I am an historian whose research and publishing has mostly been in nineteenth-century French history, as well as Atlantic history. I have an interest in the impact of modernizing processes in France, Russia and the United States since the late eighteenth century. I was a professor at the University of Southern Indiana (Evansville, IN, USA) from 1992 to 2022. Address: Department of History University of Southern Indiana 8600 University Blvd. Evansville, IN 47712 USA
PARIS IN MODERN TIMES: A survey history of Paris since the eighteenth century directed at undergr... more PARIS IN MODERN TIMES: A survey history of Paris since the eighteenth century directed at undergraduate students.
REVIEWS:
“This insightful and timely book covers events that have rocked Paris, from the French Revolution to the terror attacks of 2015, and paints an absorbing picture of successive people who have contributed to the creation of the modern city.” – Marisa Linton, Associate Professor of History, Kingston University, UK
“This is the kind of book instructors yearn for-a highly readable and cogent historical account of modern Paris, informed by the most recent insights and long established scholarship. Harison pulls off a difficult task with gusto, making the careening succession of French regimes since the Revolution appear straightforward, while enlivening that account with intriguing and surprising stories of streets, buildings and people. The Paris that emerges here is large, colorful and diverse, with its migrants, drifters and flâneurs, its high politics and low entertainments, its working men and women, its artists, rebels, courtesans and criminals. In tracing an expanding Paris from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, through five major revolutions, three occupations and two world wars, Harison deftly weaves together strands of social, political, economic and cultural history to give an engaging panorama of the city's past.” – Ian Coller, Associate Professor of History, University of California Irvine, USA
The Who were one of the most memorable and influential of the 1960s British Invasion bands—memora... more The Who were one of the most memorable and influential of the 1960s British Invasion bands—memorable because of their loudness and because they destroyed instruments during performances—influential because of their success in crafting “Power Pop” singles like “My Generation” and “I Can See for Miles,” long-playing albums Live at Leeds and Who’s Next, and the “rock operas” Tommy and Quadrophenia. The themes that principal songwriter Pete Townshend imparted into The Who’s music drew upon the group’s mostly working-class London upbringings and early Mod audiences: frustration, angst, irony, and a youthful inclination to lash out. Like some of his rock and roll contemporaries, Townshend was also affected by religious ideas coming from India and the existential dread he felt about the possibility of nuclear war. During a career that spanned three decades, The Who gave their fans and rock critics a lot to think about. The remarkable depth and breadth of The Who’s music and their story as one of the most exciting and provocative rock bands over the last half-century are the subjects of the philosophical explorations in this collection.
INTRODUCTION
CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Com... more INTRODUCTION CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Communal Studies sponsored the conference on “Capitalism & Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana as part of the bicentennial celebration of New Harmony’s founding by German Harmonists in 1814. The Harmonists are fairly well known, at least among scholars, but New Harmony is probably most famous as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was especially the legacy of Owen that animated the proceedings and drew participants from across the Atlantic to this small town in southwest Indiana. When the conversation about how to celebrate New Harmony’s bicentennial began, the possibility of the Center organizing a conference around the theme of “capitalism and socialism” came up. This seemed a great idea–a topic very much befitting New Harmony’s history, a good way to attract scholars who otherwise were probably unfamiliar with the Center for Communal Studies, and timely because the effects of the Great Recession were still with us. Indeed by the second decade of the twenty-first century, some of the momentous issues of Robert Owen’s day had again come to feel relevant in ways they had not for a generation or more. As a factory owner and manager in early nineteenth-century New Lanark, Scotland, Owen was a “success” in the new regime of modern capitalism. But as a critical observer of the effects of industrialization, he was also a committed reformer–one of the “utopian socialists” mentioned by Marx whose ideas were tremendously influential in his day. The thinking in planning the conference was that Owen’s work and the experiment he pursued at New Harmony again had currency as the world looked back on the 2008 economic crisis and as socialism, seemingly banished with the failure of Communist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century, has returned to the political and economic lexicon. As the planning for the conference proceeded, more than one person pointed out that it appeared that in coming up with a title we had just “strung together a bunch of big words.” And in a way this was true, though we did so with the sense that the words–some of which did not exist or had only recently begun to show up in dictionaries in Owen’s day–represented modern ideas with origins mostly in the eighteenth century, whose promise Owen sought to understand in his own time and as we are still trying to sort them out nearly two centuries later. The processes represented by the words in the conference title–“capitalism,” “socialism,” “utopia,” “globalization,” “revolution”–were at the heart of what was called the “Social Question” when Owen arrived at New Harmony in 1825. For Robert Owen and his contemporaries, the Social Question was part and parcel of the “industrializing” revolution for which Owen himself was as much responsible as any factory owner of his day. The status of the industrial working class–their living and working conditions in the nineteenth century’s “age of pauperism,” but also their political rights–were central to the original Social Question as the phrase gained currency