History 512:529; Liberal Studies 606:521

MODERNITY AND ITS CRITICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Dr. Andrew Lees  (Armitage 353; 856/225-6071;  alees@camden.rutgers.edu)                 Fall, 2009

 

Subjects and Purposes of the Course

            This course focuses on cultural and intellectual history between about 1800 and 1914, when there was a series of great debates in connection with industrialization, urbanization, and other aspects of the modernization of European and American society.  Much of the reading consists of primary writings by social thinkers, political philosophers, novelists, and other authors (among them, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Jane Addams) about themes such as coping with urban poverty and other urban ills, the relations between individual and group rights, and the proper roles of women and artists. Such topics also appear in books by historians, which complement the primary writings.  Most of the primary texts originated in Europe, but some of  them and several of the secondary sources pertain to the American scene, and I shall strive to maintain a comparative perspective throughout the semester.

 

Readings, Requirements, and Grades:  Some Basic Information 

            Students should purchase the books marked below by asterisks.  All assigned reading that is not contained either in the books to be purchased or in my Cities Perceived (copies to be distributed) can be found on electr.  Students who have not already studied nineteenth-century Europe or whose familiarity with it lies in the distant past would do well to acquaint themselves with the period via a basic survey.  I highly recommend any edition of R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World (a copy on reserve; widely available elsewhere).

            Coming to class with the reading in hand, so that you can refer to it during discussions, matters a lot.   More than two absences, for whatever reason, will almost certainly have an adverse impact on a student’s grade for the course.   Not bringing the reading will also attract unfavorable attention.

            A paper one to two pages in length on one of the documents assigned for Sept. 10, papers two to three pages in length on five of the seven works of history assigned in the course (for weeks 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, and 14)  and a synthetic paper (based on assigned reading) seven to eight pages in length will be required.  Anyone who misses a class owes me a two to three page paper on the reading assigned for that class. For all papers, bear the following points in mind: [1] When I say “two to three pages,” I mean at least two full pages; also, papers should be printed in twelve-point type, double‑spaced, with one‑inch margins on all sides. [2] They should be stapled, and each student's last name should be indicated in the top left corners of first pages. [3] They should be revised and proofread carefully. Large numbers of misspelled words, grammatical errors, and typographical errors will have adverse impacts on my evaluation of their quality. [4] Lengthy quota­tions should be avoided. [5] Plagiarism, the act of presenting another person's words or ideas as one's own, must be avoided.  It is an egregious form of academic dishonesty, which can get people into a lot of trouble. 

            Each student will be expected to report orally in class on a book selected from the list of suggested readings and on a second book, also from the list or located by some other means. 

            Here is my policy on grades. I do not assign letter grades for individual pieces of work.  I write comments on papers and notes to myself.  I also keep track of attendance, and I retain a pretty clear impression of the extent to which you are  participating in discussions. If I am worried about  your work, I shall let you know.  If you want to talk with me about it, I shall be glad to do so at most any time.  I think that by the end of the term you and I will have a pretty good idea of how well you have been doing.

 

Contacting Me and Meeting Me

             If you wish to meet, please contact me by e-mail, which I check often. I am pretty flexible, except

when I am surprised at the last minute while trying to get ready for a class.

 

 

 

 

Topics of Class Meetings, Perspectives, Assignments, and Suggested Readings

 

September 3

INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE

 

Perspectives

To set the stage for the first several weeks of the course, after introducing the course as a whole, I shall lecture on overall economic, social, and political developments during the period between about 1815 and about 1870.  As background, I highly recommend the chapter on “Reaction vs. Progress, 1815-48, everything in the following chapter except for the final section, and the first three sections of the chapter after that in R. R.Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World, which is a classic. (Later in the term, the chapter on “European Civilization, 1871-1914” would also be useful.)   If you have another text that you have read for a Western Civilization course ready to hand, you might review relevant sections in it instead. 

