Confronting Modernity In Fin De Si Cle France

In this study of space and power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s, Rabinow uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how social environment was perceived and described. Ranging from epidemiology to the layout of colonial cities, he shows how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, health and welfare administration, and social legislation.

The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals. In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country’s turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.

The majority of these papers were originally published in Social Research, v. 56, no. 1, spring 1989.

Modern France is an up-to-date and accessible introduction to the nature of French society at the end of the twentieth century. The book examines the transition of France and French life as the nation moves from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and the cultural and social dislocations that such an evoltuion implies. Sociological concepts and categories of class, race, gender, age and region are discussed as well as how they combine together to produce inequalities and identities. These concepts are then applied to a range of issues such as work, politics, education, health, religion.

Questions surrounding the concept of legitimacy—the force that keeps a polity together, and whose absence causes it to shatter—are possibly the most important concern of a study of politics. M. F. N. Giglioli examines the shift to a distinctly modern understanding of the concept in Continental Europe, following the crisis of liberal rationalism in the late nineteenth century, and the search for new ways of envisaging the determinants of collective action into the twentieth century. The author examines certain aspects of the intellectual and political background of early twentieth-century theories of legitimacy elaborated by Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci. These theories are interpreted as the outcome of a contested process of redefinition of the concept, itself prompted by the social and political circumstances of the late nineteenth century, such as economic modernization and the attempt to incorporate the working class into the political system. This is the first book in a generation to offer a general reassessment of issues of legitimacy in political thought at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the development of the concept in France, Italy, and Germany during the half-century or so following the Paris Commune. It discusses six key critics of classical Victorian liberalism on the revolutionary Left and the conservative Right. The political position and biography of each is a central focus of the study, as the culture of the age was decisively shaped by reflection on the social role of intellectuals.

Joris-Karl Huysmans was a famous French writer known for his large vocabulary and wit. Huysmans most famous novel was "Against Nature."

Tracing the emergence and evolution of the modern discourse on boredom in French and German literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, this book fills a gap in the intellectual and cultural history of European modernity.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.