in Western Europe and then the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Owen did not use the precise phrase in A New View of Society (1817) and The Book of the New Model World (1840), but the books are nonetheless filled with references to the “social” and to posing “questions” about the troubling condition of contemporary society. The modern social sciences represented among the chapters in this book took their shape during the second half of the nineteenth century partly as ways to understand and address the Social Question. By the turn of the century and particularly after the First World War, the way of thinking about modernity represented by the Social Question faded as chattel slavery was abolished in those corners of the world where it persisted, and as political rights were won by workers, peasants and women. In the twentieth century, technology promised ways to improve the standard of living across the globe, while Marxism-Leninism and the great revolutions in Russia and China offered universal solutions to the on-going problems of modernity. By the 1930s, “Social Question” seemed like an old-fashioned way to formulate a plan for changing the world for the better. Yet the underlying questions about how to live in the modern world did not fade away. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have once more taken up the Social Question as they have updated the phrase’s application. Pierre Rosanvallon, for one, formulated a “New Social Question” in terms of the “crisis” of the welfare state that began in the 1970s. He argues that socialism, which seemed an answer to the Social Question for part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is no longer an option because of its’ “deterioration… deriv(-ing) almost directly from the philosophical crisis of the welfare state.” For Rosanvallon, there has been a shift in the direction and the potential “answers” of Social Question in the second half of the twentieth century, but for other scholars who use the phrase it mostly continues to stand for alternatives to capitalism. Today the Social Question is less about gaining the right to vote for an industrial working class and more about guaranteeing the broader range of universal human rights for all. It is less about the path down which industry is carrying humanity and more about using technology and the sciences to raise the standard of living for the disadvantaged. Where the idea of sustainability was only implicit in the nineteenth century’s Social Question, it is explicit in the twenty-first century’s New Social Question. We did not use the phrase in our conference title, but the idea of the Social Question was there in the panels at New Harmony. In hindsight, we can say that the bicentennial celebration at New Harmony offered a small opportunity to return to the Social Question and the fundamental issues that framed Robert Owen’s mental landscape, as they do for an even more integrated world today. We hoped that the conference and this book, which draws from papers presented at New Harmony, might represent, to borrow a phrase from Erik Olin Wright, a moment of “emancipatory social science.” The issues explored here include the globalizing aspirations of capitalism and socialism; the paths, including reform or revolution, toward capitalism or socialism; the degree to which the promises of material well-being and fulfilled political lives born of these siblings of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions remain achievable; and, finally, the opportunity to simply imagine “utopian” alternatives to the status quo. These are all aspects of A New Social Question. Contributors to this volume come from fields in the social sciences and humanities. The coverage is transatlantic, with topics and authors from North America and Europe. The book is organized into sections on “capitalism,” “socialism” and “utopia.” Within sections, chapters are arranged chronologically. Particular topics include individual thinkers and theorists from the nineteenth century–Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Stuart Mill and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon–as well as analysis of contemporary topics, including the recent work of economist Thomas Piketty. Other chapters take up the interplay of religion, economics and “cybernetics” within these globalizing systems. The final section on “utopia” presents a synthesis on capitalism and socialism, concluding with a “Marxian critique of utopia.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Stalinist states across Eastern Europe a generation ago, it felt, as one scholar famously put it at the time that we had reached “the end of history.” The questions and contests that had animated university life, as they had defined politics and economics across the Atlantic and beyond for the previous two centuries, seemed to have been settled. But of course this was not really the case. As Joyce Appleby, David Harvey and Thomas Piketty have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it also reminded us that we have not reached the end of history. Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. The great questions of modernity, of capitalism and socialism, that troubled Robert Owen and inspired him to test his ideas for an alternative, “utopian” future along the banks of the Wabash River on what was then the frontier of the United States, persist, as they also provide an opportunity in this book to once again re-consider these enduring subjects.
The violence directed by police toward citizens that has been captured on video has rocked societ... more The violence directed by police toward citizens that has been captured on video has rocked societies across the Atlantic in recent years. The deaths of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk are not the first times that disturbing images of violence by authorities against ordinary citizens have galvanized the public. Honoré Daumier’s (1808-79) lithograph of a police “massacre” on Paris’ Rue Transnonain in 1834 is another famous representation of an infamous event. Daumier is best known as the discerning, often humorous caricaturist of the nineteenth-century French middle class, but he also sometimes turned a keen eye to politics, foreign policy, and civil strife, including what became known as the “Massacre on the Rue Transnonain”—a tragic killing of civilians by soldiers in the immediate aftermath of a rebellion.
