PLEASE NOTE this is a 2014-15 reading list—the precise content may change in
future years.
Week 2: Modernity as Experience
Marshall Berman died in 2013. His 1982 essay/polemic has become a classic. This in
itself is interesting because he argued that if you want to understand the 20th century you
would be best off reading the works of 19th century writers. Why? Because those writers
were living through rather than simply studying the changes that gave rise to the sort of
society that the 20th century would become; and because social science in the 20th century
had become so institutionalised and fixated on trying to emulate the natural sciences that
it now lacked the imaginative sympathy required to take the measure of the world it was
supposed to be studying. He also suggested that poets and novelists may be as good as if
not better than social scientists at diagnosing our current condition.
Bernard Yack though issued a word of warning: if modernity does refer to a
‘mode of experience’, are we justified in according modernity a temporal character? Is
there a modern ‘epoch’ or ‘age’ of which art, politics, economics and science are all
‘embodiments’?
*Marshall Berman, 1982. All that is Solid Melts into Air. Verso.
*Yack, B., 1997. The Fetishism of Modernities, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997,
intro, ch.1.
Week 3. The unanchoring of the individual I: the rational self
Weber’s protestant ethic study is ostensibly an attempt to ‘explain’ or at least account in
some way for, the emergence of the ‘spirit of capitalism’. But while that is true, its heart
is a claim about the emergence of a new type of human being, one who is capable of
disciplining him or herself, of deferring gratification. We can call this figure the rational
self and the innovation it brought about ‘rationalised conduct’; although we should bear
in mind that this is inevitably a simplification, for the rational self had another half,
passion, with rationality consisting in the capacity to suppress passion. But Weber’s
point is that the result of this is what Münch has called an attitude of ‘instrumental
activism’, one in which the self asserts itself by acting on and thereby transforming the
world. The transformative, revolutionary character of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was, of course,
the thing that fascinated Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Weber finds
the roots of this ‘detached but active’ self in Protestantism, though others have located it
elsewhere, not least in early modern philosophies of Descartes and Locke.
*Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ch.2
* ---- 2001. ‘Body and Soul’, in The Disciplinary Revolution. University of Chicago Press.
Chapter 1.
Weber, ‘The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’, in From Max Weber.
Weber, M., ‘Puritanism and Confucianism’, in The Religion of China
Gorski, P. 1999. ‘Calvinism and State Formation in Early Modern Europe‘, in G.
Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Cornell
University Press.
Hirschman, A. 1977. The Passions and the Interests.
*Munch, R. 2000. The Ethics of Modernity. Introduction and last chapter.
Schluchter, W., and Roth, G., 1979. Max Weber’s Vision of History, Univ. of California
Press, 1979
Scaff, L. 1990. Fleeing the Iron Cage, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Goldmann, H. 1988. Max Weber and Thomas Mann. University of California Press.
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self. Chs. 8 and 14.
Turner, B. 1991. Max Weber: From History to Modernity.
Turner, C. 1992. Modernity and Culture in the Work of Max Weber.
Week 4: the re-anchoring of the individual: the money economy and the market
At the end of the Protestant ethic Weber said that ‘care for external goods’ had become
an iron cage, suggesting that the instrumental activist self whose emergence he charted
had become a prisoner of the world he helped to create. Elsewhere he describes
capitalism as ‘the most fateful force of modern life’. Note that he doesn’t talk of a
‘capitalist society’ – there is still room to see politics and culture as autonomous spheres
of activity. Nevertheless, the ‘tremendous cosmos’ of the modern economy was real
enough, and it made people dependent on one another in ways that were historically
new: just as the Lutheran sought a relationship with God mediated by the word, so, it
was argued, the relationship between human beings was increasingly mediated by money
and by the market. This raises the question of the quality of that dependence. A view
popular in the 18th century was that trading relationships, grounded in the pursuit of
interest, had a civilising influence on people who might otherwise be inclined to
encounter one another as passion-filled antagonists. Trading with strangers increased the
sophistication and range of sympathies of a society. There was an inherent link between
‘commerce’ and ‘virtue’. But by the early twentieth century this optimistic view of
commerce had been challenged by Marx (the property less masses have nothing to sell
but their labour power), de Tocqueville (the absence of natural hierarchies that bind
people leaves people isolated) and Durkheim (market relations are anomic, unregulated).
A more nuanced and complicated account of the relationship between individuals in a
money economy is contained in Simmel’s massive Philosophy of Money. Simmel sees
the money economy not as the stage on which people pursue their own interests as far as
they will carry them, but as a structure of interdependence that at the same time
strengthens individuality.
*Simmel, G. The Philosophy of Money ch.6 [section on ‘the style of life’]
*---- ‘Group Expansion and the Development of Individuality’, in D. Levine (ed) Georg
Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago.
