Robespierre now deliberately amalgamated monarchical despotism and feudal arrogance, whereas Voltaire, Mably, and even Rousseau clearly distinguished between them. Indeed, innovation itself now took on a new, positive meaning.
Yet, this experience of temporality could not be decreed, as the devisers of the new revolutionary calendar discovered to their chagrin; it had to be lived and learned. Leaders could encourage their followers to rub out reminders of the past and adopt new symbols as their own, but they soon found that adherence was not automatic.
The new calendar ultimately failed, though not for want of official effort, while the metric system succeeded. Even the much dreaded guillotine lasted. Special costumes for legislators, the Constitutional Church, and theophilanthropy all fell by the wayside.
Still, some of the most polarizing of revolutionary inventions—the Festival of Reason, the Committee of Public Safety, the Terror itself—remained in the repositories of collective memory, suggesting that even when the institution of the new failed, the sheer scale of the endeavor itself signaled a rupture in secular time. With events falling one upon the other at high speed, the present seemed elongated.
Let us hurry to fill this gap; let us reconstitute human nature by giving it a new stamp. At the same time, it also cleared a path to a new kind of determinism. I did not at all shape my epoch, time of revolution and political storms…; I only did what I had to do, obey it. The Enlightenment historians had shown how humans could study their own past to get a sense of the direction of history.
With this knowledge, humans could then decide to facilitate progress accelerate time , as Turgot did himself as a government minister and as the revolutionaries tried to do on a massive scale. All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. Modernity, though the term itself was not yet well-established, was the byproduct of this conflict between proponents and opponents of the revolutionary rupture in time.
It is possible to approach this subject in a very different way, as does William Nelson, who shows how practices such as animal breeding and economic modeling helped generate a new disposition toward the future in the eighteenth century.
Such fine-grained analysis in different registers is critical to deepening our understanding of the seventeenth and eighteenth century reorientation toward time.
In other ways, though, it moves by fits and starts, changing little in some respects over decades and then very quickly at precise moments. It is perhaps not very surprising that a specialist in the history of the French Revolution like myself would give a certain priority to that moment when time is profoundly politicized; control over time becomes a political issue in a very self-conscious fashion during the French Revolution.
But it also appealed to more and more people; the French Revolution brought the people on to the stage of politics, and historians therefore had to pay attention to them in their writing. The genres of historical writing proliferated, with the historical novel being one of the striking examples.
Modernity and history writing thus became complicit. By reconfiguring the past, the very positing of modernity opened up a new role for history. It becomes singular in the sense that it ceased being a repository of repeatable exempla and became instead a nonreplicable progression. Afterward, however, acceleration only quickened. There must then exist long-term formal structures in history which allow the repeated accumulation of experience.
But for this, the difference between experience and expectation has to be bridged to such an extent that history might once again be regarded as exemplary. History is only able to recognize what continually changes, and what is new, if it has access to the conventions within which lasting structures are concealed. Does he regret the defeat of the ancients by the moderns? Does he wish for an orientation toward time that gives more attention to the past and perhaps also to the future and correspondingly less to the present?
The resulting acceleration takes three forms, which interact to produce a selfpropelling feedback loop: technological acceleration, which is easy to measure; social change or transformation, which is harder to measure but still amenable to analysis many people now change jobs several times rather than maintaining one for a lifetime, for example ; and the heightened tempo of everyday life the feeling of being rushed , which may or may not be an illusion.
Even when the analysis is not Heideggerian, as, for example, in Scheuerman, it tends to be alarmist. Somehow speed is not good. Void indeed. When first invented in the early nineteenth century, steam-driven locomotives seemed incredibly fast to contemporaries, though they barely managed to propel railway trains twenty miles an hour.
I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Experiments have shown that the perceived duration of an interval of time is determined by the complexity of the task assigned rather than the duration of the task itself. In addition, the perceived complexity of a task depends on its relative familiarity.
Unfamiliar complexity accounts for the slowing down of time, as in for example the experiences of the French Revolution. Temporal compression—the sense of time accelerating—comes from the routinization of that complexity. In general, we might conclude that the increasing differentiation of modern society influences our perception of time by producing greater complexity of tasks, but that complexity cuts both ways, producing either compression or protracted duration.
