What I’m Reading

The Making of the Modern World: Encounters, by Alan MacFarlane. He has an almost infinite list of books on Amazon, many of them with “Modern World” in the title. This is a Kindle edition, very garbled, but with much interesting material. An attempt to summarize:

1. “Modernity” is different and important. One way to think of it is that in modern societies, there is separation and balance among power, economic activity, religion, and kinship.

2. In pre-modern societies, whether tribal or imperial, these forces are fused, into the tribe or the state, respectively.

3. The 18th century was when thinkers such as Adam Smith began to notice a cultural break with the past. 19th-century legal historian Henry Maine called this the transition from a society of status in which social relationships are determined at birth to a society of contract, in which social relationships are more egalitarian and formal.

4. Maine notwithstanding, modernity reflects a balance of status and contract. We are not so atomistic that we live in a world of arms-length contracts. We belong to various types of associations (MacFarlane notes that many more team sports were invented in England than in other countries) which are bound by more than self-interest, but we do not belong to one single encompassing tribe or theocratic state.

5. The smaller, more fluid units of civil society are key to keeping modern states from reverting to tribalism or all-powerful states. This idea goes back to Tocqueville, of course. Nowadays, I would note that Yuval Levin is one of its leading champions, and he often cites Burke.

6. Modernity is not necessarily robust. Modern societies have managed to make production more rewarding than predation, and consequently they are wealthier and more powerful than pre-modern states. But humans remain attracted by encompassing ideologies, such as Communism or radical Islam. In fact, MacFarlane cites several scholars who wrote over 100 years ago that Islam did not adapt to modernity as did Christianity, and Islam still calls for a pre-modern unity of all spheres.

7. The Industrial Revolution combines modernity with the scientific/technological revolution. Neither alone is sufficient.

I highlighted numerous passages in the book. A few are given below the fold.

Maine argued that there was no concept similar to the modern Western one of inalienable rights in the traditional village commmunity. ‘Nor, in the sense of the analytical jurists, is there right or duty in an Indian village-community; a person aggrieved complains not of an individual wrong but of the disturbance to the order of the entire little society,’

a fundamental trait of classical capitalism is that it is a very special kind of order in that the economic and the political seem to be separated, to a greater degree than in any other

we find that in agrarian societies it is the warriors who are the highest group: specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production

The famous characteristics of the scientific method, falsifiability, experiments, the search for general laws and so on, do distinguish it from magic, as does the abandonment of the idea of the moving force lying above or outside this natural world.

An average Elizabethan was as affluent, well dressed, housed, and fed as an average inhabitant of England in any period up to the late nineteenth century–and far better than in all other world civilizations in history.

the only surviving holistic world system offering an alternative to the Open Society is Islam.

There are four main human drives. One is towards material sufficiency…or what we would now call the economy. A second drive is towards power and domination…This we call politics. The third is the area of the individual and society, social relations, kinship, and reproduction. This is the social sphere. The final is the drive towards understanding and knowledge, belief and ethics. This is the realm of religion and ideology. The basic characteristics of most civilizations throughout history is that these are only partially separated.

2 thoughts on “What I’m Reading

  1. “A second drive is towards power and domination…This we call politics.”

    Really politics is rather more general than that, and I think he’d do better to use a word like “power” or a related phrase (“power balance” or perhaps even “power politics”) instead of “politics”. There is a very common, perhaps universal, impulse to power and domination, sure. But in the real world many people don’t have a realistic expectation of achieving domination at an acceptable cost, and are nonetheless highly motivated to play politics for other stakes: safety, information, accumulating less-than-domination favors in the individual favor bank, accumulating collective popularity, discrediting a rival, or even sometimes facilitating a public or semipublic good. (I doubt it is the case that every single lighthouse or fire company ever built was built in pursuit of power and domination, and I doubt many were built without politics.) For that matter, a lot of medium-scale private goods, like accumulating the capital for an enterprise of a certain size, involve a lot of schmoozing/negotiation/reputation activities that sure look like politics to me, and don’t necessarily involve much power and domination.

  2. Seems it’s a lot like his ‘Invention of the Modern World’ which is a collection of lectures on the topic he gave in China. I found that book very enlightening.

    I came to see that what many call post-modernism is really just a recurrence of pre-modern. It is wrong to think that humanity cannot fall back into the pre-modern clan/tribe control of the individual. These days it seems as if more people are yearning for just such limitations.

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