Synopses & Reviews
"A fresh look at some well-known issues.and#160; In this lively and accessible work, James Vernon finds in the study of Victorian Britain a way to reenergize and make useful the slippery category of modernity.and#160; Neither a valorization nor a celebration of Britainand#8217;s explosive nineteenth-century growth, Vernonand#8217;s account instead offers a framework for global histories of modernity as well as a radical interpretation of modern Britain. Vernon takes familiar materials and arguments and transforms them into a highly original argument that reaches well beyond the shores of this small island kingdom."
and#151;Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset
"With his signature intellectual ambition and rhetorical force, James Vernon routes the history of Britainand#8217;s modernity through the rise and fulfillment of what he calls 'the charismatic state.' Both an influential abstraction and an increasingly powerful mediator of Britonsand#8217; experience of their material lives, that state made new subjects, political and economic, who adapted to the society of strangers Britain was becoming. Vernon takes us on a bracing journey through these historical processes, flying over big swaths of time and space, reaching deeply into the recesses of modern culture and illuminating the richest traces as he goes. Readers will feel they are in the hands of a true craftsman, someone at the very height of his synthetic and persuasive powers."
and#151;Antoinette Burton, author of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism
"With great clarity and great verve, James Vernon reengages some of history's biggest questions -- what does it mean to be modern, how should we characterize the modern world, how did we get there? -- while grounding them carefully in a particular place and time. By building an argument so ambitiously, with such subtlety and erudition, he not only fires up a British debate but generally renews history's confidence and vision. Here is one of our best historians writing at the peak of his prowess."
and#151;Geoff Eley, author of After the Nazi Racial State
Synopsis
What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern?
In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers.
Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.
Synopsis
When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
About the Author
Lynn Hunt is the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Family Romance of the French Revolution (California, 1992) and the editor (with Victoria E. Bonnell) of Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (California, 1999). She was President of the American Historical Association in 2002-2003.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Preface
1 What Is Modernity?
2 A Society of Strangers
3 Governing Strangers
4 Associating with Strangers
5 An Economy of Strangers
Conclusion
Notes
Index