Among recent writers who have considered social action from a similar point of view are the Italian “microhistorians,” who also make networks essential elements in social relations, although they chiefly have in mind the smaller-scale webs people construct in local contexts and that do not require the abstract mediations of money or legitimacy. All the same their conclusions are close to ours. As Maurizio Gribaudi sums up the perspective that emerges from his attempt to account for the disconcerting appeal fascist ideas exercised for some Turin workers after World War I:
One thing at least social history has finally clarified: the bases of collective existence remain incomprehensible if we do not take account of the dynamics that flow together within them as the result of the interaction of individual motives … Only by starting from the individual level does it seem to us possible to grasp the contradictory quality and the richness of the social warp and woof, and together with it the mechanisms that generate its dynamic … [constituted by] the interaction of all the variables of the social panorama within which the relations of individuals and groups take place.18
Such a perspective discloses individuals as living within their social conditions by constantly making and remaking them, giving substance and life to boundaries and rules partly by transgressing them, and thereby revealing themselves to be at once the sources and the subverters of the social limits within which they think and act. The paradoxical situation this suggests has been captured by Edoardo Grendi’s perhaps initially jarring but highly suggestive and in the end unsurprising notion of the “normal exception.”19
To focus on networks of means as frameworks for social interchange locates human action in a space that is both constricted and open, because networks possess both a material and an intellectual dimension. The material dimension consists of the implements of work and communication and the physical objects that link the points on the web to each other, together with the constraints that develop in and through them; the intellectual one arises because of the element of abstraction that such interweavings require. I noted earlier in this chapter that networks of means require some abstract medium capable of being given concrete form in order to regulate access to the resources they develop, and provide a standard of comparison for the diverse objects and energies that flow between points within them. Networks of means could not exist if humans did not have the capacity to operate by way of such abstractions, and they provide scope to develop it, contributing to what Simmel called “the intellectualization of the will” that takes place when people act by way of “long chains of connection.” Such relations thus give scope to the peculiarly human power to stand back from whatever conditions or relations shape the lives of individuals in a given moment and to submit them to reflection, at once limiting their force and finding within them possibilities that had not appeared before. To be sure the freedom gained in these ways is never complete and abstraction and reflection can undermine it even as they make space for it. But it is from within this space that people put their own stamp on the world they inhabit. It was the powers humans derive from their capacity for abstraction, together with money’s status as its most widely diffused embodiment, that led the eighteenth-century writer Bernard Mandeville to regard money, for all the evil that may be done by way of it, as perhaps the greatest and most typically human of all humanity’s inventions, “a thing more skillfully adapted to the whole Bent of our Nature, than any other of human Contrivance.”20 Networks extend, amplify, and invigorate human activity, but they are not themselves the source of the subjective agency that sets this activity in motion; that source lies in human desire, will, and reason. Whether it be a market, a state, a profession, a large corporation, the Republic of Letters, NBC, or the Internet, networks of means only exist in practice through the actions of the individuals who animate them.
To understand networks in this way is to reject out of hand the claims recently made on behalf of action network theory to the effect that networks themselves are sources of agency (or, in some versions, that no identifiable source of agency can be distinguished in network relations). To be sure human doings and fates are often affected by non-human powers, including earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and the geographical features of particular settings such as rivers, lakes, coastlines and mountains (I place considerable emphasis on such factors below). In addition, the structures humans create to pursue their ends – markets, states, instruments of communication – all sometimes impede or distort the goals they are expected to serve, leading to unintended consequences including wars, economic depressions, and the degradation of social relations. But if people often fail to achieve the aims they pursue through these means, the reasons lie in the complex mix of motives and strategies that interact and clash within them, making their outcomes difficult to control or predict. None of these results justify giving both beings that possess and exercise will and reason and entities that are devoid of them the same status as agents.21
Many characteristic qualities of modern bourgeois life testify to its kinship with this human faculty of abstract reflection, liberated from the leading-strings by which people in many times and places have sought to constrain it, and applied to the concrete situations where action takes place. That bourgeois life rests on a mix of concrete and abstract dimensions is one reason why (as I will suggest below) the first great theorist of bourgeois society could be the idealist philosopher Hegel, whose way of comprehending every phenomenon of existence was to analyze the interaction of abstract and concrete determinations within it. Marx would adopt this analytic in a different way when he sought the key to capitalism and its history through dissecting the commodity and the social relations it represented into concrete and abstract dimensions, each the product of a corresponding form of labor, one producing coats or shoes, the second exchangeable value. Simmel drew on these Hegelian and Marxist themes in writing The Philosophy of Money, making them less metaphysical than in Hegel, and less teleological than in Marx. In keeping with his title he sought to address certain speculative questions about human nature that I leave aside here, but we remain close to him in not considering “capitalism” as a system or organism with an internal logic or dynamic that underlies its various appearances and sets it on some internally generated developmental trajectory. Viewing modern history as if capitalism had such a nature has fostered many failed efforts to grasp and direct historical evolution, foreshadowed in Marx’s own attempt to predict the future collapse of bourgeois society in the great book he could never finish, Capital, at whose historical position and theoretical dilemmas we will look more closely later on. Not capital, but money, conceived in the broad manner Simmel proposed, provides the best optic through which to examine the emergence and development of both bourgeois life and modernity.
