Modernism and social life

painting: Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar (1913)

Image: Mexico City slum

Modernity is remarkably hard to define or capture. We might try this ostensive definition: it is the culture, mental framework, and social reality of the world created by the industrial revolution, mass society, urban life, and mass literacy and communication. It is the world of anonymous social relations, the market as a central social reality, the rational-bureaucratic state, and mass public opinion. It is what came after "the world we have lost" (Peter Laslett's evocative phrase in The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age) -- the pre-modern world of direct, face-to-face social relations, powerful religious beliefs, traditional regulation of village society, and very low levels of mobility for the individual. Stability, continuity, locality, and legible social relations capture the pre-modern world. And the modern world overturns each of these.

English critic (and blogger before his time) Thomas Carlyle saw it coming -- and he didn't care for it. Here are some of his descriptions of the social reality coming to England in the 1820s in Past and Present:

The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with work-shops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our Earth ever had ... and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" (Book I, ch. 1)

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him "on the rim of the sky," minatory or confirmatory? God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime. (Book III, ch. 1)

And in fact, I think the task of making sense of a rapidly changing social reality was as stunning in the 1840s as it is today -- Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Herzen, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin all turned their imaginations and their critical abilities to the task of conceptualizing the changes that were sweeping across Europe and the globe in the first part of the nineteenth century. (Steven Marcus does a good job of capturing the cognitive and imaginative challenge faced by reflective observers in the early nineteenth century in Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class.)

So how can sociologists, historians, or artists and poets help us understand the nature of modernity? The cacaphony of the modern city is one powerful metaphor for the nature of the social modern. So the sociology of the city is a good place to start. And the jangled, fractured canvases of modernist painting evoke the conflicting, overlapping mentalities of the modern world; so perhaps we can learn something about the nature of modernity from reflective art historians.

Here is how art historian T. J. Clark reflects on the meaning of "modernity" in his spectacular book, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.

"Modernity" means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future -- of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information. This process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short supply -- "meaning" here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, implicit orders, stories and images in which a culture crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the reality of pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, "the disenchantment of the world," still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best. (7)

"Secularization" is a nice technical word for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting (or resenting) a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by "information" and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the de-skilling of everyday life (deference to experts and technicians in more of the microstructure of the self); available, invasive, haunting expertise; the chronic revision of everything in the light of "studies." I should say straightaway that this cluster of features seems to be tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings. (7)

Is it not the case that the truly new, and disorienting, character of modernity is its seemingly being driven by merely material, statistical, tendential, "economic" considerations? We know we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled -- and obscurely felt to be ruled -- by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose. It is the blindness of modernity that seems to me fundamental, and to which modernism is a response. (8)

painting: Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)

And what about the city? How does the sociology of the city shed light on the cultural reality of the modern world? The modern city represented a coming-together of many of the currents of social change that constituted the heterogeneous mix of "modernity." A large and disconnected population, substantial inequalities, civic anonymity, alienation, bureaucratic administration, modern policing and public services, street cars, and a virtual absence of overarching social solidarity conjoined to create a jangled social configuration with the angular properties of a modernist portrait.

An earlier posting focused on Engels's sociology of the city. But here is how Georg Simmel puts it in "The Metropolis and Modern Life":

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labour) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition -- but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

The Chicago School of sociology is particularly on target when it comes to understanding "modernity", given its strong emphasis on understanding the social reality of Chicago as a turbulent, jangled social reality.


(See Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Politics, History, and Culture), for some very thoughtful discussions of the study of "modernity" by contemporary historical sociologists.)

Modernism and social life

painting: Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar (1913)

Image: Mexico City slum

Modernity is remarkably hard to define or capture. We might try this ostensive definition: it is the culture, mental framework, and social reality of the world created by the industrial revolution, mass society, urban life, and mass literacy and communication. It is the world of anonymous social relations, the market as a central social reality, the rational-bureaucratic state, and mass public opinion. It is what came after "the world we have lost" (Peter Laslett's evocative phrase in The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age) -- the pre-modern world of direct, face-to-face social relations, powerful religious beliefs, traditional regulation of village society, and very low levels of mobility for the individual. Stability, continuity, locality, and legible social relations capture the pre-modern world. And the modern world overturns each of these.

English critic (and blogger before his time) Thomas Carlyle saw it coming -- and he didn't care for it. Here are some of his descriptions of the social reality coming to England in the 1820s in Past and Present:

The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with work-shops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our Earth ever had ... and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" (Book I, ch. 1)

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him "on the rim of the sky," minatory or confirmatory? God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime. (Book III, ch. 1)

And in fact, I think the task of making sense of a rapidly changing social reality was as stunning in the 1840s as it is today -- Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Herzen, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin all turned their imaginations and their critical abilities to the task of conceptualizing the changes that were sweeping across Europe and the globe in the first part of the nineteenth century. (Steven Marcus does a good job of capturing the cognitive and imaginative challenge faced by reflective observers in the early nineteenth century in Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class.)

So how can sociologists, historians, or artists and poets help us understand the nature of modernity? The cacaphony of the modern city is one powerful metaphor for the nature of the social modern. So the sociology of the city is a good place to start. And the jangled, fractured canvases of modernist painting evoke the conflicting, overlapping mentalities of the modern world; so perhaps we can learn something about the nature of modernity from reflective art historians.

Here is how art historian T. J. Clark reflects on the meaning of "modernity" in his spectacular book, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.

"Modernity" means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future -- of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information. This process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short supply -- "meaning" here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, implicit orders, stories and images in which a culture crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the reality of pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, "the disenchantment of the world," still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best. (7)

"Secularization" is a nice technical word for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting (or resenting) a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by "information" and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the de-skilling of everyday life (deference to experts and technicians in more of the microstructure of the self); available, invasive, haunting expertise; the chronic revision of everything in the light of "studies." I should say straightaway that this cluster of features seems to be tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings. (7)

Is it not the case that the truly new, and disorienting, character of modernity is its seemingly being driven by merely material, statistical, tendential, "economic" considerations? We know we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled -- and obscurely felt to be ruled -- by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose. It is the blindness of modernity that seems to me fundamental, and to which modernism is a response. (8)

painting: Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)

And what about the city? How does the sociology of the city shed light on the cultural reality of the modern world? The modern city represented a coming-together of many of the currents of social change that constituted the heterogeneous mix of "modernity." A large and disconnected population, substantial inequalities, civic anonymity, alienation, bureaucratic administration, modern policing and public services, street cars, and a virtual absence of overarching social solidarity conjoined to create a jangled social configuration with the angular properties of a modernist portrait.

An earlier posting focused on Engels's sociology of the city. But here is how Georg Simmel puts it in "The Metropolis and Modern Life":

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labour) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition -- but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

The Chicago School of sociology is particularly on target when it comes to understanding "modernity", given its strong emphasis on understanding the social reality of Chicago as a turbulent, jangled social reality.


(See Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Politics, History, and Culture), for some very thoughtful discussions of the study of "modernity" by contemporary historical sociologists.)

Modernism and social life

painting: Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar (1913)

Image: Mexico City slum

Modernity is remarkably hard to define or capture. We might try this ostensive definition: it is the culture, mental framework, and social reality of the world created by the industrial revolution, mass society, urban life, and mass literacy and communication. It is the world of anonymous social relations, the market as a central social reality, the rational-bureaucratic state, and mass public opinion. It is what came after "the world we have lost" (Peter Laslett's evocative phrase in The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age) -- the pre-modern world of direct, face-to-face social relations, powerful religious beliefs, traditional regulation of village society, and very low levels of mobility for the individual. Stability, continuity, locality, and legible social relations capture the pre-modern world. And the modern world overturns each of these.

English critic (and blogger before his time) Thomas Carlyle saw it coming -- and he didn't care for it. Here are some of his descriptions of the social reality coming to England in the 1820s in Past and Present:

The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with work-shops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our Earth ever had ... and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" (Book I, ch. 1)

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him "on the rim of the sky," minatory or confirmatory? God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime. (Book III, ch. 1)

And in fact, I think the task of making sense of a rapidly changing social reality was as stunning in the 1840s as it is today -- Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Herzen, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin all turned their imaginations and their critical abilities to the task of conceptualizing the changes that were sweeping across Europe and the globe in the first part of the nineteenth century. (Steven Marcus does a good job of capturing the cognitive and imaginative challenge faced by reflective observers in the early nineteenth century in Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class.)

So how can sociologists, historians, or artists and poets help us understand the nature of modernity? The cacaphony of the modern city is one powerful metaphor for the nature of the social modern. So the sociology of the city is a good place to start. And the jangled, fractured canvases of modernist painting evoke the conflicting, overlapping mentalities of the modern world; so perhaps we can learn something about the nature of modernity from reflective art historians.

Here is how art historian T. J. Clark reflects on the meaning of "modernity" in his spectacular book, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.

"Modernity" means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future -- of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information. This process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short supply -- "meaning" here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, implicit orders, stories and images in which a culture crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the reality of pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, "the disenchantment of the world," still seems to me to sum up this side of modernity best. (7)

"Secularization" is a nice technical word for this blankness. It means specialization and abstraction; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical chances, with everyone accepting (or resenting) a high level of risk; time and space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by "information" and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the de-skilling of everyday life (deference to experts and technicians in more of the microstructure of the self); available, invasive, haunting expertise; the chronic revision of everything in the light of "studies." I should say straightaway that this cluster of features seems to be tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings. (7)

Is it not the case that the truly new, and disorienting, character of modernity is its seemingly being driven by merely material, statistical, tendential, "economic" considerations? We know we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled -- and obscurely felt to be ruled -- by sheer concatenation of profit and loss, bids and bargains: that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose. It is the blindness of modernity that seems to me fundamental, and to which modernism is a response. (8)

painting: Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)

And what about the city? How does the sociology of the city shed light on the cultural reality of the modern world? The modern city represented a coming-together of many of the currents of social change that constituted the heterogeneous mix of "modernity." A large and disconnected population, substantial inequalities, civic anonymity, alienation, bureaucratic administration, modern policing and public services, street cars, and a virtual absence of overarching social solidarity conjoined to create a jangled social configuration with the angular properties of a modernist portrait.

An earlier posting focused on Engels's sociology of the city. But here is how Georg Simmel puts it in "The Metropolis and Modern Life":

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labour) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition -- but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

The Chicago School of sociology is particularly on target when it comes to understanding "modernity", given its strong emphasis on understanding the social reality of Chicago as a turbulent, jangled social reality.


(See Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Politics, History, and Culture), for some very thoughtful discussions of the study of "modernity" by contemporary historical sociologists.)

France as a "nation"

source: Emmanuel Todd, The Making of Modern France: Politics, Ideology and Culture (Blackwell, 1991)

Is France one nation? What makes it so? And what are the large socio-cultural factors that led to modern France? These are the questions that Emmanuel Todd raises in The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture. Todd is one of this generation's leading historians in France, and his conception of the challenge of history is worth studying. I would call him a "macro-historian", in that he is interested in large processes of change over extended stretches of space (for example, the extension of industry across the map of France from 1850 to 1970, or the patterns of religious dissent from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries), and he singles out characteristics of family structure, demography, literacy, and religion as a set of causal factors that explain the patterns of historical change that he uncovers.

Todd's starting point seems exactly right to me: the "nation" is not a particularly salient level of analysis for making sense of large historical change. Social, economic, and political developments should not be presumed to unfold at the level of the nation. He puts forward a simple but apt criterion for choosing a level of analysis for historical inquiry: "one has to observe the social and economic behaviour of the human beings in question and discover their scale in order to define closed and homogeneous groups which then can be called society X or economy Y" (7). And in fact, he argues that "France" is better understood as a configuration of regions and zones than as an integrated national system. As he puts the point, "one can represent France as a heterogeneous and open area in which social, economic and political forces emerge, spread and establish themselves quite independently of the central power and of the overall national structure" (8). And: "Notions of 'French society', 'French economy', 'French industry', 'French working class' are to some extent myths" (7). (It is interesting to observe that this is one of G. William Skinner's central insights into Chinese history as well, especially in his analysis of the historical relevance of "macroregions" in China. Here's an earlier post on Skinner's work.)

So what are the patterns and causal factors that have given rise to "modern France" in Todd's reckoning? Crudely, Todd argues that there are large regional patterns of culture, demography, and property that created distinct dynamics of change across eight centuries of French history. The southern half of France is characterized by complex family systems with several generations in the same household and a low rate of reproduction, in contrast to the nuclear families of the north and their higher rate of reproduction. The family values of the southern region gave greater importance to literacy and education than the nuclear (and larger) families of the north. And family structure, patterns of inheritance, and land tenure are in turn highly relevant to the formation of large patterns of ideology. (A similar logic is expressed in another of Todd's books, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems (Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times).)

The central analytical device in Todd's argument is a fascinating series of maps of France coding the 90 départements of France by such variables as the percent of women holding the baccalauréat, the percentage of priests accepting the serment constitutionnel (revolutionary loyalty oath) in 1791, or the percentage of workers in a given industrial sector. The maps display striking geographical patterns documenting Todd's interpretation of the large historical patterns and their underlying anthropological and geographical causes. At the largest scale, he argues for three axes of historical causation: a north-south axis defined by family structure that creates differentials of literacy and population growth; an east-west axis defined by the diffusion of industry from northern Europe into eastern France and across the map from east to west; and a political pattern different from both of these, extending from Paris at the political center to the periphery in all directions. The following is a great example; Todd is interested in observing the degree of "religiosity" across France around the time of the Revolution, and he uses the percentage of priests who accepted the oath of allegiance demanded by the Revolutionary government as a measure. The resulting map reveals conspicuous patterns; the periphery and the south stand out as non-conformist.

Todd also argues that there is a causal order among the large social factors he singles out. Family structure is causally relevant to literacy and education level; literacy is relevant to religious dissent and the emergence of Cathars, Waldensians, and Protestants; family structure is relevant to reproductive rates which are in turn relevant to the spread of industry; and traditions of inheritance are relevant to a region's receptiveness to the ideology of the Revolution. And the patterns created by these causal processes are very persistent; so the southern belt of high-literacy départements of the twelfth century coincides almost exactly with the pattern of high incidence of baccalauréats and doctors in the late twentieth century.

A particularly interesting part of Todd's analysis for me is his effort to map out the agrarian regimes of pre-revolutionary France (the ancien régime). He observes that this hasn't been done by existing studies of French rural society, and that there is no suitable statistical data on the basis of which to do so for the eighteenth century in any case. However, he makes use of the first census in 1851 to infer back a century in order to arrive at an analysis into four categories: large estates with hired labor, peasant proprietorship, tenant farming, and share-cropping. And using the mid-nineteenth century census data he constructs this map:

Note that the large estates are concentrated in the center of France, including Paris; while peasant proprietorship (sometimes combined with share-cropping) predominates in the southern tier. Note as well how closely these patterns conform to the distribution of family structure and fertility at the top of the posting. And Todd argues that these patterns showed substantial continuity before and after the Revolution (61). In other words, there is a very substantial overlap between agrarian regimes and the anthropological-demographic patterns discussed earlier. Todd then uses these geographical patterns to explain something different: the pattern of de-christianization that took place over the century following the Revolution. Basically, de-christianization is associated with the regions involving a large number of landless workers, whereas this cultural process was least virulent in regions of peasant proprietorship. Todd summarizes this way:

The link between family and agrarian system will help us to understand why dechristianization gained ground, from 1791 onwards, in regions of large farms and share-cropping, and met with resistance in provinces where tenant farming and peasant proprietorship were predominant. This proposition can, moreover, be reformulated thanks to equivalences between family types and agrarian systems. Dechristianization spread in regions where the family structure was egalitarian nuclear or community, but failed in provinces where the family was stem or absolute nuclear.

In other words -- an explanation of ideology and religion in terms of a set of demographic and social characteristics that are distributed differentially across regions.

I haven't touched on the dynamics of politics at all here, which is an important piece of Todd's work. But these comments suffice to illustrate the pattern of historical thinking represented by Todd's work. It is striking for its effort to cross genres, incorporating geography, anthropology, and sociology into the formation of large interpretations of French history. And it is striking for the scale of the canvas that he attempts to paint.

France as a "nation"

source: Emmanuel Todd, The Making of Modern France: Politics, Ideology and Culture (Blackwell, 1991)

Is France one nation? What makes it so? And what are the large socio-cultural factors that led to modern France? These are the questions that Emmanuel Todd raises in The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture. Todd is one of this generation's leading historians in France, and his conception of the challenge of history is worth studying. I would call him a "macro-historian", in that he is interested in large processes of change over extended stretches of space (for example, the extension of industry across the map of France from 1850 to 1970, or the patterns of religious dissent from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries), and he singles out characteristics of family structure, demography, literacy, and religion as a set of causal factors that explain the patterns of historical change that he uncovers.

Todd's starting point seems exactly right to me: the "nation" is not a particularly salient level of analysis for making sense of large historical change. Social, economic, and political developments should not be presumed to unfold at the level of the nation. He puts forward a simple but apt criterion for choosing a level of analysis for historical inquiry: "one has to observe the social and economic behaviour of the human beings in question and discover their scale in order to define closed and homogeneous groups which then can be called society X or economy Y" (7). And in fact, he argues that "France" is better understood as a configuration of regions and zones than as an integrated national system. As he puts the point, "one can represent France as a heterogeneous and open area in which social, economic and political forces emerge, spread and establish themselves quite independently of the central power and of the overall national structure" (8). And: "Notions of 'French society', 'French economy', 'French industry', 'French working class' are to some extent myths" (7). (It is interesting to observe that this is one of G. William Skinner's central insights into Chinese history as well, especially in his analysis of the historical relevance of "macroregions" in China. Here's an earlier post on Skinner's work.)

So what are the patterns and causal factors that have given rise to "modern France" in Todd's reckoning? Crudely, Todd argues that there are large regional patterns of culture, demography, and property that created distinct dynamics of change across eight centuries of French history. The southern half of France is characterized by complex family systems with several generations in the same household and a low rate of reproduction, in contrast to the nuclear families of the north and their higher rate of reproduction. The family values of the southern region gave greater importance to literacy and education than the nuclear (and larger) families of the north. And family structure, patterns of inheritance, and land tenure are in turn highly relevant to the formation of large patterns of ideology. (A similar logic is expressed in another of Todd's books, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems (Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times).)

The central analytical device in Todd's argument is a fascinating series of maps of France coding the 90 départements of France by such variables as the percent of women holding the baccalauréat, the percentage of priests accepting the serment constitutionnel (revolutionary loyalty oath) in 1791, or the percentage of workers in a given industrial sector. The maps display striking geographical patterns documenting Todd's interpretation of the large historical patterns and their underlying anthropological and geographical causes. At the largest scale, he argues for three axes of historical causation: a north-south axis defined by family structure that creates differentials of literacy and population growth; an east-west axis defined by the diffusion of industry from northern Europe into eastern France and across the map from east to west; and a political pattern different from both of these, extending from Paris at the political center to the periphery in all directions. The following is a great example; Todd is interested in observing the degree of "religiosity" across France around the time of the Revolution, and he uses the percentage of priests who accepted the oath of allegiance demanded by the Revolutionary government as a measure. The resulting map reveals conspicuous patterns; the periphery and the south stand out as non-conformist.

Todd also argues that there is a causal order among the large social factors he singles out. Family structure is causally relevant to literacy and education level; literacy is relevant to religious dissent and the emergence of Cathars, Waldensians, and Protestants; family structure is relevant to reproductive rates which are in turn relevant to the spread of industry; and traditions of inheritance are relevant to a region's receptiveness to the ideology of the Revolution. And the patterns created by these causal processes are very persistent; so the southern belt of high-literacy départements of the twelfth century coincides almost exactly with the pattern of high incidence of baccalauréats and doctors in the late twentieth century.

A particularly interesting part of Todd's analysis for me is his effort to map out the agrarian regimes of pre-revolutionary France (the ancien régime). He observes that this hasn't been done by existing studies of French rural society, and that there is no suitable statistical data on the basis of which to do so for the eighteenth century in any case. However, he makes use of the first census in 1851 to infer back a century in order to arrive at an analysis into four categories: large estates with hired labor, peasant proprietorship, tenant farming, and share-cropping. And using the mid-nineteenth century census data he constructs this map:

Note that the large estates are concentrated in the center of France, including Paris; while peasant proprietorship (sometimes combined with share-cropping) predominates in the southern tier. Note as well how closely these patterns conform to the distribution of family structure and fertility at the top of the posting. And Todd argues that these patterns showed substantial continuity before and after the Revolution (61). In other words, there is a very substantial overlap between agrarian regimes and the anthropological-demographic patterns discussed earlier. Todd then uses these geographical patterns to explain something different: the pattern of de-christianization that took place over the century following the Revolution. Basically, de-christianization is associated with the regions involving a large number of landless workers, whereas this cultural process was least virulent in regions of peasant proprietorship. Todd summarizes this way:

The link between family and agrarian system will help us to understand why dechristianization gained ground, from 1791 onwards, in regions of large farms and share-cropping, and met with resistance in provinces where tenant farming and peasant proprietorship were predominant. This proposition can, moreover, be reformulated thanks to equivalences between family types and agrarian systems. Dechristianization spread in regions where the family structure was egalitarian nuclear or community, but failed in provinces where the family was stem or absolute nuclear.

In other words -- an explanation of ideology and religion in terms of a set of demographic and social characteristics that are distributed differentially across regions.

I haven't touched on the dynamics of politics at all here, which is an important piece of Todd's work. But these comments suffice to illustrate the pattern of historical thinking represented by Todd's work. It is striking for its effort to cross genres, incorporating geography, anthropology, and sociology into the formation of large interpretations of French history. And it is striking for the scale of the canvas that he attempts to paint.

France as a "nation"

source: Emmanuel Todd, The Making of Modern France: Politics, Ideology and Culture (Blackwell, 1991)

Is France one nation? What makes it so? And what are the large socio-cultural factors that led to modern France? These are the questions that Emmanuel Todd raises in The Making of Modern France: Ideology, Politics and Culture. Todd is one of this generation's leading historians in France, and his conception of the challenge of history is worth studying. I would call him a "macro-historian", in that he is interested in large processes of change over extended stretches of space (for example, the extension of industry across the map of France from 1850 to 1970, or the patterns of religious dissent from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries), and he singles out characteristics of family structure, demography, literacy, and religion as a set of causal factors that explain the patterns of historical change that he uncovers.

Todd's starting point seems exactly right to me: the "nation" is not a particularly salient level of analysis for making sense of large historical change. Social, economic, and political developments should not be presumed to unfold at the level of the nation. He puts forward a simple but apt criterion for choosing a level of analysis for historical inquiry: "one has to observe the social and economic behaviour of the human beings in question and discover their scale in order to define closed and homogeneous groups which then can be called society X or economy Y" (7). And in fact, he argues that "France" is better understood as a configuration of regions and zones than as an integrated national system. As he puts the point, "one can represent France as a heterogeneous and open area in which social, economic and political forces emerge, spread and establish themselves quite independently of the central power and of the overall national structure" (8). And: "Notions of 'French society', 'French economy', 'French industry', 'French working class' are to some extent myths" (7). (It is interesting to observe that this is one of G. William Skinner's central insights into Chinese history as well, especially in his analysis of the historical relevance of "macroregions" in China. Here's an earlier post on Skinner's work.)

So what are the patterns and causal factors that have given rise to "modern France" in Todd's reckoning? Crudely, Todd argues that there are large regional patterns of culture, demography, and property that created distinct dynamics of change across eight centuries of French history. The southern half of France is characterized by complex family systems with several generations in the same household and a low rate of reproduction, in contrast to the nuclear families of the north and their higher rate of reproduction. The family values of the southern region gave greater importance to literacy and education than the nuclear (and larger) families of the north. And family structure, patterns of inheritance, and land tenure are in turn highly relevant to the formation of large patterns of ideology. (A similar logic is expressed in another of Todd's books, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems (Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times).)

The central analytical device in Todd's argument is a fascinating series of maps of France coding the 90 départements of France by such variables as the percent of women holding the baccalauréat, the percentage of priests accepting the serment constitutionnel (revolutionary loyalty oath) in 1791, or the percentage of workers in a given industrial sector. The maps display striking geographical patterns documenting Todd's interpretation of the large historical patterns and their underlying anthropological and geographical causes. At the largest scale, he argues for three axes of historical causation: a north-south axis defined by family structure that creates differentials of literacy and population growth; an east-west axis defined by the diffusion of industry from northern Europe into eastern France and across the map from east to west; and a political pattern different from both of these, extending from Paris at the political center to the periphery in all directions. The following is a great example; Todd is interested in observing the degree of "religiosity" across France around the time of the Revolution, and he uses the percentage of priests who accepted the oath of allegiance demanded by the Revolutionary government as a measure. The resulting map reveals conspicuous patterns; the periphery and the south stand out as non-conformist.

Todd also argues that there is a causal order among the large social factors he singles out. Family structure is causally relevant to literacy and education level; literacy is relevant to religious dissent and the emergence of Cathars, Waldensians, and Protestants; family structure is relevant to reproductive rates which are in turn relevant to the spread of industry; and traditions of inheritance are relevant to a region's receptiveness to the ideology of the Revolution. And the patterns created by these causal processes are very persistent; so the southern belt of high-literacy départements of the twelfth century coincides almost exactly with the pattern of high incidence of baccalauréats and doctors in the late twentieth century.

A particularly interesting part of Todd's analysis for me is his effort to map out the agrarian regimes of pre-revolutionary France (the ancien régime). He observes that this hasn't been done by existing studies of French rural society, and that there is no suitable statistical data on the basis of which to do so for the eighteenth century in any case. However, he makes use of the first census in 1851 to infer back a century in order to arrive at an analysis into four categories: large estates with hired labor, peasant proprietorship, tenant farming, and share-cropping. And using the mid-nineteenth century census data he constructs this map:

Note that the large estates are concentrated in the center of France, including Paris; while peasant proprietorship (sometimes combined with share-cropping) predominates in the southern tier. Note as well how closely these patterns conform to the distribution of family structure and fertility at the top of the posting. And Todd argues that these patterns showed substantial continuity before and after the Revolution (61). In other words, there is a very substantial overlap between agrarian regimes and the anthropological-demographic patterns discussed earlier. Todd then uses these geographical patterns to explain something different: the pattern of de-christianization that took place over the century following the Revolution. Basically, de-christianization is associated with the regions involving a large number of landless workers, whereas this cultural process was least virulent in regions of peasant proprietorship. Todd summarizes this way:

The link between family and agrarian system will help us to understand why dechristianization gained ground, from 1791 onwards, in regions of large farms and share-cropping, and met with resistance in provinces where tenant farming and peasant proprietorship were predominant. This proposition can, moreover, be reformulated thanks to equivalences between family types and agrarian systems. Dechristianization spread in regions where the family structure was egalitarian nuclear or community, but failed in provinces where the family was stem or absolute nuclear.

In other words -- an explanation of ideology and religion in terms of a set of demographic and social characteristics that are distributed differentially across regions.

I haven't touched on the dynamics of politics at all here, which is an important piece of Todd's work. But these comments suffice to illustrate the pattern of historical thinking represented by Todd's work. It is striking for its effort to cross genres, incorporating geography, anthropology, and sociology into the formation of large interpretations of French history. And it is striking for the scale of the canvas that he attempts to paint.

Great structures?

The scholars of the Annales school of French history characteristically placed their analysis of historical change within the context of the large structures -- economic, social, or demographic -- within which ordinary people live out their lives. They postulate that the broad and enduring social relations that exist in a society -- for example, property relations, administrative and political relations, or the legal system -- constitute a stable structure within which agents act, and they determine the distribution of crucial social resources that become the raw materials on the basis of which agents exercise power over other individuals and groups. So the particular details of a social structure create the conditions that set the stage for historical change in the society. (The recently translated book by André Burguière provides an excellent discussion of the Annales school; The Annales School: An Intellectual History.)

The Annales school also put forward a concept that applies to the temporal structure of historical change: the idea that some historical changes unfold over very long periods of time and are all but invisible to participants -- the history of the longue durée. So large enduring structures, applying their effects over very long periods of historical time, provided a crucial part of the historical imagination of the Annales school.

Marc Bloch's own treatment of French feudalism illustrates a sustained analysis of a group of great structures enduring centuries over much of the territory of France (Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence), as does Le Roy Ladurie's treatment of the causes of change and stasis in Languedoc in The Peasants of Languedoc. Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life represents another clear example of historical research organized around analysis of great structures. And though not a member of the Annales school, I would include M. I. Finley's treatment of the ancient economy as another important example (The Ancient Economy); Finley attempts to trace out the features of property, economy, and political and military power through which ordinary life and historical change proceeded in the ancient world. But there is an important difference among the several works: Bloch, Braudel, and Finley represent an analysis of these structures as a whole, while Le Roy Ladurie's work largely attempts to explain features of life over a very long time that show the imprint of such structures. One is macrohistory, while the other is microhistory.

What are some examples of putative “great structures”? There are several that readily come to mind: a nation's economic system, its system of law, legislation, and enforcement; its system of government, taxation, and policy-making, its educational system, religious organizations and traditions, the composite system of organizations that exist within civil society, and the norms and relations of the family.

The scope of action matters here; the background assumption is that a great structure encompasses a large population and territory. (So we would not call the specific marriage customs that govern a small group of Alpine villages but extend no further a "great structure.") And it is further assumed that the hypothesized structure possesses a high degree of functional continuity and integration; there are assumed to be concrete social processes that assure that the structure works in roughly the same way throughout its scope to regulate behavior.

The idea of a "great structure" thus requires that we attend to the contrast between locally embodied institutions showing significant variation across time and space, and the supposedly more homogeneous workings of "great structures." We need to be able to provide an account of the extended social mechanisms that establish the effects and stability of the great structure. If we cannot validate these assumptions about scope, continuity, and functional similarity, then the concept of a "great structure" collapses onto a concatenation of vaguely similar institutions in different times and places.

To fit the bill, then, a great structure should have some specific features of scope and breadth. It should be geographically widespread, affecting a large population. It should have roughly similar characteristics and effects on behavior in the full range of its scope. And it should be persistent over an extended period of time -- decades or longer.

The most basic question is this: are there great structures? On the positive side, it is possible to identify social mechanisms that secure the functional stability of certain institutions over a large reach of territory and time. A system of law is enforced by the agents of the state; so it is reasonable to assume that there will be similar legal institutions in Henan and Sichuan when there is an effective imperial government. A system of trading and credit may have centrally enforced and locally reinforcing mechanisms that assure that it works similarly in widely separated places. A normative system regulating marriage may be stabilized by local behaviors over a wide space. The crucial point here is simply this: if we postulate that a given structure has scope over a wide range, we need to have a theory of some of the social mechanisms that convey its power and its reproduction over time.

So the existence of great structures is ambiguous. Yes—in that there are effective institutions of politics, economics, and social life that are real and effectual within given historical settings, and we have empirical understanding of some of the mechanisms that reproduce these structures. But no—in that all social structures are historically rooted; so there is no “essential” state or economy which recurs in different settings. Instead, political and economic structures may be expected to evolve in different historical settings. And a central task of historical research is to discover both the unifying dynamics and the differentiating expressions which these abstract processes take in different historical settings.

Great structures?

The scholars of the Annales school of French history characteristically placed their analysis of historical change within the context of the large structures -- economic, social, or demographic -- within which ordinary people live out their lives. They postulate that the broad and enduring social relations that exist in a society -- for example, property relations, administrative and political relations, or the legal system -- constitute a stable structure within which agents act, and they determine the distribution of crucial social resources that become the raw materials on the basis of which agents exercise power over other individuals and groups. So the particular details of a social structure create the conditions that set the stage for historical change in the society. (The recently translated book by André Burguière provides an excellent discussion of the Annales school; The Annales School: An Intellectual History.)

The Annales school also put forward a concept that applies to the temporal structure of historical change: the idea that some historical changes unfold over very long periods of time and are all but invisible to participants -- the history of the longue durée. So large enduring structures, applying their effects over very long periods of historical time, provided a crucial part of the historical imagination of the Annales school.

Marc Bloch's own treatment of French feudalism illustrates a sustained analysis of a group of great structures enduring centuries over much of the territory of France (Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence), as does Le Roy Ladurie's treatment of the causes of change and stasis in Languedoc in The Peasants of Languedoc. Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life represents another clear example of historical research organized around analysis of great structures. And though not a member of the Annales school, I would include M. I. Finley's treatment of the ancient economy as another important example (The Ancient Economy); Finley attempts to trace out the features of property, economy, and political and military power through which ordinary life and historical change proceeded in the ancient world. But there is an important difference among the several works: Bloch, Braudel, and Finley represent an analysis of these structures as a whole, while Le Roy Ladurie's work largely attempts to explain features of life over a very long time that show the imprint of such structures. One is macrohistory, while the other is microhistory.

What are some examples of putative “great structures”? There are several that readily come to mind: a nation's economic system, its system of law, legislation, and enforcement; its system of government, taxation, and policy-making, its educational system, religious organizations and traditions, the composite system of organizations that exist within civil society, and the norms and relations of the family.

The scope of action matters here; the background assumption is that a great structure encompasses a large population and territory. (So we would not call the specific marriage customs that govern a small group of Alpine villages but extend no further a "great structure.") And it is further assumed that the hypothesized structure possesses a high degree of functional continuity and integration; there are assumed to be concrete social processes that assure that the structure works in roughly the same way throughout its scope to regulate behavior.

The idea of a "great structure" thus requires that we attend to the contrast between locally embodied institutions showing significant variation across time and space, and the supposedly more homogeneous workings of "great structures." We need to be able to provide an account of the extended social mechanisms that establish the effects and stability of the great structure. If we cannot validate these assumptions about scope, continuity, and functional similarity, then the concept of a "great structure" collapses onto a concatenation of vaguely similar institutions in different times and places.

To fit the bill, then, a great structure should have some specific features of scope and breadth. It should be geographically widespread, affecting a large population. It should have roughly similar characteristics and effects on behavior in the full range of its scope. And it should be persistent over an extended period of time -- decades or longer.

The most basic question is this: are there great structures? On the positive side, it is possible to identify social mechanisms that secure the functional stability of certain institutions over a large reach of territory and time. A system of law is enforced by the agents of the state; so it is reasonable to assume that there will be similar legal institutions in Henan and Sichuan when there is an effective imperial government. A system of trading and credit may have centrally enforced and locally reinforcing mechanisms that assure that it works similarly in widely separated places. A normative system regulating marriage may be stabilized by local behaviors over a wide space. The crucial point here is simply this: if we postulate that a given structure has scope over a wide range, we need to have a theory of some of the social mechanisms that convey its power and its reproduction over time.

So the existence of great structures is ambiguous. Yes—in that there are effective institutions of politics, economics, and social life that are real and effectual within given historical settings, and we have empirical understanding of some of the mechanisms that reproduce these structures. But no—in that all social structures are historically rooted; so there is no “essential” state or economy which recurs in different settings. Instead, political and economic structures may be expected to evolve in different historical settings. And a central task of historical research is to discover both the unifying dynamics and the differentiating expressions which these abstract processes take in different historical settings.