Age of Revolutions, An Open-Access Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal, 2023
Individual Republican politicians in the United States and the Republican party in general have d... more Individual Republican politicians in the United States and the Republican party in general have downplayed the seriousness of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd. Despite what many of us saw on television that day-images that have since been bolstered by the revelations of the House Committee investigating the event-the Washington Post reported last summer that "Republicans still mostly just shrug." Indeed, as the Post proceeded to report in September, a majority of polled Republicans believe January 6 "wasn't a riot at all, just a demonstration, maybe with a few bad apples." Former President Donald Trump has echoed the nonchalance, even as he has tried to turn one of the invaders into a martyr.
IN SPRING SEMESTER 2017, I offered an undergraduate senior seminar titled "History and Literature... more IN SPRING SEMESTER 2017, I offered an undergraduate senior seminar titled "History and Literature," for which the main project was a close reading of a big book: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862). I had long thought about a course like this, but had never even drawn up a proposal because I had reservations about the material and the approach to teaching it I envisioned, both of which seemed outdated. Les Misérables, and the nineteenth-century style in which it is written, seemed too lofty for a post-modern audience. A singular focus on a classic of Western literature also struck me as too reflective of a "great books" way of thinking, and not sensitive enough to the reasons why so many teachers (myself included) had long since reacted against a Eurocentric understanding of the world. 1 Another reservation (though also a challenge I was ready to take up) had to do with compelling students to undertake the project of reading a big book-not to mention all the other requirements of a senior seminar (additional readings, presentations, short tests, and a long final paper, with drafts). We are often informed, not only in the broader culture, but also at my own university, that we live in a visual world, which implies an inability to read or concentrate for
This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. Vsevolod Pudovkin's... more This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938) are beautifully filmed and timeless stories that continue to hold the attention of the viewer almost a century after they were made. They also offer credible interpretations of two great European Revolutions: Russia in 1917 and France in 1789-1794. In doing so, the films illustrate some of the momentous developments of their own time, including the emergence of the Communist model of modernization, the rise of fascism, and the shifting of the European revolutionary tradition from France to Russia. Incorporating universalist master narratives from a European perspective, these films provide a persuasive take on Europe's history of revolutions. The films Considered side-by-side, Petersburg and Marseillaise have much to say about how the revolutionary process evolved from local grievance into global models. Interestingly, it is not clear that the directors Pudovkin and Renoir were especially aware of the other's work. The End of St. Petersburg was released during the tenth anniversary celebration of the October
Victoria E. Thompson, ed., A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WORK IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE (Bloomsbury), 2018
Work and workplaces probably saw as much change during the age of empire (1800–1920) as any perio... more Work and workplaces probably saw as much change during the age of empire (1800–1920) as any period in the human past. Much of the change had to do with two developments: the Industrial Revolution and the " new regime " of capitalism. Many traditional skills, trades, and places of work gave way under the relentless advance of industry and capitalism during the age of empire. Workers in textile mills, iron foundries, cotton fields and other workplaces became more-and-more tied to a generalized and global system of production as Atlantic nations exploited their own resources and those of faraway places. At the same time, rising wealth among the upper classes expanded the need for service workers and domestic servants. Work and workplaces changed in significant ways after 1800, contrasting with the " old regime " that went before it and leaving patterns we live with today. This chapter focuses on skilled and unskilled work done by persons who labored with their hands, the physical places where they performed that labor, and the cultural changes that occurred over time at the workplace. Factory workers, domestic servants, agricultural laborers and the places where they worked—not bankers, merchants, clerks, or engineers and the places where they worked—are our subjects. Geographically, most of the examples are from western Europe and Russia, but with details from the Americas, too. The age of empire was especially an Atlantic phenomenon, but Japan also participated. Nearly the entire world was impacted, willingly or not. 1 The chapter reviews topics related to the structure of work before examining in more detail the lives of men, women, and children, and the cultural changes they experienced at the workplace during the age of empire. STRUCTURAL SHIFTS And pLACES OF WORK As with any historical " age, " there were elements of both change and continuity in the age of empire—in work and workplaces, as in other spheres of life. But as historians have long argued, there likely was more change, and less continuity, in this age than others. Most of this had to do with the development of modern industry and capitalism. Over time and in some places, industry and capitalism contributed to longer, better lives though with great costs: the expansion, often through violence, of empires; the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources; and sometimes the degrading of life—including work and workplaces—for those groups not in position to prosper during the advent of industry and capitalism. During the age of empire, the negative impact on the working classes of the Atlantic world mostly outweighed the positive. 2