Such an approach does, I acknowledge, seek to recognize the evolution of bourgeois life as the development of innate and in some degree universal human powers, and it may point toward some reasons why its basic structures, as opposed to the particular attitudes and assumptions characteristic of its agents in given times and places, have never been superseded. But it also opens a window on many of the tensions and contradictions that such a form of life entails. How the resulting pressures and strains have been confronted, developed, and worked out over time is a large part of the history of the subject to which this book is dedicated.
An outline of what follows
Before closing this Introduction I owe prospective readers a brief preliminary outline of the chapters that will follow it, together with some of the ways they seek to carry on the interpretive project just sketched out. Part I aims to develop a comparison of the historical trajectories of Britain (chiefly England), France, and Germany, plotted in relation to the differing configurations assumed by the three major types of networks in each place, and the distinct character of bourgeois existence that developed in relation to them. In general Chapters 2, 3, and 4, focus on the period before 1850 and Chapters 5, 6, and 7 on forms of economic an
d political modernity that emerged after that date, but the distinctive shape of the three histories requires that each be treated in chapters with somewhat different chronological frames. The book’s overall temporal boundaries are roughly 1750 and World War I, but these are often transgressed: the patterns exhibited by the comparisons have many earlier roots that cannot be ignored, nor can the later unfolding of the developments I consider. That a book focused on the “long nineteenth century” ends with some observations involving the place of the Internet in the history of networks may raise some historians’ eyebrows but its aim is to suggest the continuing significance of the story I seek to tell.
Britain here emerges as the place where geography and history combined to afford all three kinds of networks early and extensive development, giving it a precocious modernity and putting a special stamp on both its middle classes and its aristocracy, no less conscious of their social difference than elsewhere, but all the same sharing many more orientations and attitudes than did their counterparts in other places. That the category of “bourgeois” had to be imported from France in the nineteenth century is one sign that the common participation of town and country people in national networks made social identities more permeable and destinies less sharply divergent there; the shift from teleocracy to autonomy in network relations occurred earlier and more spontaneously than anywhere else. The state was no less important than in other places, in some ways it was even more so, but state power was shared with people outside official institutions much more than in France or Germany, and many initiatives that required government sponsorship elsewhere grew out of private actions and relations. Both England’s role as the pioneer of industrial innovation and its later overshadowing by the continental countries, especially Germany, were rooted in the conditions that made all these special features of its history possible.
Differently situated, France followed a path where the royal project of political integration had to confront far greater resistance from already established local powers, and where economic geography combined with this political opposition to retard the establishment of a national market until well into the nineteenth century. Only the coming of railroads after 1850 brought France’s regions into the kind of effective proximity that England exhibited much earlier. The compromises into which the monarchy was forced by this situation generated a baroque structure whose inner contradictions no reform program could ever overcome. Much of the reason why France was the only country to erupt in nationwide revolution at the end of the eighteenth century lay in this situation, not in the “rise” of its bourgeoisie. The latter would long bear the marks of its formation inside an Old Regime where the politics of privilege generated deep and lasting social antagonisms, and where the state felt called on to foster economic innovations because most private individuals had little incentive to undertake them.
In the German-speaking lands both economic and political integration were long absent, producing a situation where local independence reached heights attained nowhere else, and where the absence of an effective central authority opened up unique opportunities for territorial states to seek expansion of their reach and power against their rivals. The rulers sought support for these projects in various ways, of which one of the most significant was developing a body of literate officials to bring administrative unity to their domains; set free of many local connections through their work and the education it demanded, the bureaucrats became in many ways the first modern bourgeois in the German lands, providing the core of the group later called Bildungsbürger. Everywhere dependent for their positions at once on culture and on state power, the group as a whole was tinged by the involvement of its Prussian section in the Hohenzollern recognition that the German situation offered special rewards to a state able to develop a powerful army, providing the ground on which the country developed the characteristic Janus-faced orientation toward Geist and Macht that long marked its history. Paradoxically it was in Germany, the least “developed” of the three major European nations, that members of the Bürgertum – these same administrators and intellectuals more than businessmen – most self-consciously pursued a process of social transformation, becoming the pioneers of a new form of bürgerliche Gesellschaft that was not yet modern bourgeois life but that tended toward it in visible ways. It was in Germany that the bourgeois character of modern society was most self-consciously asserted and theorized, but it was there too that the bürgerliche legal and political order proved to be the least stable, the most vulnerable to tensions and conflicts generated by the growing weight of relations at a distance in everyday life.
