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EUROG002

The Making of Modern Europe

Matthew D'Auria
20 credits
Term 2
Friday 9am-11am
Room - 101, 16-18 Gordon Square

The aim of the course is to shed light on some of the historical processes that have shaped Europe’s identity. By analyzing the development of some key concepts and by setting them in their historical, social and cultural contexts, we shall try to understand how, and to what extent, Europe and the idea of modernity have influenced each other. The time span ranges from the eighteenth century to today.

The course is divided into three main sections focusing, respectively, on the intellectual, the political and the economic aspects of Europe’s contested modernities.

Course outline

1. Europe: between progress and modernity
2. Religion and the secularization process
3. The Enlightenment project
4. The development of the public sphere
5. Europe’s great Revolutions
6. The rise and the crisis of the Nation-state
7. Democracy and totalitarianism
8. The birth and the development of Liberalism
9. The European social model
10. Essay question discussion

Preliminary reading

• R. Koselleck, ‘Social history and conceptual history’, in The practice of conceptual history: timing history, spacing concepts (Stanford, 2002)
• D. Lacapra, Rethinking intellectual history (London, 1983), pp. 23-71
• M. Perry, An intellectual history of modern Europe (Boston, 1993)
• J. W. Burrow, The crisis of reason: European thought, 1848-1914 (London, 2000)
• K. D. Bracher, The age of ideologies: a history of political thought in the twentiethcentury (London, 1985)
• R.N. Stromberg, An intellectual history of Europe since 1789 ( Englewood Cliffs, 1975)
• R. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (2 nd ed. Oxford, 1999)
• C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007)
• J. Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, 1989)
• R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modernsociety (Oxford, 1988)
• N. Bobbio, Liberalism andDemocracy (New York, 2005)
• H. Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism (New York 2004)
• J. L. Talmon, The origins of totalitarian democracy (London 1970)
• H. Arendt, On revolution (New York and London, 2006)
• J. Farr, ‘Historical Concepts in Political Science: The case of ‘Revolution’, in American Journal of PoliticalScience, vol. 26, n. 4, 1982, pp. 688-708.
• L. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass; London, 1992)
• J. Llobera, The God of Modernity. development of nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994)
• D. A. Irwin, Against the tide: an intellectual history of free trade (Princeton, 1996)