Casey Harison
“’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were... more Casey Harison “’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were famous or infamous, depending upon one’s point of view, for producing rock and roll “operas.” Tommy from 1969 is the familiar example while 1973’s Quadrophenia is only slightly less well known. But before Tommy and Quadrophenia there was also what Pete Townshend, the group’s main songwriter, called a “mini-opera”: “A Quick One, While He’s Away” from 1966. “A Quick One” was a nine-minute Power Pop medley of short songs that tells the story of an affair between a young woman and an “engine driver” (“Ivor” [it rhymes]) that happens while her real “lover” is away. In due course, accompanied by the distinctive power chords of Townshend and riotous drumming of Keith Moon, there are acts of betrayal, loss, guilt, redemption and, at the end, forgiveness. “You are forgiven,” the lover informs the girl on the record, while in live performance Townshend happily shared the good news that, indeed, “You are all forgiven.” This chapter takes up the theme of forgiveness from “A Quick One,” pairing it with the aural and physical violence that was a distinctive part of The Who’s “brand,” especially in the 1960s, and examining the two in the context of reflections on violence by Hannah Arendt, Gareth Stedman Jones and others. Aside from Townshend, who liked to talk and reflect on the larger meaning of rock and roll, the other band members did not over-intellectualize the smashing of instruments and the painfully loud music. But in hindsight the violent noise, the smoke bombs and the on-stage destruction were a reflection of a time and place – the Atlantic World of the 1960s – and of deeper chords in the relationship between music and violence.
Casey Harison
"Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria:
Europe’s Social Question and the Lega... more Casey Harison "Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria: Europe’s Social Question and the Legacy of French Communalism"
Paris and its revolutionaries were a long way from Corning, Iowa but female members of the Icarian colony there knew a lot about the best-known among them – Louise Michel. An intuitive utopian and lifelong rebel who became famous during the Commune of 1871, Michel was devoted to the “dream” of revolution and human emancipation. There was in the story of Michel and the Paris Commune a communalist spirit: nascent and unstructured, but apparent to empathetic observers in Iowa. There were many elements that drew the Icariennes to Michel: her experience as a female “soldier” in the Commune’s army; her passion for worker’s and women’s rights; and a bourgeoning communalist spirit. These were all personal embodiments of the “Social Question,” a widely-used phrase that described the gap between the promise of citizenship and improved standard of living coming from the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of actual conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. The creation of the first Icarian community in the United States was a response to Europe’s Social Question. The Iowa Icariennes felt an affinity with Louise Michel, though she is not usually included among well-known figures like Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Yet a case may be made that Michel has a place alongside this group, and that the story of the Commune, Michel’s role in it and the larger Social Question have a salient, though sometimes forgotten role in the history of communalism. This article explores the nineteenth-century European roots of communalism in the Social Question via the role of Louise Michel and the Commune of 1871.
ATLANTIC STUDIES, vol. 8, no. 1 (2011), 49-68: Heard on the radio or played live, the song “My G... more ATLANTIC STUDIES, vol. 8, no. 1 (2011), 49-68: Heard on the radio or played live, the song “My Generation” (1965) by the British rock band The Who could startle or enthrall. It is possible to make sense of the song's curiously stuttering lyrics, loudness and distortion, along with the smashing of instruments that ended the band's live act, as the product of long- and short-term historical developments. This article offers a historical interpretation of the stutter and violence of “My Generation” by pairing it with a literary counterpart: Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924). A fumbling for words and a reflex for violence mark Melville's famous story of a young sailor who strikes and kills his nemesis, Claggart. The song and the novella describe young men unable to put emotions into words, a frustration that fuels a violent outburst. Melville inscribed the stutter as a function of deep consternation from a character for whom a physical blow is the only way for “right” to prevail. The stutter of “My Generation” comes from the modern young punk, brazen in attitude and yet deeply unsure of himself. Billy Budd and “My Generation” were products of historical settings that have obvious differences. Yet, the surprising blend of stuttering and violence in the two illustrates parallel historical developments across the North Atlantic during the last two centuries which cast certain acts of violence as “redemptive.” These developments combined with political, technological and commercial developments to create transatlantic fans receptive to surprising juxtapositions like Billy Budd and “My Generation.” The similarities in the novella and the song are signs of a distinctly modern receptiveness to youthful, stuttering, redemptive violence that has roots in the legacies of the French Revolution, the Burke–Paine dialogue and the idea of the “angry young man.”
PARIS IN MODERN TIMES: A survey history of Paris since the eighteenth century directed at undergr... more PARIS IN MODERN TIMES: A survey history of Paris since the eighteenth century directed at undergraduate students.
REVIEWS:
“This insightful and timely book covers events that have rocked Paris, from the French Revolution to the terror attacks of 2015, and paints an absorbing picture of successive people who have contributed to the creation of the modern city.” – Marisa Linton, Associate Professor of History, Kingston University, UK
“This is the kind of book instructors yearn for-a highly readable and cogent historical account of modern Paris, informed by the most recent insights and long established scholarship. Harison pulls off a difficult task with gusto, making the careening succession of French regimes since the Revolution appear straightforward, while enlivening that account with intriguing and surprising stories of streets, buildings and people. The Paris that emerges here is large, colorful and diverse, with its migrants, drifters and flâneurs, its high politics and low entertainments, its working men and women, its artists, rebels, courtesans and criminals. In tracing an expanding Paris from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, through five major revolutions, three occupations and two world wars, Harison deftly weaves together strands of social, political, economic and cultural history to give an engaging panorama of the city's past.” – Ian Coller, Associate Professor of History, University of California Irvine, USA
The Who were one of the most memorable and influential of the 1960s British Invasion bands—memora... more The Who were one of the most memorable and influential of the 1960s British Invasion bands—memorable because of their loudness and because they destroyed instruments during performances—influential because of their success in crafting “Power Pop” singles like “My Generation” and “I Can See for Miles,” long-playing albums Live at Leeds and Who’s Next, and the “rock operas” Tommy and Quadrophenia. The themes that principal songwriter Pete Townshend imparted into The Who’s music drew upon the group’s mostly working-class London upbringings and early Mod audiences: frustration, angst, irony, and a youthful inclination to lash out. Like some of his rock and roll contemporaries, Townshend was also affected by religious ideas coming from India and the existential dread he felt about the possibility of nuclear war. During a career that spanned three decades, The Who gave their fans and rock critics a lot to think about. The remarkable depth and breadth of The Who’s music and their story as one of the most exciting and provocative rock bands over the last half-century are the subjects of the philosophical explorations in this collection.
INTRODUCTION
CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Com... more INTRODUCTION CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Communal Studies sponsored the conference on “Capitalism & Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana as part of the bicentennial celebration of New Harmony’s founding by German Harmonists in 1814. The Harmonists are fairly well known, at least among scholars, but New Harmony is probably most famous as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was especially the legacy of Owen that animated the proceedings and drew participants from across the Atlantic to this small town in southwest Indiana. When the conversation about how to celebrate New Harmony’s bicentennial began, the possibility of the Center organizing a conference around the theme of “capitalism and socialism” came up. This seemed a great idea–a topic very much befitting New Harmony’s history, a good way to attract scholars who otherwise were probably unfamiliar with the Center for Communal Studies, and timely because the effects of the Great Recession were still with us. Indeed by the second decade of the twenty-first century, some of the momentous issues of Robert Owen’s day had again come to feel relevant in ways they had not for a generation or more. As a factory owner and manager in early nineteenth-century New Lanark, Scotland, Owen was a “success” in the new regime of modern capitalism. But as a critical observer of the effects of industrialization, he was also a committed reformer–one of the “utopian socialists” mentioned by Marx whose ideas were tremendously influential in his day. The thinking in planning the conference was that Owen’s work and the experiment he pursued at New Harmony again had currency as the world looked back on the 2008 economic crisis and as socialism, seemingly banished with the failure of Communist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century, has returned to the political and economic lexicon. As the planning for the conference proceeded, more than one person pointed out that it appeared that in coming up with a title we had just “strung together a bunch of big words.” And in a way this was true, though we did so with the sense that the words–some of which did not exist or had only recently begun to show up in dictionaries in Owen’s day–represented modern ideas with origins mostly in the eighteenth century, whose promise Owen sought to understand in his own time and as we are still trying to sort them out nearly two centuries later. The processes represented by the words in the conference title–“capitalism,” “socialism,” “utopia,” “globalization,” “revolution”–were at the heart of what was called the “Social Question” when Owen arrived at New Harmony in 1825. For Robert Owen and his contemporaries, the Social Question was part and parcel of the “industrializing” revolution for which Owen himself was as much responsible as any factory owner of his day. The status of the industrial working class–their living and working conditions in the nineteenth century’s “age of pauperism,” but also their political rights–were central to the original Social Question as the phrase gained currency in Western Europe and then the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Owen did not use the precise phrase in A New View of Society (1817) and The Book of the New Model World (1840), but the books are nonetheless filled