The Transformation of the World (194 page)

The new media did the rest to speed up the circulation of religion. One factor in Rome's role as world capital of Catholicism was that the foreign press began to post correspondents there; the papacy had become newsworthy. The Mormon leader Brigham Young, at once theocratic ruler, sect boss, and businessman, realized which way the wind was blowing and soon had telegraph cables laid all the way to Utah. Railroad links to Salt Lake City made it harder to keep temptations at bay and easier for the federal army to send in troops, but the farsighted leader of the sect also saw that they would steer Mormons away from extreme navel-gazing tendencies.
⁸⁴
In the second half of the nineteenth century, cheaper and simpler publishing techniques made it possible for the first time to print the Bible by the million and to favor exotic peoples with the holy book in their own language. The numerous translations done for this purpose belong among the greatest achievements of intercultural transfer in the nineteenth century. Catholic milieux that were less focused on the Bible itself now began to consume huge quantities of cheap tracts, pamphlets, and almanacs, giving a boost to new forms of popular religiosity on the margins of the official church. Popular religions blossomed wherever the respective orthodoxy lost some of its capacity for control. A major prerequisite for this was the decline of illiteracy and the growing potential to provide a mass public with printed matter. Both in Europe and in missionary regions, the possibility of feeding the Bible to new readers became an important motive for the religious (especially Protestant) commitment to education. Where people felt defensive toward the torrent of words coming from an expanding Christianity, the printing press offered itself as a weapon of resistance. This was one reason why in the last third of the century, after ages of skepticism, the Islamic clergy (
ulama
) enthusiastically embraced it for its own ends.
⁸⁵

CONCLUSION

 

The Nineteenth Century in History

 

“A general history of the world is necessary but not possible in the present state of research.… But we need not despair: particular research is always instructive when it produces results, and nowhere more so than in history, where even in deep recesses it always encounters a living element with universal significance.”
¹
These words of Leopold von Ranke, written in 1869, still hold true today. This book has attempted a piece of impossible, though perhaps not “general,” global history. In the end, both reader and author should return to particular concerns, not soar upward into even more ambitious generalizations. The panoramic view from a summit is an impressive experience. But—as the great German medievalist Arno Borst asks—how long can a historian remain on a summit?
²
The following remarks do not offer the distilled essence of an epoch or a speculation about the spirit of the age. They are meant as a final comment, not as a summation.

1 Self-Diagnostics

The opening chapter presented the nineteenth century as an age of increased self-reflection. From Adam Smith in the 1770s until Max Weber in the early decades of the twentieth century, grandiose attempts were made to grasp the whole of the contemporary world and to place it within the historical
longue durée
. Diagnoses of the age did not appear only in Europe. They are found wherever societies developed the type of the scholar or intellectual, wherever ideas were written down and discussed, wherever observation and criticism gave an impetus to reflections on one's own lifeworld and its broader spatial and temporal preconditions. Such reflections did not always take a form that can be easily identified from today's retrospect as “diagnosis of the times” or “theory of the contemporary age.”
³
They could be clad in the most diverse genres: as contemporary history in the Egyptian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, for example, who experienced the Napoleonic occupation of his country and gave a detailed account of it,
⁴
or in the famous historian of antiquity
Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who also lectured on his own times, the “Age of Revolution”; as taking a position on political events of the day, as in Hegel's 1831 essay on the English Reform Bill or Marx's stirring polemic against Louis Napoleon and his shift from president by election to dictator by acclamation (
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
, 1852); as philosophical criticism of contemporary culture in Madame de Staël (
De l'Allemagne
, 1813), Alexis de Tocqueville (
Democracy in America
, 1835–40), or the Egyptian educational reformer and translator Rifaa al-Tahtawi (
A Paris Profile
, reporting on his stay in the French capital in 1826–31, first published in 1834);
⁵
as a regular journal in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (covering the years 1851–96) or the Japanese army doctor and poet Mori Ōgai (for his stay in Europe between 1884 and 1888); as autobiography in the black ex-slave, intellectual, and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass (the most important of his three books of memoirs:
My Bondage and My Freedom
, 1855) or the American historian Henry Adams (
The Education of Henry Adams
, 1907 privately, published in 1918); or, finally, as disparate journalism in John Stuart Mill (whose diagnosis of the age is found more in short
pièces d'occasion
than in his principal works) or Liang Qichao (who for three decades commented on and helped to shape political events in China).