----, ‘Fashion’, in Simmel on Culture.
Campbell, C. 1983. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism.
Ingham, G. 2008. Capitalism, Polity. ch. 5 (‘market exchange’)
Elias, N. [1939] 1978. ‘Afterword: Social Constraint and Self-constraint’, in The Civilising
Process.
Week 5: the unanchoring of the individual II: the autonomous political actor
Political liberalism, in contrast to economic liberalism, presupposes a political actor with
the sovereign capacity to act but also to reason autonomously, that is, to abstract from
his or her determinate involvements in those social relations that make him or her
‘dependent’. For Immanuel Kant, dependence is exhibited when we are subordinate to
other people but also when we pursue or own ‘desires’ or wants (we are then dependent
on the means of satisfying them being available). We are most autonomous and free, on
the other hand, when we can reason. Kant thought that if we did so we would discover a
basic principle of duty, an idea he set down in his treatise on the metaphysics of morals.
But he also wrote a short text, ‘What is Enlightenment’, which proposes an idea of an
individual who is ‘rational’ not because he or she can transform the world or subordinate
nature to human purposes (e.g. through science and technology) but because he or she
can communicate rationally with others, and form opinions that lie beyond ‘self-interest’.
*Immanuel Kant, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge.
*Michel Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?, in The Foucault Reader.
Hannah Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’ in Between Past and Future
Ciaran Cronin, 2003. ‘Kant's Politics of Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, Volume 41, Number 1: 51-8.
Daniel Gordon, 1994. Citizens without Sovereignty.
Christopher Clark, 2006. ‘Conversation’, in Iron Kingdom.
Jurgen Habermas, [1962] 1982. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
MIT Press. pp.1-26.
Alan Ryan, 1993. ‘Liberalism’, in P. Pettit et al (eds) A Companion to Contemporary
Political Philosophy. Blackwell.
Georg Simmel, 1958. ‘Individual and Society in Eighteenth and nineteenth century views
of life’, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, pp.58-86.
[https://ia600307.us.archive.org/33/items/sociologyofgeorg030082mbp/sociologyofgeo
rg030082mbp.pdf]
Peter Wagner, 2008. ‘Modernity and the Question of Freedom’, in Modernity as
Experience and Interpretation, Cambridge: Polity. ch. 2.
Week 6. The re-anchoring of the individual II: the state and the shaping of selves
Foucault reminded us that Kant’s idea of enlightenment – have the courage to make
public use of your own (private) reason – was still consistent with loyalty to the Prussian
state of Frederick the Great. ‘Loyalty’ meant loyalty to one’s given position in society.
But the age of enlightened absolutism was also the age in which modern states began to
do more than demand loyalty from subjects who otherwise remained as they were; they
were developing ways of affecting the lives of those subjects, and ultimately of creating
new types of people. The extent to which this was a conscious ‘project’ is disputed, but
there is little doubt that in the 20th century, this capacity greatly expanded, even if the
extent of its use varied.
*Wagner, P. 1994. ‘Building Iron Cages’, in A Sociology of Modernity.
*Mann, M. ‘The Autonomous Power of the State: its origins, mechanisms and results’, in
European Journal of Sociology. Vol.25 (2) 185-213.
*Michel Foucault, ‘Docile Bodies’, in The Foucault Reader.
Foucault, M. 'The Subject and Power', in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault:
Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Burchell, G., et al, 1991. The Foucault Effect, Chicago.
Hacking, I. 1991. ‘Making up People’, in Schneewind et al Rethinking Individualism.
Gordon, C. 1987. ‘The Soul of the Citizen’, in Lash and Whimster (eds) Max Weber,
Rationality and Modernity.
Castells, M. 2010. The Information Age . 2nd edition. Foreword.
Lefort, C. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Polity.
Offe, C. 1996. Modernity and the State. Polity.
Pierson, C. 1996. The Modern State
Poggi, G. 1982. The State: its development and prospects
Poggi, G. 1978 The Development of the Modern State (last chapter)
J. Hall (ed.) States in History.
Mitchell Dean, 1998. Governmentality
Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Penguin.
John O’Neill, 1986. ‘The Disciplinary Society from Weber to Foucault’, British Journal of
Sociology. Weber and Foucault on Discipline’, British
Weber, Max 1948. ‘The Meaning of Discipline’, in From Max Weber.
Week 7: modes of individualisation and collectivisation: communism as
civilisation
Much of the Foucault-inspired work on governmentality has been about has been about
the modern state’s capacity to use infrastructural power in order to generate disciplined
individuals with the capacity to discipline themselves. One challenge to this view is
Gorski’s account of a ‘disciplinary revolution from below’. An interesting variation is
revealed by current work on the Soviet Union; in particular, by work which suggests that
the Soviet Union was less a collectivist utopia than a more complicated civilizational
effort, one in which the creation of a new kind of individuality was prominent.
