Description

Rating: ****

Tags: History of Ideas, Modernity, Lang:en

Summary

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.

**

Review

"This is an impressive work of synthesis which tracks more than a century of bourgeois life in Europe. And the bourgeois world Seigel conjures is a complex one, born of ever more tightly woven patterns of communication and exchange, never fixed but changing over time, and always an unstable mix of the structured and the fluid. Rarely has the subject been treated with such sweep and sympathy."
Philip Nord, Princeton University

"A virtuoso performance in a powerful survey with an eye for the telling contrast and the shrewd comparison: England - at once the most bourgeois and the least; France - homeland of revolution yet slow to change, and Germany, where bourgeois politics was expressed by not yet modern bourgeois classes."
Donald Sassoon, Queen Mary, University of London

"Jerrold Seigel dazzles the reader with an array of original arguments across European time and space, and gives new credibility to transformational claims for Western Europe's middle classes. He convincingly shows how the articulation of new bourgeois networks in various spheres of activity cumulatively altered European society and culture."
Isser Woloch, Columbia University

"Jerry Seigel's ambitious and important new book offers a fresh interpretation of Europe's 'great transformation' (1750-1914) that is as cogent as it is challenging. Immensely learned, vividly detailed and impressively comprehensive, Modernity and Bourgeois Life combines a broad synthesis of the social and cultural history of modern western Europe with an original and compelling argument regarding the place of bourgeois actors in the gradual and uneven emergence of modern life in economic, cultural and political realms. Beautifully written and sharply argued, Seigel's narrative is shot through with luminous insights, telling individual portraits and clear and engaging explanations of sometimes quite difficult material. A pleasure to read, Modernity and Bourgeois Life invites its readers on a genial voyage of discovery, or re-discovery, of recent European landscapes they thought they already knew."
Laura Lee Downs, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris

"In this masterful interpretation of modern European history, Seigel (emer., NYU) persuasively and lucidly argues that the essence of change has been the growth and transformation of the bourgeoisie ... This work belongs in every academic library; it also deserves to be taken off the shelves and read by all students of European history. Uncommonly good. Summing up: highly recommended."
Choice

Book Description

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.