Sociology, as it emerged around 1830 on older foundations, was an endeavor to interpret the contemporary world. Initially associated with political economy and the newly rising science of ethnology, it developed basic models for an understanding of the age that are still discussed today: for example, the transition from status to contract as the organizing principle of society (in the legal historian Sir Henry Maine,
Ancient Law
, 1861) or the related opposition between community and society (
Gemeinschaft
and
Gesellschaft
) in the eponymous book by Ferdinand Tönnies (1887). Karl Marx analyzed capitalism as a historically determinate social formation—and Friedrich Engels added many insightful points relating to the diagnosis of his time. John Stuart Mill had earlier produced a great synthesis of classical political economy (
Principles of Polit ical Economy
, 1848). Herbert Spencer tried to show how a peaceable industrialism had evolved out of a military barbarism into which it might one day relapse (
Principles of Sociology
, vol. 1, 1876). Fukuzawa Yukichi inserted Japan into the general development of civilization (
Bummeiron no gairyaku
[Sketch of a theory of civilization], 1875);
⁶
the Armenian Iranian Malkom Khan interpreted European modernity in the light of Islamic values (
Daftar-i Tanzimat
[Book of reform], 1858).
⁷
Philosophers and literary critics such as Friedrich Schlegel and Heinrich Heine (especially in his
History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany
, 1835), Ralph Waldo Emerson and Matthew Arnold, Friedrich Nietzsche, and at the end of our period, Karl Kraus and Rabindranath Tagore registered the cultural sensibilities and contradictions of their age.
⁸
The rich self-diagnoses of the nineteenth century must be the starting point for any attempt to grasp its specific signature.

2 Modernity

On top of these come the interpretations offered by present-day sociology, which revolve around the concept of modernity.
⁹
Mostly they also have something to say about the past, therefore referring explicitly or between the lines to the nineteenth century, but often the net is cast more widely to take in the whole of the European modern age. A category such as “individualization” can hardly be pinned down to a particular period. By tradition and custom, virtually the entire modern discourse of sociology limits itself to Western Europe and the United States. Since about 2000, however, the research agenda of “multiple modernities,” championed by the great sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt, has brought an important advance. What Eisenstadt sees in the nineteenth century is above all a divergence between European and North American paths, so that modernity for him has by no means shaped a homogenous West, while in the non-Western world the characteristic features of modernity are recognizable only in Japan, if only with many special twists.
¹⁰
It is indeed difficult, for the period roughly between 1800 and 1900, to find distinctive Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern/Islamic, or African paths to modernity independent of the West European model. Such differentiation became noticeable only after the turn of the century, at first less structurally than in the history of ideas.

If historians today want to operate meaningfully with the category “modernity,” they must guide themselves by theories at the highest level that sociology has to offer. At the same time, they should bear in mind how the nineteenth century interpreted itself, and they ought to strive for greater spatial and temporal precision than is usually to be found in social science literature. Sweeping conceptions of “the bourgeois subject,” “functional differentiation,” or “civil society” become serviceable only if it is possible to specify their reference in historical reality. Any attempts to postulate the spontaneous emergence of modernity in the course of the nineteenth century only remain contentious. The intellectual foundations of modernity were laid during the “early modern” age in Europe, between Montaigne and Bacon at the beginning and Rousseau and Kant toward the end of the period.

