Mark Valeri attends to minutiae as he examines the interaction between religion and commercial activity in early New England ( Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America ). He attends to “merchants accounts and ledgers, businesscorrespondence and personal letters, . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernity, argues Deborah Lupton, was an effort to manage risk. Risk was originally connected with the science of probability and statistics, which developed “as a means of calculating the norm and identifying deviations from the norm” and thus as a means for getting the world under . . . . Continue Reading »
The rise of geohistory did not, argues Martin JS Rudwick in his (literally) massive Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution , produce a conflict of “Science” and “Religion.” That paradigm for understanding eighteenth-century . . . . Continue Reading »
I have many commendations, and one complaint/caveat about Charles Taylor’s discussion of the formation of an “economic” image of society in the early modern period ( A Secular Age , 176-84 ). Kudos for Taylor for his modification of the Weber thesis. Like Weber, he traces the rise . . . . Continue Reading »
Michael Edward Moore’s A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850 is a detailed, deeply researched study of the formation of the political theology of the Frankish Kingdom from the collapse of Rome through the fragmentation of the Carolingian dynasty. Moore traces . . . . Continue Reading »
The TLS reviewer of The Library: A World History gives some tantalizing examples from the book, such as “the Tripitaka Koreana (1251), housed in a monastery high in the mountains of South Korea. Its rough-hewn timbers are freighted with wooden printing-blocks comprising a complete set of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Modernity rests on a distinction between Us moderns and Them primitives. Them primitive might be dead and gone; they might be somewhere south of Us, in warmer, wetter climates and with darker skin. But Them is primitive, even if they are contemporaries. The problem is, modernity spawns a continuous . . . . Continue Reading »
Henry Lefebvre ( Introduction to Modernity ) vividly captures the modernity of modernity, our continuous quest for novelty: “Once, in an ahistorical society with virtually no conscious history, nothing began and nothing came to an end. Today everything comes to an end virtually as soon as it . . . . Continue Reading »
Latour, speaking of the reductionisms of critical thought ( We Have Never Been Modern ): “The critics have developed three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization and deconstruction. Let us use E.O. Wilson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida — a . . . . Continue Reading »
Bruno Latour ( We Have Never Been Modern ) explains why there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an anthropology of modernity: “In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you wil l not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. If the analyst is subtle, she . . . . Continue Reading »
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