with references to the “social” and to posing “questions” about the troubling condition of contemporary society. The modern social sciences represented among the chapters in this book took their shape during the second half of the nineteenth century partly as ways to understand and address the Social Question. By the turn of the century and particularly after the First World War, the way of thinking about modernity represented by the Social Question faded as chattel slavery was abolished in those corners of the world where it persisted, and as political rights were won by workers, peasants and women. In the twentieth century, technology promised ways to improve the standard of living across the globe, while Marxism-Leninism and the great revolutions in Russia and China offered universal solutions to the on-going problems of modernity. By the 1930s, “Social Question” seemed like an old-fashioned way to formulate a plan for changing the world for the better. Yet the underlying questions about how to live in the modern world did not fade away. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have once more taken up the Social Question as they have updated the phrase’s application. Pierre Rosanvallon, for one, formulated a “New Social Question” in terms of the “crisis” of the welfare state that began in the 1970s. He argues that socialism, which seemed an answer to the Social Question for part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is no longer an option because of its’ “deterioration… deriv(-ing) almost directly from the philosophical crisis of the welfare state.” For Rosanvallon, there has been a shift in the direction and the potential “answers” of Social Question in the second half of the twentieth century, but for other scholars who use the phrase it mostly continues to stand for alternatives to capitalism. Today the Social Question is less about gaining the right to vote for an industrial working class and more about guaranteeing the broader range of universal human rights for all. It is less about the path down which industry is carrying humanity and more about using technology and the sciences to raise the standard of living for the disadvantaged. Where the idea of sustainability was only implicit in the nineteenth century’s Social Question, it is explicit in the twenty-first century’s New Social Question. We did not use the phrase in our conference title, but the idea of the Social Question was there in the panels at New Harmony. In hindsight, we can say that the bicentennial celebration at New Harmony offered a small opportunity to return to the Social Question and the fundamental issues that framed Robert Owen’s mental landscape, as they do for an even more integrated world today. We hoped that the conference and this book, which draws from papers presented at New Harmony, might represent, to borrow a phrase from Erik Olin Wright, a moment of “emancipatory social science.” The issues explored here include the globalizing aspirations of capitalism and socialism; the paths, including reform or revolution, toward capitalism or socialism; the degree to which the promises of material well-being and fulfilled political lives born of these siblings of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions remain achievable; and, finally, the opportunity to simply imagine “utopian” alternatives to the status quo. These are all aspects of A New Social Question. Contributors to this volume come from fields in the social sciences and humanities. The coverage is transatlantic, with topics and authors from North America and Europe. The book is organized into sections on “capitalism,” “socialism” and “utopia.” Within sections, chapters are arranged chronologically. Particular topics include individual thinkers and theorists from the nineteenth century–Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Stuart Mill and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon–as well as analysis of contemporary topics, including the recent work of economist Thomas Piketty. Other chapters take up the interplay of religion, economics and “cybernetics” within these globalizing systems. The final section on “utopia” presents a synthesis on capitalism and socialism, concluding with a “Marxian critique of utopia.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Stalinist states across Eastern Europe a generation ago, it felt, as one scholar famously put it at the time that we had reached “the end of history.” The questions and contests that had animated university life, as they had defined politics and economics across the Atlantic and beyond for the previous two centuries, seemed to have been settled. But of course this was not really the case. As Joyce Appleby, David Harvey and Thomas Piketty have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it also reminded us that we have not reached the end of history. Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. The great questions of modernity, of capitalism and socialism, that troubled Robert Owen and inspired him to test his ideas for an alternative, “utopian” future along the banks of the Wabash River on what was then the frontier of the United States, persist, as they also provide an opportunity in this book to once again re-consider these enduring subjects.
The violence directed by police toward citizens that has been captured on video has rocked societ... more The violence directed by police toward citizens that has been captured on video has rocked societies across the Atlantic in recent years. The deaths of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk are not the first times that disturbing images of violence by authorities against ordinary citizens have galvanized the public. Honoré Daumier’s (1808-79) lithograph of a police “massacre” on Paris’ Rue Transnonain in 1834 is another famous representation of an infamous event. Daumier is best known as the discerning, often humorous caricaturist of the nineteenth-century French middle class, but he also sometimes turned a keen eye to politics, foreign policy, and civil strife, including what became known as the “Massacre on the Rue Transnonain”—a tragic killing of civilians by soldiers in the immediate aftermath of a rebellion.
