Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Notes

  1 Introduction: ends and means

  1 On the decline of historical faith in the class narrative of the Revolution’s origins, see William Doyle, “A Consensus and Its Collapse: Writings on Revolutionary Origins since 1939,” in his Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford and New York, 1980; 2nd edn., 1988), 7–40. The first strong blast against the traditional view was Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1964). Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (New York, 1973), 247. The textbook referred to is R. R. Palmer, A History of the Modern World (New York, many editions, the later ones written in collaboration with Joel Colton). For 1830 see David Pinkney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, 1972). I will return to the content of this and the following two paragraphs in Part I, where sources are cited.

  2 Among historians who have recognized the limits of bourgeois power in the nineteenth century is Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to The Great War (New York, 1981). But Mayer, declaring himself to be a “lumper” rather than a “splitter,” concludes from this that, since the middle classes did not rule, power must still have rested in the hands of old nobles. This is to fall into the error of petitio principi described above, assuming that some class must always dominate.

  3 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore et al. (London and New York, 2nd enlarged edn., 1990). See especially the sections “The tool as intensified means,” and “Money as the purest example of the tool,” 209–11.

  4 Among recent examples to capitalize on this see: Pierre Musso, ed., Réseaux et societé (Paris, 2003); Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London, 2006). I will return to Benkler’s book in the Conclusion.

  5 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (London and New York, 1979, 1996).

  6 The connection being developed here between markets and states shares some ground with the general current of thinking employed by Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, “Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas, Practices, and Governance,” in their edited volume Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge and New York, 2004), esp. 1–5. They use the term “governs” instead of “regulates,” however, which seems to me open to a possible confusion between limits effected by impersonal conditions and ones that may involve the intentions of actors. All the same, networks impose restraints on those who operate by way of them, as the price of the benefits they bring, a point to which I will return in the discussion of bourgeois occupations below.

  7 Identifying legitimacy as what Daniel Bell calls the “axial principle” of the political sphere is practically the only thing that the approach to the separate realms of bourgeois existence proposed here shares with the one he employs in “The Disjunction of Realms,” his introduction to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York, 1978; new edn., 1996), 11. The opposition he posits between the economy and what he calls “the culture” seems to me far too rigid and one-sided. I argued that the relationship between them is much closer and more complex in Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York, 1986; reprinted, Baltimore and London, 1999); see 391–92 for a comment on Bell’s views. In addition, his understanding of the nature and claims of modern selfhood seems to me similarly one-sided. For a different account see my book The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., and New York, 2005).

  8 Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book i. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford and New York, 1958), 78–79.

  9 I have attempted to appreciate the ambiguities of this relationship in Bohemian Paris, cited just above (n. 7).

  10 The shift was indicated by the description Bishop Sprat gave of the Royal Society of London in 1667. Its members, he said “have freely admitted men of different Religions, Countries, and professions of life,” since their aim was not “to lay the Foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or ProtestantPhilosophy, but a Philosophy of Mankind.” Quoted (from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Atom and Void [Princeton, 1989]) by David A. Hollinger in his introduction to Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996), 14–15.

  11 See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750, (New Haven and London, 1995).

  12 Letter 80; Penguin edn., trans. C. J. Betts (1973), 158.

  13 Quoted by David Newsome, The Victorain World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997), 73.

  14 As readers of The New York Times were pithily reminded in 2006: “During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: ‘‘Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.’” Quoted by Slavoj Zizek, “Defenders of the Faith,” New York Times, Op.-Ed. page, March 12, 2006.

  15 See Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate: the Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1978), ch. 7.

  16 The original Marxist position is still broadly represented for instance by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York, 1984); in their view when states and administrators take the lead in economic and institutional reform they serve “as a kind of surrogate bourgeoisie” (176). Lenore O’Boyle regards the middle class as a plurality of elements spread out between the aristocracy and the peasantry in “The Middle Class in Western Europe, 1815–48,” American Historical Review 71 (1966), 826–45, citing others who take similar views. For attempts to solve the problem in the third, “cultural” way see Jürgen Kocka, “The European Pattern and the German Case,” ch. 1 of Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Kocka and Allan Mitchell (Oxford and Providence, RI, 1993), Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris, 1963), discussed in Chapter 6, and David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn., Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2003), 161 (Blackbourn’s views seem to have evolved since the 1980s). The original theory of a “style of life” as giving unity to diverse forms of bourgeois existence was Edmond Goblot, La Barrière et le niveau: étude sociologique de la bourgeoisie française (Paris, 1925).

  17 For a somewhat different critique of the attempt to find the unity of bourgeois in a shared culture, especially as applied to Jürgen Kocka’s and his colleagues’ approach to the German Bürgertum, see Jonathan Sperber, “Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World,” Journal of Modern History 69 (June, 1997), 271–97.

  18 From Maurizio Gribaudi’s introduction to E. Beltrami, S. Cavallo, E. Gennuso, M. Gentile, G. Gribaudi, and M. Gribaudi, Relazioni sociali e strategie individuali in ambiente urbano: Torino nel Novecento, Ricerca Coordinata da G. Levi (Torino, 1981). For a similar perspective from a philosophical viewpoint see Bernard Williams, “Making Sense of Humanity,” in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge and New York, 1995), esp. 85–86. And from a sociological one, Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud, “Individualisme,” in Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie (Paris, 1982), esp. 287, as well as Bourdon’s “Individualisme et holisme dans les sciences sociales,” in Sur l’individualisme, ed. Pierre Birnbaum
and Jean Leca (Paris, 1986).