What is the
primary
understanding of modernity? Is it an incipient long-term rise in national income; the conduct of life involving rational calculation; a transition from status to class society; the growth of political participation; a legal basis for relations of political rule and social intercourse; destructive capacities of a quite new dimension; or a shift in the arts away from imitation of tradition to the creative destruction of aesthetic norms? There is no concept that would hold all these aspects (and others) in neutral equilibrium, and a mere listing of characteristics would remain unsatisfactory. Concepts of modernity always pose priorities and—even if they are not monothematic—place the various aspects in a ranking order. As a rule, they do not disregard the fact
that these aspects were in harmony with one another in only a few historical cases. It is enough to look closely at a country like France, a pioneer of modernity, to encounter discrepancies and obstructions. The Enlightenment philosophes were in their century the most “modern” group of thinkers anywhere in the world, and the French Revolution, especially the phase before the execution of Louis XVI and the onset of the Terror, appears to many historians and theoreticians even today as a highly important source of political modernity. On the other hand, France was a country where, outside Paris and a few other large cities, archaic social forms persisted well into the nineteenth century, at a time when they were much rarer in England, the Netherlands, or southwestern Germany.
¹¹
Moreover, it took a full ninety years after the beginning of the Great Revolution for the French political system to stabilize as a parliamentary democracy. Lengthy processes were necessary to translate the “birth of modernity” at the level of ideas into institutions and mentalities that came close to the definitions of modernity used in today's social theory. Also the experience of the nineteenth, and even more the twentieth, century shows that economic modernity can go together with politically authoritarian conditions. It is also true that aesthetic innovation is improbable under extreme repression (Dmitri Shostakovich or Anna Akhmatova were exceptions that proved the rule in the Stalinist period), but it does not necessarily flourish where the most modern political conditions prevail. Thus, around 1910 the capital of the Habsburg monarchy was in no way inferior as a cultural center to London and New York, the metropolises of democracy and liberal capitalism.
¹²

There is a further problem with “modernity.” Are we interested mainly in its “birth,” which by definition could happen only once at a particular time and place? Is it enough that modern principles came into the world somewhere and sometime? Or are we more concerned with how it spread and took effect, and with the point at which whole societies could be described as modern or thoroughly modernized? How can such gradations of modernity be determined? When fully developed, “high” modernity is no longer an insular tendency but has become the dominant way of life; it is no longer norm-breaking and revolutionary, as in the period of its “birth,” but an everyday routine productive in turn of antimodern or postmodern tendencies. Since the concept of modernization receded in the late twentieth century before the concept of modernity, such questions about the breadth or systematic character of modernity are seldom raised. One would not wish to describe many countries in the world around 1900 as predominantly modern; the list would include Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, France, Switzerland, the United States, the British dominions (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and with some reservations Japan and Germany. In relation to Europe east of the Elbe or Spain and Italy, there would be doubts about whether they were ripe for modernity. But what is to be gained by such evaluations?

3 Again: The Beginning or End of a Century

Historians today need not allow political rhetoric to drive them into making essentialist statements about Europe. Their discipline is in the fortunate position of being able to leave behind old political-ideological struggles over the conception of Europe. The issue is now seldom any more whether it should be Catholic or Protestant, Latin or Germanic (or Slav), socialist or liberal-capitalist, although older cleavages along a north-south axis have reemerged during the financial crisis of the 2000s. Also there is broad agreement in the literature about Europe's most important characteristics and tendencies in the long nineteenth century.
¹³
For the most part, however, it cannot clarify the extent to which such features and processes constituted a special European role in history, because it still rarely uses the possibilities of a comparison with regions outside Europe. We should note with the German historian Jost Dülffer: “Europe cannot be presented or understood from within itself”;
¹⁴
only comparison with Japan or China, Australia or Egypt, can bring out its distinctive profile. This is especially productive if it is undertaken by non-Europeans, since they are struck by many cultural peculiarities that Europeans take for granted. Of course, a global historical perspective must do without such opportunities for an external or ex-centric viewpoint. The world as a whole cannot be contrasted with anything else.