 

September 10

CONDITIONS AND CONTROVERSIES IN BRITAIN, CA. 1800-1845:

DEVELOPMENTS AND DOCUMENTS

 

Perspectives

During (and for several decades beyond) the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain maintained a clear lead in the area of technological and economic development. Liberals generally welcomed the rise of a commercial-industrial-urban society, and they tended to believe that individuals should be both free to pursue their own self-interests and obligated to fend for themselves.  The doctrine of laissez-faire became increasingly widespread both in their writings and in the writings of pessimists such as Thomas Malthus.  In contrast, men such as Thomas Carlyle, Robert Owen, and the various supporters of Chartism sought to counter such ideas, advocating instead various visions of social cooperation and social justice.

 

Assigned Reading:

Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (excerpts)

Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities (excerpts)

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (excerpts), in John Bowditch and Clement Ramsland, eds., Voices of the Industrial Revolution**, pp. 49-69

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (excerpts), in Bowditch and Ramsland, pp. 91-111

Robert Owen,  Report to the County of Lanarck (excerpts), in Bowditch and Ramsland, pp. 124-44

“National Petition,” in Bowditch and Ramsland,  pp. 112-15

Harold Perkin, "The Struggle between the Ideals"

 

September 17

CONDITIONS AND CONTROVERSIES IN BRITAIN, CA. 1800-1860: HISTORICAL ANALYSES

 

Perspectives

The reading assigned and suggested for this week  reveals some of the ways in which historians have attempted to make sense of  the ideas expressed by individuals of the sort we encountered last week, whether by relating them to social class or by situating them within larger contexts of thought and policy.  Who spoke for whom?  How were values and interests intermixed in varying proposals for social reform?  How did competing values take shape institutionally?  These are some of the questions addressed in the works listed below.

 

Assigned Reading 

Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860**

                       

Suggested Reading

John R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795‑1834 (HV245 67)

Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (Alex: HV4086 A3 H5)

William Grampp, The Manchester School of Economics (HB103 A2 G7)

Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838-1846 (HF2044 M14 1968)

                          R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (PR4984 M5 Z93 1960a)

David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (HN385 R57)                               Michael Levin, The Condition of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels (Alex: HC255 L5291998)

Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (RA485 H28 1997)

             J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for a New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (HX696 O9 H34 1969b)

Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture (Alex; DA533.B57 2003)

 

September 24

CONDITIONS AND CONTROVERSIES ELSEWHERE, CA. 1830-1870:

DEVELOPMENTS AND DOCUMENTS

 

Perspectives

We listen this week to the voices of  writers who expressed their thoughts on both sides of the Atlantic, in America as well as on the European continent.  The views of Orestes Brownson (active in Massachusetts) and Étienne Cabet (born in France but also active both in Britain and in the United States) bore interesting resemblances to ideas we have already encountered.  Two Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, drew on this thinking too, but they did so in ways that were far more radical--and far more influential.  The Communist Manifesto, which they wrote on the eve of the revolutions that broke out in Europe in early 1848, constitutes the classic expression of what has come to be known as the "Marxist" outlook.  Meanwhile, other intellectuals and activists were seeking the establishment of what Marx and Engels regarded as political prerequisites for the revolution they had in mind: nation states that were either based on popular sovereignty or at least equipped with parliamentary institutions.  Giuseppe Mazzini played an important part in efforts to forge a united Italy.  “The Basic Rights of the German People” emanated from the ill-fated efforts of the so-called Frankfurt Parliament to forge a united Germany.   Finally, we meet another New Englander, Margaret Fuller, who raised a new set of concerns, quite different from the ones we have encountered so far.