  19 Edoardo Grendi, “Repenser la micro-histoire?” in Jeux d’échelles: la micro-analyse à l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris, 1996), 233–43, originally in Quaderni storici 86 (1994), 539–49. For a similar perspective, see Simona Cerutti, “La Construction des catégories sociales,” in Passés recomposés: champs et chantiers de l’histoire, ed. Jean Boutier and Dominique Julia (Paris, 1995), 224–34, and her contribution to Jeux d’échelles.

  20 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, by Bernard Mandeville, in two volumes, with a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by F. B. Kaye, vol. ii (Oxford, 1924), 353.

  21 The claims made in a recent volume, Urban Assemblages: How Actor Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, ed. Ignacio Farias and Thomas Bender (New York, 2010), that Thomas P. Hughes’s careful study of the construction of electric generating grids, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore and London, 1983) supports the ideas of “ANT” deserve to be firmly rejected. Hughes’s conclusion that “The style of each system was found to be based on entrepreneurial drive and decision, economic principles, legislative constraints or supports, institutional structures, historical contingencies, and geographical factors, both human and natural” fits what is said above in the text; to claim his work in support of a theory that denies the difference between human and non-human agency is somewhere between disingenuous and guileful. The chief inspiration for “action network theory” has been Bruno Latour, who bases his understanding of network relations on a theory of language as a network of signs that owes much to Jacques Derrida’s ideas about speech and writing; see Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005). I have argued elsewhere that Derrida’s attempt to portray human subjects as unable to exercise independent agency because the linguistic practices through which they seek to establish stable relations with themselves and with the world impose their own structures on perception and expression rests on a misreading of Saussurean linguistics and cannot account for the actual ways people employ language and speech, and I believe that the same arguments point to the incoherence of Latour’s thinking about non-linguistic relations. See The Idea of the Self, ch. 18.

  22 Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York, 1949), 49–112.

  23 E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge and New York, 1981; 2nd edn., 1987). For a more recent and powerful restatement of this position see Joseph M. Bryant, “The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31:4 (2006), 403–44, where much literature is cited. The views advanced by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), are quite distinct from those developed by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), but both belong to the globalizing trend mentioned above; for notions close to Chakrabarty’s see After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC, and London, 2003). I will have a word to say about some arguments advanced in the last work in Chapter 2.

  2 Precocious integration: England

  1 See, for instance, Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford and New York, 1984), who quote Engels on 411 in order to insist that he got things the wrong way round.

  2 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), chapter 2. For views that make the age aristocratic, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Practice, and Political Power During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge and New York, 1985), and John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: the Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge and New York, 1984). Against this, Paul Langford, Public Life and Propertied Englishmen, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). Langford argues that aristocrats in the later eighteenth century adopted increasingly bourgeois values in their behavior, religion, and culture.

  3 For the persisting aristocratic dominance see David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: the Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester, 1980), ch. 1, esp. 26–36, for politics, and passim for the urban involvement of the elite; and for the later decline the same author’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New York, 1990). For the fortunes, W. D. Rubinstein, “Wealth, Elites, and the Class Structure of Modern Britain,” ch. 3 of his book Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Brighton and New York, 1987), esp. 54. For the argument about industrial decline and values, Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge and New York, 1981). For similar themes, Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), esp. ch. 2. For a fundamental critique of these notions see W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1990 (London and New York, 1993).

  4 For transport and the rivers in France and England see Rick Szostak, The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution: a Comparison of England and France (Montreal, London, and Buffalo, 1991), esp. 55–88. Adam Smith understood most of the advantages geography gave to the development of the English economy; see The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library edn.), 393.

  5 My understanding of the things noted in the second part of this paragraph owes much to my long association with the eminent medievalist Joseph R. Strayer, in whose courses I assisted as a young instructor. See his general history (with D. C. Munro), The Middle Ages, 395–1500 (New York, 1959) and The Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, 1970). Also S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional History (Oxford, 1965).

  6 Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 40.

  7 There is much good information on the transport networks in Szostak, The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution. For the London road connections, Roy Porter, London: a Social History (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 135.

  8 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford and New York 1976), 119, 77–78. Also Porter, London, ch. 6, 133 for Defoe, and 138 for the figures on Newcastle coal. For London’s effect on England’s economic development see E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York, 1969), and more recently T. C. Barker, “Le Grand Avantage de la petite Angleterre,” in L’Économie française du XVIIIIe au XXe siècle, Perspectives nationales et internationales (Mélanges offerts à François Crouzet), ed. Jean-Pierre Poussou (Paris, 2000), 477–99.

  9 Smith is cited in Bernard Lepetit, The Pre-industrial Urban System: France, 1740–1840, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge and New York, 1994), 84.

  10 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), 231 and 213 (where Richard Grassby is quoted).

  11 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), 59–62.

  12 Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, esp. ch. 9 (257 for the quotation).