Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T03:23:03.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Modernity’ and the Making of Social Order in Twentieth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

DENNIS SWEENEY
DENNIS SWEENEY*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Department of History and Classics, 2–28 Henry Marshall Tory Building, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H4, Canada; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is hard not to be struck by the continuing interest in the concept of ‘modernity’ or ‘the modern’ for making sense of the economic, cultural and political transformations of twentieth-century Europe. Seemingly laid to rest by the early 1980s for its association with modernisation theory, modernity as a concept was revived during the late 1980s and 1990s largely by European historians working on countries, especially Germany and Russia, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that modernisation theorists deemed models of developmental backwardness or case studies in the failure to modernise and its consequences. But, like its striking re-appearance in scholarship on those areas of the world – especially Asia and Africa – written off as the most irredeemably un-modern or ‘traditional’ by modernisation theorists, this renewed interest in modernity derives from very different interventions in post-structuralist theory and cultural and postcolonial studies, which have generated new definitions, and critiques ‘modernity’ and its ‘dark side’ from the vantage point of ‘postmodernity’.

Type
Forum: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain (1995)
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 209 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For a sampling, see Daunton, Martin and Rieger, Bernhard, eds, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar; Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Pence, Katherine and Betts, Paul, eds, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Sayer, Derek, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 Peukert, Detlev, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989)Google Scholar; The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); and ‘The Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit of Science’, in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds, Re-evaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993).

3 Weiner, Amir, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Hoffmann, David L. and Kotsonis, Yanni, eds, Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoffmann, David L., Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holquist, Peter, ‘To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in Martin, Terry and Suny, Ronald Grigour, eds, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–44Google Scholar; Beer, Daniel, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Barnes, Steven A., Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Kotkin, Stephen, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, ns, 2, 1 (2001), 111–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hoffmann, David L., ‘Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Social History, 34, 1 (2000), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Weiner, introduction to Landscaping, 9, 11, 17.

7 See, above all, Hong, Young-Sun, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998Google Scholar.

8 Ibid. 40.

9 Hong, Welfare, 242.

10 Lohalm, Uwe, Völkische Wohlfahrtsdiktatur: Öffentliche Wohlfahrtspolitik im nationalsozialistischen Hamburg (Munich: Dölling und Galitz)Google Scholar.

11 Ibid. 549.

12 Holquist, ‘To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate’; Hoffmann, Stalinist Values; Weiner, introduction to Landscaping and Making Sense of War; Werth, Nicolas, ‘The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, 1937–1938’, in Gellately, Robert and Kiernan, Ben, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 215–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7–11Google Scholar, 83–107.

13 Dodman, ‘The Fate of Red October’, History Workshop Journal, 56, 1 (2003), 263Google Scholar.

14 Schieder, Wolfgang, Faschistische Diktaturen: Studien zu Italien und Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008)Google Scholar; Reichardt, Sven, Faschistische Kampfbünde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Riley, Dylan, ‘Civic Associations and Authoritarian Regimes in Interwar Europe: Italy and Spain in Comparative Perspective’, American Sociological Review, 70, 2 (2005), 288–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Here I draw analytically on Mayer, Arno, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956: An Analytic Framework (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 59–85Google Scholar.

16 Broszat, Martin, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London: Longman, 1981), 276Google Scholar; and Gorlizki, Yoram and Mommsen, Hans, ‘The Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism’, in Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 41–86Google Scholar.

17 Wildt, Michael, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 ‘Modern Times’, 151–6.

19 Northrup, Douglas Taylor, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 8, 59–60Google Scholar.

20 Stoler, Ann, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18 (2006), 125–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 18. See also Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

22 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

23 Gregory, Derek, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 261Google Scholar.

24 Dirks, Nicholas B., foreword in Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, ix.

25 See esp. Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Ibid. 72.

27 Ibid.

28 Sweeney, Dennis, ‘Pan-German Conceptions of Colonial Empire’, in Naranch, Bradley and Eley, Geoff, German Colonialism in a Global Age, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

29 Mai, Uwe, ‘Rasse und Raum’: Agrarpolitik, Sozial- und Raumplanung im NS-Staat (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002)Google Scholar; and Heinemann, Isabel, ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003)Google Scholar.

30 Gruchmann, Lothar, Nationalsozialistische Großraumordnung: Die Konstruktion einer ‘deutschen Monroe-Doktrin’ (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).

31 Wegner, Phillip E., Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 21Google Scholar.

32 For exemplary and superb studies, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar on ‘colonial modernity’; Detlev Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne, 71–5, on ‘classical modernity’ as it relates to industrial rationalisation; and de Grazia, Victoria, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, on the subversive and popular-democratic dimensions of ‘consumer modernity’.

33 Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell, 1990), 240Google Scholar, 277.

34 See, e.g., Tooze, Adam, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lange, 2006)Google Scholar.

35 Wiesen, S. Jonathan, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. On the case of Fascist Italy, see also de Grazia, Victoria, ‘Nationalizing Women: The Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini's Italy’, in de Grazia, Victoria with Furlough, Ellen, eds, The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 337–58Google Scholar.

36 Bloch, Marc, ‘A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies’, in Land and Work in Medieval Europe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 58Google Scholar.

37 Sewell, William H., ‘Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille’, in Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 225–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter, eds, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 97–9, 122; and Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.