Assigned Reading

Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes”

             Étienne Cabet, Voyage to Icaria (excerpts) and "Communist Creed," in Bowditch and Ramsland,  pp. 145-53

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Preface to the 1888 Edition of the Manifesto" and Manifesto of the Communist Party (excerpts), in Bowditch and Ramsland, pp. 154-180

“Selections from Writings by Giuseppe Mazzini:  ‘Instructions for Young Italy’ and ‘Duties towards Your Country’”

“The Fundamental Rights of the German People”

Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit: Man Versus Men, Woman Versus Women”

 

October 1

CONDITIONS AND CONTROVERSIES ELSEWHERE, CA. 1830-1870: HISTORICAL ANALYSES

 

Perspectives

The reading assigned for this week offers a penetrating view of the implications of economic, social, and intellectual change in German central Europe, with particular emphasis on the turmoil that erupted at mid-century. Other works treat both revolutionary and reformist developments elsewhere as well as in Germany.  If you wish to do extra reading on antebellum America, you might look at works listed at the end of the list of suggested reading on utopianism and abolitionism.

 

Assigned Reading

             Theodore S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815-1871**

 

Suggested Reading

Christopher Johnson, Utopian Communism: Cabet and the Icarians (HX703 J62 1974)

Ann La Berge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement
(Alex: RA499 .L23 1992 )

Jill, Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848 (DC733.H37 2002

Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann: Ideas and Proposals for a New City
(DC723 .P28 2004)

Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (D387.S64 1994

Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution (DC270 D853)

             Frank Eyck, The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848-1849 (DD207.5 E87)    

Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Alex: DD207.5 V48 2002)

Catherine M. Prelinger, Charity, Challenge, and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Women's Movement in Germany (HQ1626 P74 1987)

Carol Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative:  Fourierism in Nine­teenth-Century America (Alex: HX654 G82 1991)

Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (E449 W2)

Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Alex: E449 P46)

Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (Alex: HN57 M56 1995)

Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (HN57.A548 1994)

 

October 8

A LITERARY INTERLUDE:  SOCIAL VIEWS OF TWO WRITERS, IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA

 

Perspectives

This week  we focus on two authors, each of whom made a major mark on cultural and intellectual life in either Europe or America during the 1850s and 1860s. The claims of the feeling heart versus those of the calculating head, which had already been set forth earlier by conservative reformers, found classic expression in the imaginative realm in the work of the great British novelist Charles Dickens.  We encounter in his novel Hard Times (1855) a troubling tale about life in the industrial city and a scathing condemnation of the "utilitarian" approach to social problems.  Meanwhile, in the United States, Walt Whitman’s poetry revealed a rather different view of the possibilities inherent in urban society.

 

Assigned Reading

Charles Dickens, Hard Times**

“Selected Poems by Walt Whitman”

 

Suggested Reading

F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (PR4584 S3)

Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (PR4592 C7 C6)

David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (PS3231 R48 1995)

 

October 15

PERCEPTIONS OF AND PROGRAMS FOR BIG CITIES: AN OVERVIEW AND SOURCES

 

Perspectives

The closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth witnessed far-reaching investigations into and debates about the rapidly growing urban sector, which seemed to many observers to embody central features of the modern world more generally.  Most of the reading for this week consists of an analytic overview of the urban theme as it appeared during the period in both European and American discourse.  Additional reading consists of primary sources that were published during the period in Great Britain.  Either discussing or embodying both criticisms and affirmations of the big city, the reading for this week touches on a number of themes that we shall encounter at greater length not only next week but also later. For general background for the rest of the course, see  “European Civilization, 1871-1914,” in Palmer and Colton, A History of the Modern World.

