Professor Hall started his course with a terrific introduction, setting out the goal of the course: to figure out why in particular Great Britain, France, and Germany entered the modern age from similar medieval conditions but took such different political routes. Britain had a relatively nonviolent transition toward democracy. French made the transition with violence and setbacks. Germany was the one which had fascism. He said we would review the history and assess different factors and theories, using a comparative perspective to try to isolate factors which made the key difference in these trajectories. He named some of the major theorists and theories of modernization that I would come to really only begin to get the following year in Social Studies 10, such as Marx and Weber and Durkheim.
In the first phase of the transition from feudalism, there were two major sets of trends. One was economic. Each society had a distinctive "crop", which shaped how commercialization could occur. In Britain it was wool, which would require the consolidation of land for pasture. In France it was grapes, which was labor-intensive and gave the patterns of the peasantry a tremendous inertia. In Germany it was grain. The other trend was political, and shaped how the institution of the state and the monarchy would change in the age of absolutism. In Britain, the new economy of grazing and "putting out" generated a new class of gentry, distinct from traditional artistocracy. In France, the monarchy created a bureaucracy to enforce the collection of taxes, a new set of nobility distinct from the traditional landed nobles. In Germany, which was not yet a unitary state, what political authority existed relied on the traditional aristrocracy, the Junkers.
I hadn't known how consequential the commercialization of agriculture was as a phase before the market and industrial revolutions of the late 1700s and 1800s. Professor Hall did a nice job presenting us a ton of detail, organizing it, stopping to talk about big theories of these changes like Marxism and critiquing them and refining them, and also introducing what he called the question of structure vs. voluntarism, meaning the role that factors in the moment, decisions by political actors, and ideas played in addition to structural constraints.
I certainly hadn't really thought of or maybe even known that Britain had experienced a revolution in the 1600s, or two -- though it occurs to me now to question whether the same term is appropriate for Britain as for the U.S. and France. I will say now what I think about a lot too, which is that I know really nothing about the backdrop of non-European societies and whether any of this analysis of the transition to modernity applies. I don't think Professor Hall claimed that it does; I just know that like a lot of people, I carry the implicit notion that Western modernization is the norm, or that the British/American experience is in some sense an ideal to which others should be compared. It's a gap in my learning I still have not addressed.
One thing I note about the French Revolution is that it doesn't stand pat for a single explanation. Professor Hall labeled its different phases -- driven at different times by different groups in society, sometimes peasants, sometimes bourgeois, sometimes aristocrats, sometimes urban sans-culottes. He made note of the terror as both a new kind of state action, and an ideology identifying the state itself as a source of virtue and authority, distinct from society or the king who ruled. He also talked about how in France, the Revolution tore apart so many institutions, set the state against the church, did not succeed in reconciling the interests of peasants in earning enough from their crops and city-dwellers in having affordable food. So the French state would continue to convulse, and the Revolution and the Napoleonic period created a strong state with an army but not a modern land economy or a modern social class powerful enough to move the nation into a strong and stable next phase.
In Britain, Professor Hall noted that industrialization took off first even though Britain lagged France and Germany in innovation or education. What Britain had was an alignment between the state and new economic actors, who adopted the technology of the factory and accepted patterns of the city and both internal and international trade and who could propel them forward. There was social transformation and suffering, a complete overturning of the logic of land, labor, and capital within a hundred years or less -- and while there were upheavals they did not overwhelm the political system the way that France experienced.
Germany was still fragmented into separate governments in a looser economic alliance well into the 1800s, and while Britain made the leap from textiles to steel, Germany was still much more rooted in grain for far longer, so industrialization was impeded until later the new state would push it ahead in a convulsive way.
In the Zionism class, Professor Bartal to my surprise on reread referenced contemporary Palestinian nationalism in the first class. This was a year and a half before the first intifada. I think from him I learned the idea of the Jews as a medieval "corporation" -- a recognized legal-social entity with its own parameters from the rulers. I didn't remember two things from the early lectures. One is that before the Enlightenment period, during the age of European absolutism, the Jewish of particularly Central and Eastern Europe were experimenting with a kind of parallel process of consolidation, such as the "Council of the Four Lands." Already in other words the purely local, self-contained corporate community was experiencing some stresses in the 1600s. Also he said that again before the period of political change, there was a certain shift toward the Atlantic, to some degree even in Jewish migration, as opportunities in the commercial and mercantilist centers began to draw Jews away from the Ashkenazi centers.
Professor Bartal portrayed some of the Wissenschaft scholars as documenting historical processes within Jewish reality that might be leading to the end of separate Jewish existence as it had been known. I don't remember that then or hearing that since. I am struck my how small the window was in the 1800s between the offer of citizenship to the Jews in liberalizing countries and the turn toward modern anti-Semitic attitudes. I don't know how Bartal saw it, but there is both an incredible creativity in Jewish movements like Haskalah and self-critique/reinvention/reform of Judaism and also a tremendous pressure from the outside, from romantic-era attitudes toward Jews and about nationhood while the Jews were still assimilating earlier Enlightenment, liberal ideas. That mismatch would crash all over Europe in the late 1800s, from France to Russia.
In one lecture, Professor Bartal tried to answer why anti-Semitism became such an important feature of 19th century social thought and reform discourse, including among leaders and thinkers for whom traditional anti-Jewish attitudes were not important. I hadn't remembered that he pointed out how anti-Jewish attitudes morph to absorb whatever the core issues or critiques of the time area, and in that sense continuous in energy with medieval anti-Judaism even though the content in completely different. He said that some of the ways Jews were described are true, but don't carry the weight that anti-semitism assigns them. Even thinkers who viewed Jews positively overemphasized the features they admired (e.g. that Jews embodied the spirit of capitalism). All of these are commonplaces I think today; maybe they were back then and I just didn't get it. Ultimately, what made anti-semitism so potent, he argued, was a combination: the failure of political equality and liberal ideas to achieve enough equality of social status for Jews in the eyes of others; plus the romantic essentialism of nationalism in the later 1800s, which defined nationality rigidly and could not fit Jews in. Then when Jews turned to nationalism in response to this exclusion, that itself fed into the anti-semitic nationalism of others.
Professor Bartal also took a lecture to trace how messianism had been spreading within the Jewish world in a particular way even right before modernity. In its kabbalistic form, Jewish messianic suggested a cosmic process unfolding toward redemption, helped along by the spiritual acts of individual Jews. The movements that embraced this kind of messianism created a spiritual energy separate from the authority of traditional halacha and the rabbis whose authority came with that. I think what he was saying was that by the 1800s, with the wide spread of Hasidut, the Jewish world was ripe in this religious way for another change movement which was not built on traditional authority and which saw redemption as a possibility in the foreseeable future. But I haven't read ahead yet....
Meanwhile, in art, we are at the other end of the Middle Ages. What's interesting is how Charlemagne adopted forms and traditions and ideas from the Roman Empire, which is so unrelated to where he came from. He continued a pattern of new rulers incorporating pieces of prior monuments into his own, of making sure to be represented as both militarily strong and fundamentally just in his rule, as an embodiment of piety and the heavenly. Like other turning-point figures in later Roman history, Charlemagne turned back to Augustus as a model of representation to imitate. It's fascinating that rather than simply obliterate the Roman legacy he took it on, and that the papacy saw it as in its interest to ally with and crown Charlemagne as a continuation. One particular thing that strikes me in the notes, again not realizing I had seen it then, is the Christian shift from pagan temples, where priests are within but most people are outside, to the church as basilica, a public architecture where the people are within even as they may be wowed by grandeur.