*Oleg Kharkhordin, 1999. The Individual and the Collective in Russia: a study of
practices [course extracts]
*----, 1995. ‘The Soviet individual: genealogy of a dissimulating animal’, in Mike
Featherstone (ed) Global Modernities [course extracts]
*Alexei Yurchak 2006. Everything was Forever until it was no more.
Arnason, J.P. 1994. The Future that Failed. London: Routledge.
Claude Lefort, 1988, ‘The Logic of Totalitarianism’, in The Political Forms of Modern
Society. Polity
---- 2007. Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy.
Talcott Parsons, 1951. ‘Types of Social Structure’ in The Social System.
Mabel Berezin, 1997. Making the Fascist Self.
Gary Bruce, The Firm. The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010
Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2005. Tear off the Masks: identity and imposture in 20th century
Russia. chs. 1 and 5
----, Everyday Stalinism, 1999. E-book.
Wendy Goldman 2011. ‘Family Secrets’ in Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and
Terror in Stalin’s Russia.
Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul’ in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed) 2000. Stalinism: new
directions
Svetlana Boym, ‘Living in Common Places’, in Common Places: mythologies of everyday
life in Russia.
Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison [paradox of artistic freedom under communism]
Vaclav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Living in Truth.
Stephen Kotkin, 1995. ‘Speaking Bolshevik’, in Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as
Civilisation, pp.198-237.
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind [classic account from the 1950s]
Week 8: the unanchoring of the individual III: the passionate self
One of Weber’s contemporaries was Freud (1856-1939), and indeed much of the debate
about the character of modernity in the 20th century revolves around the two poles
defined by their work. One of Freud’s many concerns was less the rational self than the
passionate self. For some interpreters of Freud the problem of modernity was how to
liberate the individual; for others, however, it was how passionate modern selves could
form coherent ‘communities’, communities that they needed if individuals were not to be
cast adrift. One of the most distinctive voices at that time was that of the social theorist
Philip Rieff, whose attack on ‘therapeutic culture’ gave rise to a generation of cultural
diagnosis. Rieff’s argument, derived from Freud’s writings on religion, was that, in the
absence of powerful, religiously grounded ‘interdictions’, modern human beings were
capable of forming merely ‘negative communities’, temporary, fleeting connections.
Such a situation was, he believed, unsustainable.
*Rieff, P. 1966. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Chicago University Press.
*MacIntyre, A. 1980. After Virtue, Aldershot: Duckworth. ch.9
Bell, D 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Lasch, C. 1972. The Culture of Narcissism
Sennett, R. 1977. The Fall of Public Man
Freud, S. Civilisation and its Discontents
Manning, P. 2004. Freud and American Sociology.
Riesman, D. The Lonely Crowd
Seligman, A. 2000. Modernity’s Wager: self, authority and transcendence. Princeton
University Press.
Turner, C. 2011. ‘Sacred Sociology: the life and times of Philip Rieff’, Theory, Culture
and Society.
Week 9: the re-anchoring of the individual III: nationalism
For Rieff, in modernity ‘sacred order’ is no longer able to provide the basis for ‘social
order’, and modern ‘culture’ is an anti-culture, signalled by the ‘fact’ that its greatest
artistic achievements acts of negation, experimentation and transgression. The only
communities it can create are ‘negative communities’: profane and therefore ephemeral.
One challenge to this view is that the need to ‘belong’ has remained strong enough to
generate forms of community that do meet the needs of a passionate human being. The
most prominent of these is nationalism. The literature nationalism is enormous but here
we ask simply: is national belonging the product of modern forms of institutional
development (Gellner) or does it have its roots in pre-modern sensibilities that are strong
enough to withstand the disembedding forces of modern economic and political
development?
*Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
*Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Kohn, Hans. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origins and Background. New
York: Macmillan, 1944.
Llobera, J. 2004. The God of Modernity. Oxford: Berg.
Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Week 10: the idea of vocation and the fate of selfhood: Weber
Somehow, as always, Max Weber’s lecture, ‘Science as a Vocation’, even today almost
100 years after it was first given, manages to crystallise these themes and many more.
The opportunities and burdens of freedom, the unavoidability of choice, the availability
of institutional and organisational ways of avoiding such choice, the decline of organised
religion but the rise of ‘new gods’, the themes of impersonal bureaucracy and the
meaning of ‘personality’, these and many more are brought together.
*Weber, M. ‘Science as a Vocation and Profession’, in I. Velody and P. Lassman (eds),
Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation, London: Unwin Hyman 1989, OR in C. Wright
Mills and Hans Gerth (eds) From Max Weber, London: RKP, 1948