Writing the History of Europe

Seminar description

One of the key and foundational principles of the EUI’s department of History and Civilization is the aspiration to contribute to European History, to the research and writing of the history of Europe. The aim of this departmental seminar is to study the historiography of Europe and to assess the venues and possibilities of the writing of European history. The sessions of the seminar seek to open up three distinct perspectives.

First, they explore a range of classical and more recent attempts to study key ‘periods’ and ‘phenomena’ in the history of Europe as distinctly European. We will look at the debates on whether the Renaissance and the Enlightenment can be seen, in singular terms, as having distinct European identities and manifestations. Was there a European Renaissance? Was there a European Enlightenment? And what was the long term impact of the Reformation - did it, to take up Max Weber’s classic analysis, split Europe in a diligent Protestant North and a debauched Catholic South?

Second, the seminar critically assesses the approach of a number of recent and highly successful, indeed bestselling attempts to write the history of twentieth-century Europe, looking at (parts of) the distinctly and differing European perspectives by Mark Mazower and Tony Judt, and at Saul Friedländer’s seminal work on the Holocaust.

Thirdly, the seminar examines three attempts - again highly successful and bestselling - to contribute to the history of Europe by looking at the ‘old world’ from the outside and/or by looking at Europe and the world. Here we analyze the debates on Edward Said’s Orientalism and Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe, and we explore John Pocock’s probing critique of European integration from the perspective of a New Zealand/Atlantic scholar.

All these sessions raise fundamental issues concerning the cultural unity and diversity of Europe. With the current debate focusing so strongly on Europe’s economic and financial integration, the seminar ends with an attempt to bring scholars, politicians and public intellectuals together in a conference reassessing how much cultural unity Europe needs in the 21st century.

Programme

 

11 October: Europe and its Historians: An Overview

• Anthony Pagden, ‚Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: from Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge; New York, 2002, pp. 33-54

• Stuart Woolf, ‘Europe and Its Historians’, Contemporary European History, vol. 12, no. 3, 2003, pp. 323-337.

 

18 October: North and South: Max Weber and the Impact of the Reformation

• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West, transl. and introd. by Stephen Kalberg, 4th ed., Oxford, 2009, Part II: The Vocational Ethic of Ascetic Protestantism, pp. 101-162

• Max Weber, The Uniqueness and Origins of the Modern Western Work Ethic in Max Weber - Readings and Commentary on Modernity, ed. Stephen Kalberg, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 69-110

• Jacques Delacroix and François Nielsen, ‚The Beloved Myth: Protestantism and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Social Forces, Vol. 80, No. 2, 2001, pp. 509-553

•  Anthony J. Carroll, ‘The Importance of Protestantism in Max Weber's Theory of Secularisation’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 50, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61-95

 

25 October: The European Renaissance: Unity and Diversity

• John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, New York 1994, ch. 1, pp. 3-50

• William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550-1640, New Haven-London 2000, ch. 1, pp. 1-19

• Randolph Starn, ‘The European Renaissance’, in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. G. Ruggiero, Oxford 2002, pp. 39-54

• Theodore K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity, Cambridge (MA) 2006, ch. 3, pp. 41-90

 

01 November: All Souls - no session

 

08 November: Was/Is There a European Enlightenment?

• Robert Darnton, ‘The Case for the Enlightenment: George Washington’s False Teeth’ in Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century, New York: Norton & co, 2003, pp. 3-24

• John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760, Cambridge, 2005, Chapter 1: The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 1-42.

 

15 November: Europe’s 20th Century: A Dark Continent

• Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998), new Ed. Penguin, 2008, pp. 402-410 (Epilogue: Making Europe)

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (2005), Pimlico edition, 2007, Introduction and chapters XXIII and XXIV, pp. 1-12, 749-800

•  Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Review: Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945’,  The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 80, No. 4, 2008, pp. 917-919

•  Stefan Berger, ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 629-678

 

22 November: The Holocaust as European History

• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, London, 2007, pp. xiii-xxvi (introduction)

• Saul Friedländer, ‚History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities‘, New German Critique, No. 80, 2000, pp. 3-15.

• Amos Goldberg, ‚The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History‘, History and Theory, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2009, pp. 220–237.

•  Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (OUP 2009), chapter 8, pp. 301-333.

 

29 November: Euroscepticism: John Pocock’s Discovery of Islands

• J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution; a Eurosceptical Enquiry’, History of Political Thought, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1999, pp. 125-139.

• J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Deconstructing Europe’ in The Discovery of Islands. Essays in British History, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 269-288.

• Timothy Garton Ash, ‚Is Britain European?‘, International Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 1, 2001, pp. 1-13

 

06 December: Provincialising Europe: Said and Chakrabarty

• Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), new. Ed., Penguin, 2003, Preface (2003) and Introduction, pp. xi-30

• Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, 2000, pp. 3-23

• Jon E. Wilson, ‚Review: Taking Europe for Granted‘, History Workshop Journal, No. 52, 2001, pp. 287-295

• Carola Dietze, ‚Toward a History on Equal Terms: a Discussion of Provincializing Europe‘, History and Theory, vol. 47, 2008, pp. 69-84

• Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Los Angeles, 2005.

 

09 December: Concluding Conference: European Cultural Unity in the 21st Century: How Much Do We Need?