History 5: Lecture 30 Outline
“End of History”?
Introduction
History 5 Europe 1492-2003 course goal: an understanding of the main
themes of European civilization since 1492. Since European civilization
main component of today’s Western civilization studying it helps
us to know today’s world and respond to its challenges: “Who
controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls
the past”. (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four);
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting”. (Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting).
I Dividing up time: medieval, modern, and postmodern
From late 15th.c new forces metamorphose European society.
Early modern: 1492-1640-1670s; modern: 1670s-1870s; late modern 1914-70s;
postmodern, 1970s-.
Modernity: by mid-19th.c awareness that world and experience completely
transformed; recognition that modernity by nature “transient…fleeting…contingent”
(Baudelaire, “The painter of modern life” 1863); “All
fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away…all that is solid
melts into air”, Marx, Communist Manifesto.
Assumptions of modernity: inevitability of progress in human affairs,
search for Utopias and systems of knowledge.
Postmodern=the cultural situation we are now supposed to be in following
modernity’s collapse as the driving ethos of Western civilization.
II Key themes of European history (1492-1900)
• Shattering of religious unity: Luther’s 1520s revolt
against the medieval Church, followed by a century of religious wars.
• Emergence of the modern state; absolutist regimes of 17th/18th.c;
strong centralized state power. Common feature of dictatorships and
democracies
• Rise of modern science and enlightenment of 17-18 centuries;
opposed to traditional thinkers and ways; Enlightenment assumes perfectibility
of humanity and society
• New political culture with universal appeal: popular sovereignty
and rights of man; secularization (French Revolution)
• New political ideologies: liberalism, socialism, nationalism
• Industrialization- evolutionary, not revolutionary. >modern
mass consumer society
• Critiques of modernity: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
• Rise of the nation-state and modern nationalism
III Stocktaking: Europe 1914-2003
• More democratic than in any previous period.
• More prosperous
• More caring
• More peaceful
• Politics no longer central concern for many Europeans
• Nation-state alive and kicking
• Dark side: Ethnic conflict/ multiculturalism
IV End of history?
Francis Fukuyama (The End of History? 1989) v Samuel
P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order, 1996); for Fukuyama see Kishlansky, p.315.