Age of Revolutions, An Open-Access Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal, 2023
Individual Republican politicians in the United States and the Republican party in general have d... more Individual Republican politicians in the United States and the Republican party in general have downplayed the seriousness of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd. Despite what many of us saw on television that day-images that have since been bolstered by the revelations of the House Committee investigating the event-the Washington Post reported last summer that "Republicans still mostly just shrug." Indeed, as the Post proceeded to report in September, a majority of polled Republicans believe January 6 "wasn't a riot at all, just a demonstration, maybe with a few bad apples." Former President Donald Trump has echoed the nonchalance, even as he has tried to turn one of the invaders into a martyr.
IN SPRING SEMESTER 2017, I offered an undergraduate senior seminar titled "History and Literature... more IN SPRING SEMESTER 2017, I offered an undergraduate senior seminar titled "History and Literature," for which the main project was a close reading of a big book: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862). I had long thought about a course like this, but had never even drawn up a proposal because I had reservations about the material and the approach to teaching it I envisioned, both of which seemed outdated. Les Misérables, and the nineteenth-century style in which it is written, seemed too lofty for a post-modern audience. A singular focus on a classic of Western literature also struck me as too reflective of a "great books" way of thinking, and not sensitive enough to the reasons why so many teachers (myself included) had long since reacted against a Eurocentric understanding of the world. 1 Another reservation (though also a challenge I was ready to take up) had to do with compelling students to undertake the project of reading a big book-not to mention all the other requirements of a senior seminar (additional readings, presentations, short tests, and a long final paper, with drafts). We are often informed, not only in the broader culture, but also at my own university, that we live in a visual world, which implies an inability to read or concentrate for
This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. Vsevolod Pudovkin's... more This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image. Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938) are beautifully filmed and timeless stories that continue to hold the attention of the viewer almost a century after they were made. They also offer credible interpretations of two great European Revolutions: Russia in 1917 and France in 1789-1794. In doing so, the films illustrate some of the momentous developments of their own time, including the emergence of the Communist model of modernization, the rise of fascism, and the shifting of the European revolutionary tradition from France to Russia. Incorporating universalist master narratives from a European perspective, these films provide a persuasive take on Europe's history of revolutions. The films Considered side-by-side, Petersburg and Marseillaise have much to say about how the revolutionary process evolved from local grievance into global models. Interestingly, it is not clear that the directors Pudovkin and Renoir were especially aware of the other's work. The End of St. Petersburg was released during the tenth anniversary celebration of the October
Victoria E. Thompson, ed., A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WORK IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE (Bloomsbury), 2018
Work and workplaces probably saw as much change during the age of empire (1800–1920) as any perio... more Work and workplaces probably saw as much change during the age of empire (1800–1920) as any period in the human past. Much of the change had to do with two developments: the Industrial Revolution and the " new regime " of capitalism. Many traditional skills, trades, and places of work gave way under the relentless advance of industry and capitalism during the age of empire. Workers in textile mills, iron foundries, cotton fields and other workplaces became more-and-more tied to a generalized and global system of production as Atlantic nations exploited their own resources and those of faraway places. At the same time, rising wealth among the upper classes expanded the need for service workers and domestic servants. Work and workplaces changed in significant ways after 1800, contrasting with the " old regime " that went before it and leaving patterns we live with today. This chapter focuses on skilled and unskilled work done by persons who labored with their hands, the physical places where they performed that labor, and the cultural changes that occurred over time at the workplace. Factory workers, domestic servants, agricultural laborers and the places where they worked—not bankers, merchants, clerks, or engineers and the places where they worked—are our subjects. Geographically, most of the examples are from western Europe and Russia, but with details from the Americas, too. The age of empire was especially an Atlantic phenomenon, but Japan also participated. Nearly the entire world was impacted, willingly or not. 1 The chapter reviews topics related to the structure of work before examining in more detail the lives of men, women, and children, and the cultural changes they experienced at the workplace during the age of empire. STRUCTURAL SHIFTS And pLACES OF WORK As with any historical " age, " there were elements of both change and continuity in the age of empire—in work and workplaces, as in other spheres of life. But as historians have long argued, there likely was more change, and less continuity, in this age than others. Most of this had to do with the development of modern industry and capitalism. Over time and in some places, industry and capitalism contributed to longer, better lives though with great costs: the expansion, often through violence, of empires; the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources; and sometimes the degrading of life—including work and workplaces—for those groups not in position to prosper during the advent of industry and capitalism. During the age of empire, the negative impact on the working classes of the Atlantic world mostly outweighed the positive. 2
Casey Harison
“’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were... more Casey Harison “’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were famous or infamous, depending upon one’s point of view, for producing rock and roll “operas.” Tommy from 1969 is the familiar example while 1973’s Quadrophenia is only slightly less well known. But before Tommy and Quadrophenia there was also what Pete Townshend, the group’s main songwriter, called a “mini-opera”: “A Quick One, While He’s Away” from 1966. “A Quick One” was a nine-minute Power Pop medley of short songs that tells the story of an affair between a young woman and an “engine driver” (“Ivor” [it rhymes]) that happens while her real “lover” is away. In due course, accompanied by the distinctive power chords of Townshend and riotous drumming of Keith Moon, there are acts of betrayal, loss, guilt, redemption and, at the end, forgiveness. “You are forgiven,” the lover informs the girl on the record, while in live performance Townshend happily shared the good news that, indeed, “You are all forgiven.” This chapter takes up the theme of forgiveness from “A Quick One,” pairing it with the aural and physical violence that was a distinctive part of The Who’s “brand,” especially in the 1960s, and examining the two in the context of reflections on violence by Hannah Arendt, Gareth Stedman Jones and others. Aside from Townshend, who liked to talk and reflect on the larger meaning of rock and roll, the other band members did not over-intellectualize the smashing of instruments and the painfully loud music. But in hindsight the violent noise, the smoke bombs and the on-stage destruction were a reflection of a time and place – the Atlantic World of the 1960s – and of deeper chords in the relationship between music and violence.
