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How should we understand Europe's special role in world history, and the enduring impact it made on the rest of the globe? Jerrold Seigel traces both the positive and negative sides of the continent's special role to its absence of effective central authority, the division and competition between its states and peoples, and its propensity for developing autonomous spheres of activity. Remaking the World analyzes how these features fostered Europe's characteristic preoccupation with a politics of liberty, its evolution of an aesthetic sphere animated by values specific to itself, its singular capacity to revolutionize scientific understanding, and its ability to prepare and carry out the first transition to a modern industrial economy. Extended and substantive comparisons with Africa, India, China, and the lands that came under the rule of the Ottomans demonstrate the absence of similar phenomena elsewhere, whereas in Europe they also helped generate the malign force of imperial expansion.
1. Introduction
Part I. Liberty and Liberties:
2. A preoccupation with liberty
3. From liberties to liberty
4. Liberties elsewhere
Part II. Autonomy and Teleocracy:
5. Spheres of autonomy: the church, universities, and the bounds of reason
6. Classical humanism and aesthetics
7. Science as a sphere of autonomy
8. Teleocratic sciences
Part III. Openness and Domination:
9. Other peoples, other places
10. Empire: material expansion, moral contraction, and internal criticism
11. Courage and weakness: anti-imperialism and its limits in the nineteenth century
Part IV. Transformations:
12. Autonomy and transformation: Britain
13. Transformation and autonomy: France and Germany
14. Ready or not? China and India
15. Conclusion.
Description
How should we understand Europe's special role in world history, and the enduring impact it made on the rest of the globe? Jerrold Seigel traces both the positive and negative sides of the continent's special role to its absence of effective central authority, the division and competition between its states and peoples, and its propensity for developing autonomous spheres of activity. Remaking the World analyzes how these features fostered Europe's characteristic preoccupation with a politics of liberty, its evolution of an aesthetic sphere animated by values specific to itself, its singular capacity to revolutionize scientific understanding, and its ability to prepare and carry out the first transition to a modern industrial economy. Extended and substantive comparisons with Africa, India, China, and the lands that came under the rule of the Ottomans demonstrate the absence of similar phenomena elsewhere, whereas in Europe they also helped generate the malign force of imperial expansion.
