Making of the Modern World – Week 1

Question 1

Key Themes:

Answer 1

1. Becoming “modern”
2. Stages of modernity
3. Explaining modernity

Question 2

Becoming “modern”:

Answer 2

Nation – distinctively modern
Capital – impacts on economy
Science – developments in science
Empire – building of different empires

Question 3

“Modernisation”

Answer 3

1. Secular power and authority operating within the boundaries of nation-states
2. Economics based on money, large scale production and consumption of commodities, and private property
3. Traditional social order (inflexible and hierarchal) giving way to more dynamic one, including a new sexual division of labour. New class and gender relationships.
4. Decline of religious world views. Rational and individual motivations celebrated and became more common
5. New cultural formations, including new forms of knowledge (including new ways of producing, validating and classifying knowledge)

Question 4

Stages of modernity:

Chevalier de Lamarck:

Answer 4

Modernity seen to begin with Lamarck

Species had not all been created at the same time but changed and developed

Lamarck’s ideas became known as progressive development and eventually as “evolution” – a term from embryology and meant the “unfolding” of the embryo along its pre-set pathways – ‘transformist’

Question 5

Henri de Saint-Simon:

Answer 5

One of the founders of social science

Very much a product of the Enlightenment

“Social physiology”

Question 6

Auguste Comte:

Answer 6

His cours de philosophie positive, announced the “great fundamental law of the development of human thought”

Comte coined the term “sociology” to describe his science of society

Saw societies as organisms that evolved according to national laws and like animals, followed a pre-determined path of development

Argued all knowledge must pass through three stages

Question 7

Comtes’ three stages of knowledge:

Answer 7

1. Theological
2. Metaphysical
3. Positive

Question 8

Evolutionary Process and Racism:

Answer 8

Became easy for racists to adapt the idea of evolutionary progress to ‘explain’ the supposed inferiority of non-white people

Question 9

Explaining Modernity:

Karl Marx:

Answer 9

German economic and political philosopher

19th century thinker

Marx argued societies defined by their mode of production – technology combined with social mechanisms

Argues new modes produced greater surplus, all societies are marked by class conflict, which leads to political, economic and social change

Question 10

Max Weber:

Answer 10

German sociologist, philosopher and political economist

Weber adopted some of Marx’s ideas, but more interested in human motivations than Marx

Distinguished traditional and rational motivations as being characteristic of pre- and industrial societies respectively

Traditionalism vs Rationalism

Weber saw Western Europe’s modernity being based on 4 conditions:

1. Ascetic forms of religion
2. Rational forms of law
3. Free labour
4. The growth of cities

Question 11

Emile Durkheim:

Answer 11

French sociologist and philosopher

Less interested in economics, asked what holds societies together (social and moral solidarity), distinguished mechanical and organic solidarity

Question 12

Marx, Weber and Durkheim:

Answer 12

All trying to explain the difference between traditional and modern societies

All saw modern societies as better (e.g. more rational)

All assumed stages through which all societies must progress

All indebted to the legacy of the Enlightenment

Question 13

Modernisation Theory:

Answer 13

Particularly associated with Walter Whitman Rostow, writing in the 1950s

Influenced much Western policy towards the Third World in the sixties and seventies

The economy (Western-style, capitalist) only engine that could propel a developing country along the correct path to become a proper “modern” consumer democracy

Modernisation theory largely agreed with Marxists about the motor of change and the inevitability of all societies following a common path

Question 14

Iranian Revolution (1979)

Answer 14

Rise of militant Islam

Challenged the 1960s assumption that the end of colonialism would lead to third world countries choosing between Eastern and Western models of development

Question 15

What is the opposite of “modern”:

Answer 15

Like many Enlightenment legacies, the idea of modernity was founded on creating contrasts

Clark = argued that industrialisation entailed a loss of status and economic power, as the male breadwinner model became widespread

Rousseau = argued that the ideal society was a state of nature, without laws or property

Said = orientalism described the ways in which Europeans imagined the colonised as “other”

Question 16

Weber saw Western Europe’s modernity being based on 4 conditions:

Answer 16

1. Ascetic forms of religion
2. Rational forms of law
3. Free labour
4. The growth of cities