Modernity
I. Early Modernity:
A. 1500-1700: transition
from the medieval world
1. Political:
a. destruction of feudal relations
b. growth of absolutism
c. Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
(1) interstate balance of power:
(2) national sovereignty
d. freeing up of commercial / bourgeois elements (“possessive individualism”)
(1) English Civil War, Restoration, “The Glorious Revolution”
(a) Locke and slavery: not for English, but for Africans
(b) Pope and new consumables: coffee, chocolate, sugar
(2) Holland and freedom of religion, thought, and commerce
(a) Spinoza and democratic theory
(b) West India Company and colonialism: Dutch war for Brazil
2. Economic:
a. discovery of New World:
b. beginnings of colonial slavery system and “Atlantic triangle”
3. Military:
a. gunpowder, mercenaries, increasing discipline
b. Wars of Religion on the Continent
c. Piracy and struggles for control of the oceans
4. Cultural:
a. Luther’s theses (1517): and the Reformation
b. Council of Trent (1548-63): Counter-Reformation
c. overlapping and competing movements
(1) Baroque (1630-1750) [considered Rococo decadence at the
end]
(2) Classicism (1660-1716) [reign of Louis XIV]
B. 1700-1800: Acceleration
1. Political:
a. early: high point of absolutism
b. late: American and French revolutions
c. development of “governmentality” and statistics
2. Economic:
a. Imperial “free trade” and “Mercantilism”
b. colonial slave production primes the pump of English “Industrial Revolution”:
{“Williams thesis”; Robin Blackburn}
c. expansion into Asian and competition for world markets
3. Military: British defeat the French in North America and take India
4. Cultural:
a. the “Enlightenment” (Kant: “Age of Critique”)
(1) objective science [free from religious superstition]
(2) universal morality [free from religious dictates / dogma]
(3) autonomous art [free from religious censors]
b. the Encyclopedia: compilation of human arts: “look what we can do co-
operatively to improve human life if only we were free to do so”
C. 1800-1900: Consolidation
1. Political:
a. French struggles: Empire and Republic
b. American expansion and Civil War
c. Haitian Republic (1804): defeats Napoleon’s attempt to re-establish
slavery
2. Economic: increasing importance of industrial manufacture; end of slavery
3. Military:
a. citizen armies (Napoleon’s innovation);
b. French establish African colonies (1830 onwards)
c. “scramble for Africa” among all European powers1880s
4. Cultural:
a. novel, opera, and other bourgeois-consumable cultural commodities
b. Baudelaire: “painter of modern life”: urban life, dandyism, flaneurs
c. Nietzsche: criticism of modernity as socialist, feminine, mass mediocrity
II. High point: 1915-60:
A. Political:
1. Communism:
a. Russian Revolution (1917) [Allied Expeditionary Force, White Russians]
b. Stalinism (1927 {assassination of Trotsky} - 1953)
c. Cold War and construction of Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe
2. Far Right powers
a. Italian fascism (1922-45)
b. German National Socialism (1933-45)
c. Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Franco (1939-75)
3. Post-war US hegemony and the “Free World”: UN, NATO, SEATO
B. Economic:
1. mass production and consumption: (“Fordism”): the “black Model T”
2. labor unions and Taylorism:
a. wages vs. control of work-floor discipline
b. Marx / Foucault: discipline and the pre-conditions of socialism
c. “aristocracy of labor” and racism / sexism
3. government regulation and mass programs (“Keynesianism”)
a. “New Deal” {SEC, FCC, Social Security, etc.}
b. post WW II: US global hegemony
(1) Marshall Plan
(2) Bretton Woods
C. Military: the two
World Wars: mass industrial wars
D. Cultural:
1. Futurists: worship of speed, change
2. Modernists: reaction to mass production and consumption: perspectivism
and
relativism: change
in experience of space and time Matisse, Picasso, Stravisnki,
Schoenberg, Proust,
Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Saussure, Einstein, Mies van
der Rohe, Corbusier
3. Dada, Surrealism, Situationism: critiques from the “left”
4. Spengler, Heidegger: anti-modernist cultural critique from the right
III. Revolutions: 60s / early
70s:
A. Linkage of political-military-economic-cultural
(“New Left” theorizes “the system,” with
US in Vietnam as catalyst)
B. Notable events
1. End of colonialism in Africa and Asia
2. Civil rights (1963 March on Washington) and Black Power (SNCC)
3. Women’s liberation
4. 1968 as (failed) global revolution
5. Gay liberation (Stonewall: August 20, 1969)
6. “Hippies” and counter-culture: “sex, drugs, rock n’ roll”: but what
kinds?
IV. End: 1970-91 [details
to follow in our course]
A. Political-economic-military:
1. Beginning of the end: 1971: end of international gold standard
2. Middle of the end: Thatcherism / Reaganism
a. “neo-liberalism”: attack on New Deal
b. arms race and “spending them [Soviets] into bankruptcy”
3. End of the end: 1989-91: dismantling of Soviet Empire
B. Cultural
1. Decadence: 70s: e.g., “stadium rock”; booze and downers vs. 60s hallucinogens
2. Backlash: 80s/90s against blacks, women, gays, “the 60s,” “political
correctness”
3. Resistance / appropriation: punk, funk, rap
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