The modern emphasis on moving quickly away from the past, and as Fritzsche puts it, restlessly iterating the new, leads to a kind of disciplinary reductio ad absurdum. In the nineteenth and even much of the twentieth century, most history students studied ancient and medieval history and most European gymnasium students learned Greek and Latin.
Now most undergraduates and even many graduate students—at least in the United States—prefer to study the twentieth century and what they prefer as consumers determines at least in some measure what they are taught. In recent years, more than half of history doctoral students in the U. Is the historical discipline, one wonders, truly historical any more? The pressure to innovate grew steadily within the historical discipline in the twentieth century.
When James Harvey Robinson published his book The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook in , it caused a stir in American historical circles and was immediately hailed or criticized as a manifesto for a new generation of historians. Articles critical of it were still being published in the s. Science proceeds by building upon previous discoveries, but as they advance scientists rarely feel the need to look back to work undertaken more than a short time before.
Historians have tended to follow the scientific model, even though it is not entirely germane to historical investigation. So students are more likely to know the most recent historical writings and to be almost entirely ignorant of the work of historians before and especially before I am willing to wager right now that not one of my students has ever read a word written by James Harvey Robinson. I have found to my chagrin that I sometimes only give a more up-to-date twist to arguments made long before me by Alphonse Aulard or Albert Mathiez.
But repetition in the name of novelty is not the most serious problem. Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns as it might be said I am doing right here and now too often leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures.
Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. They are not up-todate. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. Yet we should question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western and now probably worldwide historical discipline.
Modernity and history went hand in hand from the start. In the end, however, modernity is more than a time schema. The Oxford English Dictionary definition, with which I began, misrepresents the most crucial element in modernity, i.
Don't have an account? American Historical Association members Sign in via society site. Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Purchase Subscription prices and ordering for this journal Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. View Metrics. Email alerts Article activity alert.
Advance article alerts. New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Related articles in Google Scholar. Citing articles via Google Scholar.
S usan P. M c C affray. First, an internal factor is that only in Europe, through the Renaissance humanists and early modern philosophers and scientists, rational thinking came to replace many intellectual activities that had been under heavy influence of convention, superstition, and religion.
This line of answer is most frequently associated with Max Weber, a sociologist who is known to have pursued the answer to the above question. Second, an external factor is that colonization, starting as early as the Age of Discovery, created exploitative relations between European countries and their colonies. It is also notable that such commonly-observed features of many modern societies as the nuclear family, slavery, gender roles, and nation states do not necessarily fit well with the idea of rational social organization in which components such as people are treated equally.
While many of these features have been dissolving, histories seem to suggest those features may not be mere exceptions to the essential characteristics of modernization, but necessary parts of it. Modernization brought a series of seemingly indisputable benefits to people. Lower infant mortality rate, decreased death from starvation, eradication of some of the fatal diseases, more equal treatment of people with different backgrounds and incomes, and so on.
To some, this is an indication of the potential of modernity, perhaps yet to be fully realized. In general, rational, scientific approach to problems and the pursuit of economic wealth seems still to many a reasonable way of understanding good social development.
At the same time, there are a number of dark sides of modernity pointed out by sociologists and others. Technological development occurred not only in the medical and agricultural fields, but also in the military. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and the following nuclear arms race in the post-war era, are considered by some as symbols of the danger of technologies that humans may or may not be able to handle wisely.
Stalin's Great Purges and the Holocaust or Shoah are considered by some as indications that rational thinking and rational organization of a society might involve exclusion, or extermination, of non-standard elements. Environmental problems comprise another category in the dark side of modernity. Pollution is perhaps the least controversial of these, but one may include decreasing biodiversity and climate change as results of development. The development of biotechnology and genetic engineering are creating what some consider sources of unknown risks.
Besides these obvious incidents, many critics point out psychological and moral hazards of modern life - alienation, feeling of rootlessness, loss of strong bonds and common values, hedonism, disenchantment of the world, and so on. In conjunction with the website's philosophy, I have freely adapted materials, added my own, and deleted other selections without clear attribution.
Adapted from Gay, Craig M. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, Berger, Peter L. The image above is of Torsten Renqvist's Ordet.
It is an image of Christ.
0コメント