These contrasts in the three countries’ histories must not be allowed to hide some significant similarities between them, however, and in particular the shared rhythm of transformation that made the decades following the abortive revolutions of 1848 the moment when newly powerful networks greatly heightened the importance of distant and mediated relationships in society as a whole. As I will try to show below, the developing connections between people at a distance effected earlier by such linkages as international trade, the putting-out system, urban growth, improved transport, “public opinion,” and Enlightenment criticism encouraged the emergence of “autonomous” principles in opposition to the ordained or teleocratic ones supposed to regulate economic, political, and cultural interchanges. But traditional structures, practices, and beliefs still retained much of their power, reasserting themselves even in the face of revolutionary crises and the beginnings of industrial innovation, so that overall the decades between 1750 and 1850 were an age of instability but not of lasting reorganization; only the age of railroads and telegraphs that began after the mid century brought the main lines of a new and more distinctly modern form of life. Like other features of the general interpretation offered here, this one is not radically new, but I hope to show that the effects of spreading and thickening networks in the decades after 1850 were more pervasive than has usually been recognized, encompassing Britain as well as the continent, and extending to a whole series of crucial modern phenomena, all of which followed a similar drumbeat of change.
Some of these phenomena are the subjects of the chapters that make up Part II, “Calculations and Lifeworlds.” The topics assembled under this rubric are varied to be sure: changes in time measurement and in the forms of money and banking, Marx’s attempt to subsume modern economic relations within a particular theorization of capitalism, relations between men and women, the emergence and decline of the strict moral regime often dubbed “Victorian,” and the special but unstable prominence of Jews in European life. What links them together, I will try to show, is that each displays a pattern of development orchestrated by the evolution of networks of means and in particular by their marked expansion and thickening after 1850. The most powerful force in establishing modern ways of reckoning time was the advent of the railroads, but it was not technological change in itself that made the difference, since the deepening importance of distant relations had been creating pressures to standardize the length of days and hours for over a century before. What makes the history of money so significant in our overall story is its demonstration of how incompletely modern forms of economic exchange remained in the period before 1850, given that most of the money in circulation was still private in nature and widely varying in its value. Marx’s economic theory was ingenious and brilliant, but its deep coloration by the regime of manufacture still dominant in the first half of the nineteenth century gave it a peculiar and limited perspective on the relations between capitalism and modern mechanized industry. Despite the emancipatory hopes fostered by Enlightenment and political reform, traditional forms of both gender relations and morality took on a more rigid cast from late in the eighteenth century, fed by the expansion of markets, state functions, and public discussion; but the changed conditions brought by the further evolution of these same extended connections in the age of railroads, telegraphs, and the large-scale political organizations they enabled, allowed the li
beralizing potential bottled up earlier to find increasing realization. For Jews the story was reversed as in a mirror: long practiced in acting through distant ties and linkages, Jews achieved remarkable degrees of both prominence and advancement in the era when most sections of society were only beginning to become involved in such relations, but their comparative advantage became a liability once people formerly focused chiefly on local contexts and relations were drawn into more extended connections and became able to draw social and political power from them.
The same perspective underlies the accounts offered in Part III, devoted to culture as a separate realm of intellectual and artistic activity, the guise it took on from late in the eighteenth century. In Chapter 12 I argue that a main reason for culture’s acquiring this status as a sphere apart was that literature, painting, and music came to occupy a larger position in public consciousness as a consequence of the remarkable expansion in the implements and institutions that supported them – publishing, museums and galleries, public concerts. The new forms and institutions of culture had a number of consequences, one of which was to contribute to the exaltation of art and artists that developed in the age of romanticism; at the same time, the more public and anonymous relations between cultural producers and their audiences opened up new spaces for private and ungoverned encounters between individuals and cultural materials, creating both new opportunities for individuals to draw on culture for personal development and perceived dangers for society in the reduced power of oversight these changes entailed. The altered situation of culture simultaneously contributed to giving prominence to the distinction and even opposition between “high” and “popular” culture that developed from around 1800, in good part because only elite cultural forms participated in the expanding cultural networks at first, giving their producers and distributors new connections to their audience and a heightened position in public life. Here too however the second half of the century brought a turn in a different direction, the subject of Chapter 13: as the continued extension and thickening of networks of culture and communication began to have an impact on popular cultural forms too, these began to exhibit powers and energies they had lacked before, weakening the separation between levels this expansion had at first encouraged. In this way the stage was set for the ongoing transformation of culture and its relations to other regions of life that has continued down to our own day. Modern culture at every level has become a culture of means, inseparable from the large-scale media within which it is created and diffused. In some ways it has become the most open and democratic of the spheres of modern existence, alas not always with effects that deserve to be cheered.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 5