Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany Since 1750

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of their common participation in expanding and thickening networks that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

Author: Jerrold Seigel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 05/28/2012
Pages: 638
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.20lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781107666788

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2013

About the Author
Seigel, Jerrold: - Jerrold Seigel is Kenan Professor of History Emeritus, New York University. His previous publications include The Idea of the Self (2005), Bohemian Paris (1986) and Marx's Fate (1978).