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43 results

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  • 21 - Ideas of Europe: A View from Inside-Out, the 1880s to the 1910s (and Beyond)

  • from Thinking and Memory
  • Edited by Mathieu Segers, Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands, Steven Van Hecke, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the European Union
    Published online:
    21 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 536-560

  • Summary

    In 1832, the Prussian novelist Gotthilf August von Maltitz published a curious epistolary novella, the Journey among the Ruins of Old Europe in the Year 2830. Telling of a journey of an American tourist to Europe to visit its ruins and learn about its past, von Maltitz meant this to be a ‘serious and satirical’ work. In it, Europe was a devastated land, invaded and despoiled by hordes from the East, the Russians first and foremost. Its peoples had been easily subdued because of their weakness after centuries of decadence, brought about by their materialism and individualism. In the novella, the comparison between Europe and the United States was a grim one indeed. Von Maltitz’s text, now a forgotten literary curiosity, was rather unusual in its day, and few of its readers would have seen in it a serious foreshadowing of European decline. In truth, the nineteenth century was an age of unprecedented economic, military and cultural expansion for Europe. Admittedly, Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that its nations had attained the acme of their power and that Russia and the United States, ‘called by a secret design of Providence’, would one day hold in their hands the destinies of the world. Yet few others, at that time and for the best part of the century, were so prescient.

  • 9 - Europe’s Eighteenth Century and the Quest for the Nation’s Origins

  • from Part ii - Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, University of East Anglia, Matthew D'Auria, University of East Anglia, Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
    Published online:
    27 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 186-207

  • Summary

    Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism
  • Volume 2, Nationalism's Fields of Interaction
  • Edited by Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D'Auria, Aviel Roshwald
  • Published online:
    08 November 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023
  • This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In volume II, leading scholars in their fields explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism's interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethno-national identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field whose study was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions.

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