crisis
...roblematic in the social sciences and was in any casedriven by schematic conceptions of the historical process.Although the point was seldom put so bluntly in the bright glow ofthe new dispensation, failure was its epochal theme and a source of itsproductivity. The neo-Malthusian argument was most direct in its insis-tence on limitations to growth, but whatever the dates or dimensionsassigned to it, early modernity was strewn with blocked transitions andrepeated failures to deliver along the lines of two rival templates for therise of the modern world. Functionalist, ‘bourgeois’ sociology, from itsfounders through Durkheim and Weber, had dealt in abstracted lists ofvariables responsible in their aYnities or conjunctions for modernity—secularism, science, capitalism, government by design and so on. InMarxist theories of stages, modes of production succeeded one anotherin crescendos of class struggle, but during the long, uneven, and thereforeespecially problematic transition from feudalism, capitalism came intoits own only with the French and Industrial Revolutions. In one accountearly modernity was the half-way house of the modern spirit; in theother it was the ‘merchant capitalist’ or ‘proto-industrial’ phase thatlled the gap between feudalism and capitalism in the embarrassing lag-time between the ‘crises’ of the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries.The early modern eld was formed by back ll from the debris of thecollapsed breakthroughs to modernity that had not (quite) come about.8series in Comparative History, including its inaugural collection of essays, Preconditions ofRevolution in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore andLondon, 1970), and National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe,ed. Oreste Ranum (Baltimore and London, 1975). Early modern ‘crises’ were an impor-tant research-and-development theme for a wide-ranging historiography: see RandolphStarn, “Historians and Crisis,” History and Theory, no. 52 (1971): 2-23, and note 8 below.8Good samples from an immense bibliography would include the high-pro le debates -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 5 300review articleI’ve set up a mostly Anglo-American scenario so far. The Europeans,after all, had no need for the ‘early modern.’ Although ‘frühe Neuzeit’rst cropped up in the 50s and was institutionalized in the 70s in theGerman-speaking countries, it was and has remained historiographicallydispensable.9The Annales in uence, as usual, has been overestimated.10Braudel was a tease on periodization. The famously programmatic divi-sion of history into the longue durée, mid-term economic and social con-joncture, and histoire évenémentielle deliberately scrambled periodization inkeeping with Braudel’s campaign to open social science to the plural-ity of historical time while also making history more scienti c. The clos-est he came to ‘modern Europe’ was in the 1400-1800 of the threevolumes of Civilization and Capitalism, but his overriding point there wasto strip the period of most of its modernity and to reduce capitalismto a relatively few international traders.11Philippe Ariès would haveappreciated the comedy of his becoming a hero of a cultural turn forthe Annales school, outsider in the Bureau of Tropical Fruit that he wasuntil his belated appropriation by the Annalistes. His English translatorconverts his conventional French histoire moderne in the History of Privateof the 1960s and 1970s over early modern “crisis,” the “Brenner Thesis,” and ImmanuelWallerstein’s “World Systems”: Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York,1965); Theodore Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975);Europe in Crisis, 1599-1648, ed. GeoVrey Parker (Ithaca, NY, 1979); The Brenner Debate:Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston andC. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985); the review articles on Immanuel Wallerstein’s workin Fernand Braudel Center Review 21/1 (1998).9The rst FNZ chair in Germany, established at the Free University Berlin after itsfounding in 1951 and occupied by Carl Hinrichs, was regarded as a sign of American-style specialization disemburdening the “eigentliche Neuzeit” of its “Vorgeschichte”:Wilhelm Kamlah, “Zeitalter überhaupt, Neuzeit und Frühneuzeit,” Saeculum 8 (1957):313-32; Johannes Kunisch, “Über den Epochencharakter der frühen Neuzeit,” in DieFunktion der Geschichte in unserer Zeit, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Ernst Weymar (Stuttgart,1975): 150-61 (a programmatic essay on the founding of a journal for late medieval andearly modern research: Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 1974). German historical schol-arship was not much inclined to the term ‘modern,’ except for the state; “frühe Neuzeit”emerged in the 1950s without displacing “Neuzeit” as the subsuming category. Its usagehas been described as purely pragmatic and pedagogical in course listings and texts, with“grundsätzliche Erwägungen über den Charakter dieser Epoch” playing only a minorrole: Hans Erich Bodecker and Ernst Hinrichs, “Einleitung,” in Alteuropa—Ancien Régime—Frühe Neuzeit; Probleme und Methoden der Forschung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1991): 11-50.10Cf., e.g., the diVerent assessments in Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essaysfrom the Annales, ed. Peter Burke (London and New York, 1972), and Peter Burke, TheFrench Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89 (Stanford, CA, 1990); PhilippeCarrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore,1992).11Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Sîan Reynolds,3 vols. [French ed. 1979] (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984; 1992). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 6 review article301Life, 1500-1800 into ‘early modern’ in a volume which further com-pounds the confusion by its English title, The Passions of the Renaissance.Ariès hardly helps by noting that his previous work had shown that“from the central Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth centurythere was no real change in people’s fundamental attitudes (mentalité).”12In any event, the Atlantic boom in early modern studies that peakedin the 1980s genially blurred schools, boundaries, and in uences.13Inan emblematic conjunction, Natalie Zemon Davis’s Society and Culture inEarly Modern France (1975) brought popular culture with anthropologicaland literary in ections together with the social and economic intereststhat had mostly de ned the historians’ early modernity. Her protago-nists, ordinary people with extraordinary panache, played on the pos-sibilities of creative human agency, whereas those of French historianstended to perform their structural roles. Either way, however, we shouldnot make too much of a consistent cultural turn. Historians did notveer oV in formation, as aging memories are now inclined to remem-ber.14Most real historians found the proliferating historicisms of the lit-erary branches of early modern studies amateur. Riding on the negativeundertow in the conception of the early modern, this early modernitysurfaced against the high-culture privileges of the literary canon.15Infusedwith doses of British cultural materialism, Foucault, deconstruction, gen-der studies, and post-colonial criticism, it became a dominant tendencyin the Renaissance and post-Renaissance wings of literature departments.It inspired, or, some would say, disintegrated in the burgeoning, a-chronological eld of cultural studies, where culture means, as the BritishMarxist critic Raymond Williams argued, “a whole way of life” con guredin the power relations of its ideas, practices, media, and institutions.1612History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. [French ed.1985-87] (Cambridge, MA, 1987-91), vol. 3: The Passions of the Renaissance, trans. ArthurGoldhammer, 2.13After a 1979-81 surge of early modern Europe books in English (11 items), theboom came in 1987-89 (34 items) and 1990-92 (25 items). N.B. Some of these arereprints or re-editions. Source: JSTOR.14See the introduction to Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Societyand Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1999), 1-32.15The rst crossover into literary studies I have found with an early modern title isrelatively late and anti-Renaissance in inspiration: Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discoursesof Sexual DiVerence in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, andNancy Vickers, Women in Culture and Society Series (Chicago, 1986); for a sophisticated per-sonal account: Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism(Chicago and London, 2000), 1-19.16A representative sample: Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, andPaula A. Treichler (New York, 1992). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 7 302review articleTo make a longer story short, we are by now the somewhat usteredheirs of a spate of early modernities. They are intramural and inter-disciplinary, both newly conventional and still contested. Their period-busting profusion is as oYcial as the Library of Congress’s 1500-1700;as commercial as the 1600-1815 of Scribner’s forthcoming Encyclopediaof Early Modern Europe, following upon the 1400-1600 of the already-published Encyclopedia of the Renaissance; as multinational as surveys forFrance, Germany, England, and Italy, each with a diVerent chronol-ogy.17The American Academy of Arts and Sciences published a recentissue of Daedalus on early modernities across the globe, and the histor-ical sociologist Jack A. Goldstone has struggled with mounting frustra-tion through the claims of “literally hundreds of volumes covering Europe,North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, China, India, Japan, and the NewWorld [that] these societies either had their own ‘early modern’ peri-ods, or were part of an ‘early modern’ world.”18Meanwhile, in the realworld, ‘early modern’ probably means any time before, say, 1960.Since (so we are told) “no one seems to have a good word for peri-odization these days,” it will be said that periods don’t matter anyway—that they are heuristic conveniences at best—or that if they do matter,it is because they suppress diversity and diVerence in the name of someessence or end that we ought to get rid of anyway.19Enter the earlymodern that seems to diminish the liabilities of periodization whilemaximizing the bene ts. On the medieval side it looks like a kinder,gentler Renaissance, except that that even the Middle Ages were per-mitted their renascences and the modern in ‘early modern’ still caststhe medieval as ‘traditional.’ Adding injury to insult, the early moderntakes the middle out of the Middle Ages as a ‘transitional’ period. Onthe modern side, while seeming to rise above and beyond crude versionsof modernization theory, early modernity actually naturalizes and nor-17Robin Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560-1715 (New York, 1972); Michael Hughes,Early Modern Germany 1477-1806 (Philadelphia, 1992); J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England:A Social History, 1550-1760 (London and Baltimore, 1987); Gregory Hanlon, Early ModernItaly, 1550-1800 (New York, 2000).18Early Modernities, an issue of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences127/3 (1998); Jack A. Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” Journalof the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41/3 (1998): 249; see, too, the introductionto this issue by Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “The Discipline of World History and theEconomic and Social History of the Orient. A New Fashion in an Old Hat?,” 241-48.19The quotation is from Lee Patterson, “The Place of the Modern in the Late MiddleAges,” in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. LawrenceBesserman (New York, 1996), 51. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 8 review article303malizes them. Binary oppositions and abstracting dichotomies are nowregularly treated and traced as parameters of an early modern histori-cal ‘process’: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, status and contract, carnivaland lent, enchantment and disenchantment, boorish behavior and civil-ity. Hence a history that can only ask “how modern is it?” and a hist-oriography that keeps score on this or that gure, trend, institution, oridea. The early modern rubric does little, if anything, to call Whiggishnotions of historical progress to account. It probably does more to deferor defeat any obligation to think clearly about directions of change, andit is hard to detach from a particularly insidious ‘Occidentalism’ thatnot only leaves out much of the world but much of Europe besides.A standard early modernist response might be that the period is nota conduit of discredited teleological schemes because it has its own char-acteristic identity in the ‘dynamic’ or ‘process’ of being at once tradi-tional and modern, old and new, and of working at diVerent paces.The German formulation is ttingly cumbersome: “mehrschichtige Gleich-zeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen.”20The covering trope is complexity. Fromthe surveys to the micro-histories, we are told that early modernity is unusually complex. Its privileged form is the list: factors; discontinu-ities; multi-stranded patterns of development; particulars, instances, cases.The problem here is that all periods, as is often said, can be thoughtof as being pulled between old and new, tradition and innovation. Asis not so often said in this context, tradition must innovate and adaptor die on the vine—it’s the notion of modernity that looks static andsimplistic.* * *Renaissance scholars may take some bemused comfort in these renais-sances, so to speak, of periodization past. One way or another, it is notat all clear that early modernity has liberated anyone from crypto- orpseudo-modernization templates and trajectories. Nor is this likely tohappen by the familiar rites of inversion—so, for example, by the noto-rious Oedipal ritual of Burckhardt-bashing to prove that even RenaissanceItalians were caught in webs of collective identities and obligations, pre-occupied with political legitimacy, and no better or worse than con-ventional Christians. Burckhardt upside down is still Burckhardt.20Ernst Bloch as cited by Bodecker and Hinrichs, “Einleitung,” 21. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 9 304review articleThe extreme antidote would be to wonder, with Bruno Latour, whetherwe have ever been modern. The presumption in the early/modern mixis that the modern has, after all, prevailed; and further that it repre-sents a break in the stymied system of early modernity. But, arguesLatour, “[t]his beautiful order is disturbed once . . . quasi-objects [histerm for the con ation between natural ‘things’ and social ‘construc-tions’ exempli ed and at the same time concealed in the paradigmatichistory of modern science] are seen as mixing up diVerent periods,ontologies, or genres. Then a historical period will give the impressionof a great hotchpotch. Instead of a ne laminary ow we will mostoften get a turbulent ow of whirlpools and rapids. Time becomesreversible instead of irreversible.”21While seeming to acknowledge thecomplicating turbulence of history, the idea of early modernity vindi-cates the categorical separateness of the modern by conjuring up thebinary of an archaic, conservative, traditional, or repressed opposition.This generates histories caught in a set of oppositions and modernizingscenarios that have long since been called into question. “We have allreached the point of mixing up times,” Latour insists. “There never hasbeen anything else than that mixture and confusion of times, ontolo-gies, genres. . . . Modernization has never occurred.”22These grand manner pronouncements will make instant skeptics ofmost historians, and not simply about modernization, either. However,the outcome might just as well be the kind of close-grained work thatcomes as much in the absence of as in resistance to the Big Picture.One risk of this reaction is scholarship that may be only antiquarianor, like the new ethnic republics, ercely separatist and partisan. (I has-ten to add that nothing could be farther from Latour’s intentions.)23Besides, the unassuming monograph often assumes a great deal, includ-ing the interpretative schemes that it supposedly dismisses. Would his-tories without the coming of the modern lapse into what...