Kurzbeschreibung

What does it mean to be modern? Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity. What does it mean to be modern? In the nineteenth century a consensus emerged that Western Europe was giving birth to a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values played a key role. Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity.

Beschreibung

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of a common participation in expanding and thickening 'networks of means' that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface; 1. Introduction: ends and means; Part I. Contours of Modernity: 2. Precocious integration: England; 3. Monarchical centralization, privilege, and conflict: France; 4. Localism, state-building, and bürgerliche gesellschaft: Germany; 5. Modern industry, class, and party politics in nineteenth-century England; 6. France and bourgeois France: from teleocracy to autonomy; 7. One special path: modern industry, politics, and bourgeois life in Germany; Part II. Calculations and Lifeworlds: 8. Time, money, capital; 9. Men and women; 10. Bourgeois morals: from Victorianism to modern sexuality; 11. Jews as bourgeois and network people; Part III. A Culture of Means: 12. Public places, private spaces; 13. Bourgeois and others; 14. Bourgeois life and the avant-garde; 15. Conclusion.

Klappentext

What does it mean to be modern? Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity.