Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 4/12/2012
EAN 9781107018105, ISBN10: 1107018102
Hardcover, 638 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.5 cm
Language: English
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.
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.