretive Essay
• weeks 6
& 7: October 1 & 8
October 15: mid-semester
break
Lisa Jardine, Worldly
goods, Norton 0393318664
• weeks 8
& 9: October 22 & 29
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, Vintage
0-394-74478-0
October 29: Second Interpretive Essay
• weeks 10
& 11: November 5 & 12
Eric Posner, Law
and social norms,
Harvard 0674008146
November 5: First Draft Deadline
• weeks 12
& 13: November 19 & 26
Michael Taussig,
Defacement, Stanford
0804732000
November 26: Final Interpretive Essay
• week 14:
December 3
Discussion of
term-papers
All papers must
be submitted with the presentations
PAPERS
You
are requested to write one major research paper to be submitted during the last
session, Tuesday, December 3. You will have to submit, however, a first draft
of this paper on Tuesday, November 5. The first draft should be as complete as
possible and follow the same presentation and writing guidelines as your final
draft, and it will count as 20% of your total grade unless the final draft is
of superior quality. 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 methodology and history and its relations to
the social sciences. 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
<h395-l@luc.edu> (see below) no later than November 5. Your abstract
should include: (i) title; (ii) description; (iii) sources; (iv) methodology
(e.g. suggestions on how to read sources). Your preliminary draft will not
be accepted unless you’ve submitted an on-line abstract.
·
preliminary
drafts should be submitted on time, November 5.
·
preliminary
drafts should be complete and include footnotes and an annotated
bibliography.
(The Turabian reference above is annotated: it briefly spells what the book is
about and to whom it might be useful. The same applies to many of the titles in
the bibliography below.)
·
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 F for
20% of the total and your final grade will be averaged accordingly.
·
the
oral presentation is an essential aspect of your grade; if you can’t
attend the last session, request an appointment. Absences will only be accepted
after prior approval from the Dean’s Office.
·
your
final draft should take into consideration all the relevant comments provided
on your earlier draft:
·
all
factual and grammatical mistakes should be corrected, in addition to other
stylistic revisions.
·
passages
indicated as “revise” or “unclear” or
“awkward” should be totally revised.
·
when
specific additional references have been suggested, you should do your best to
incorporate them into your material.
·
there
might be several additional suggestions in particular on your overall
assumptions and methodology. It will be up to you to decide what to take into
consideration.
·
Submit
the final draft with your preliminary corrected one.
·
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 all five 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.
·
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.
·
You
should subscribe to this list as soon as possible, preferably by the first week
of classes.
·
The
forum list is free speech and not subject to any censorship: each message is
posted directly and not subject to review from the list’s coordinator.
The contents of the messages are the own responsibility of their authors.
·
Updates
on the syllabus—in particular on the readings—will be posted
whenever necessary.
·
Discussions
on the weekly readings and the interpretive essays are particularly encouraged.
·
You’re
expected to post at least one message regarding your term-paper so that
everyone knows what others are working on (see supra the section on papers
regarding the content of your message).
·
All
other messages not directly related to the course, whatever their nature, are
also welcomed.
·
The
list will be kept for an additional semester once the course is over by
December. To unsubscribe, follow the instructions below.
To
join the list, please send an e-mail message to:
and
include as your e-mail message (leaving the Subject: field blank, if possible):
subscribe
H395-L first-name last-name
e.g.,
Janine Doe—you would type in:
subscribe
H395-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:
H395-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
h395-l first-name last-name
Do
not send any mail to my private address <zghazza@luc.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).
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
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 aggressivelly 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.
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.”
Greeks & 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 erring: fulfillment 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 provides
us with 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.
Medieval Europe
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 from where Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre (his “Maître de thèse”), Braudel
constructs a thesis around the Mediterranean as an object of study for what
become 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.
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).
Intellectual
Movements in Modern Europe
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, are 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 popular culture which we can
hardly see and perceive.
The
French Revolution
Edmund
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1969. A great classic.
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.
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).