 

Assigned Reading

             Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820‑1940, pp. 1-13, 104-255, 346-48

             A brief  look at one of the following primary sources, all on reserve: William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (Salvation Army); James Cantlie, Degeneration amongst Londoners; Arnold White, The Problems of a Great City; Frederick Dolman, Municipalities at Work; Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century; Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow; or William Harbutt Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany

 

October 22

PERCEPTIONS OF AND PROGRAMS FOR BIG CITIES: HISTORICAL ANALYSES

 

Perspectives

London, far and away the world’s greatest city, attracted enormous attention, both favorable and unfavorable. A book by Rutgers-New Brunswick historian Seth Koven sheds considerable light on dark places. Suggested readings offer additional opportunities to consider attitudes toward cities elsewhere, on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Assigned Reading

Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London**

 

Suggested Reading

Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (PN56 C55 P54)

Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States, and France, 1780-1914 (Alex: HT166 S914 1981)

E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government

            (Alex: JS3185.H45 1973a)

Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (RA485 W64 1983)

Katharine Roper, German Encounters with Modernity: Novels of Imperial Berlin (Alex: PT771 R67 1991)

Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (PN5219 B59 F75 1996)

Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914 (Alex: HT169 G3 L24 1990)

Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright (HT161 F57 1982)

Morton and Lucia White, The Intellec­tual Ver­sus the City (19­62; HT113 W53), pp. 54­‑239

Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, pp. 123-292 (HT123 B67)

             Robert Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (1956; HV91 B7), pp. 16‑175

Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Disbelief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (HN80.C5S57 1995)

James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893 (Alex: F545 G43 1991)

             Rolf Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School (Alex: HM22 U6 P344413 1996) 

 

October 29

REFORMIST SOCIALISTS AND NON-SOCIALIST REFORMERS:

DEVELOPMENTS AND DOCUMENTS

 

Perspectives

As it matured, urban-industrial society experienced the advent of socialist movements in Central and Western Europe that were much more broadly based than any of the movements that had preceded them.  The rise of organized labor was accompanied by a diminution of revolutionary impulses as Fabianism and "revisionism" came to the fore.  (Socialist tendencies made themselves felt in the United States too, but they were much weaker here than in Europe.)  Accused of class-centered selfishness by socialists, the "bourgeoisie" produced its own critiques of unbridled capitalism and its own proposals for social reform.  Seeking to alleviate the suffering that resulted from the pursuit of private profit without destroying the profit motive itself, leaders of charitable movements, clergymen, and social scientists helped to lay the foundations for what later came to be known as "the welfare state."   The assigned documents illustrate varlious aspects of these developments.  For background, take a look at the chapter in Palmer and Colton mentioned in connection with October 15, focusing on the sections on “The Advance of Democracy: Socialism and Labor Unions” and “The Waning of Classical Liberalism.”

 

Assigned Reading

Sidney Webb, Fabian Essays (excerpts)

Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (excerpts)

Pope Leo XIII, Concerning New Things

Lester Frank Ward, “Mind as a Social Factor”

Richard Ely, Ground Under Our Feet

 

November 5

REFORMIST SOCIALISTS AND NON-SOCIALIST REFORMERS: HISTORICAL ANALYSES

 

Perspectives

Our common reading consists of the first half of a major work by Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers, who brilliantly explores the impact of European thought and practice on American critics of “gilded age” capitalism. Additional works indicate the extent to which numerous historians have dealt either with socialists or with other reformers, both in Europe and in the United States, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Their writing helps to substantiate Rodgers’s view of the period as “a progressive age.”

 

Assigned Reading

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, pp. 1-266**

 

Suggested Reading

Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (HX276 G3 1962)

Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (HX279 L64 1985)

Robert Laurence Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (E169.1 M787)

Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (HX843 M29)

Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (HD4904 R33 1990)

Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (on Britain; Alex: HM276 F74)

Geoffrey Russell Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study of British Politics and Political Thought, 1899‑1914 (Dana: DA570 S4 1971b)

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (Alex: HV4086.A3H54 1991)

                          Janet R. Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Alex: HN425.5.H67 2002)

Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880-1914 (HN425 E48)

Andrew Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (HT137 L354 2002)

Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (DD228.5 R38 2000)

Derek S. Linton, "Who Has the Youth, Has the Future": The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany (HD6276 B4 L56 1991)