Casey Harison
"Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria:
Europe’s Social Question and the Lega... more Casey Harison "Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria: Europe’s Social Question and the Legacy of French Communalism"
Paris and its revolutionaries were a long way from Corning, Iowa but female members of the Icarian colony there knew a lot about the best-known among them – Louise Michel. An intuitive utopian and lifelong rebel who became famous during the Commune of 1871, Michel was devoted to the “dream” of revolution and human emancipation. There was in the story of Michel and the Paris Commune a communalist spirit: nascent and unstructured, but apparent to empathetic observers in Iowa. There were many elements that drew the Icariennes to Michel: her experience as a female “soldier” in the Commune’s army; her passion for worker’s and women’s rights; and a bourgeoning communalist spirit. These were all personal embodiments of the “Social Question,” a widely-used phrase that described the gap between the promise of citizenship and improved standard of living coming from the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of actual conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. The creation of the first Icarian community in the United States was a response to Europe’s Social Question. The Iowa Icariennes felt an affinity with Louise Michel, though she is not usually included among well-known figures like Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Yet a case may be made that Michel has a place alongside this group, and that the story of the Commune, Michel’s role in it and the larger Social Question have a salient, though sometimes forgotten role in the history of communalism. This article explores the nineteenth-century European roots of communalism in the Social Question via the role of Louise Michel and the Commune of 1871.
ATLANTIC STUDIES, vol. 8, no. 1 (2011), 49-68: Heard on the radio or played live, the song “My G... more ATLANTIC STUDIES, vol. 8, no. 1 (2011), 49-68: Heard on the radio or played live, the song “My Generation” (1965) by the British rock band The Who could startle or enthrall. It is possible to make sense of the song's curiously stuttering lyrics, loudness and distortion, along with the smashing of instruments that ended the band's live act, as the product of long- and short-term historical developments. This article offers a historical interpretation of the stutter and violence of “My Generation” by pairing it with a literary counterpart: Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924). A fumbling for words and a reflex for violence mark Melville's famous story of a young sailor who strikes and kills his nemesis, Claggart. The song and the novella describe young men unable to put emotions into words, a frustration that fuels a violent outburst. Melville inscribed the stutter as a function of deep consternation from a character for whom a physical blow is the only way for “right” to prevail. The stutter of “My Generation” comes from the modern young punk, brazen in attitude and yet deeply unsure of himself. Billy Budd and “My Generation” were products of historical settings that have obvious differences. Yet, the surprising blend of stuttering and violence in the two illustrates parallel historical developments across the North Atlantic during the last two centuries which cast certain acts of violence as “redemptive.” These developments combined with political, technological and commercial developments to create transatlantic fans receptive to surprising juxtapositions like Billy Budd and “My Generation.” The similarities in the novella and the song are signs of a distinctly modern receptiveness to youthful, stuttering, redemptive violence that has roots in the legacies of the French Revolution, the Burke–Paine dialogue and the idea of the “angry young man.”
Volume ! la revue des musiques populaires, Jul 20, 2014
Emmanuelle Olivier, editor.
"As digital technologies set off new modes of writing, listening, ... more Emmanuelle Olivier, editor.
"As digital technologies set off new modes of writing, listening, exchanging, circulating and data storaging, as well as new forms of authority, economies and types of relationships to time and to the world, this set of texts questions notions of musical and choreographic creation in our globalized context. Through a series of case studies which go beyond the North/South, written/oral, learned/popular and sacred/secular dichotomies, we better understand how these practices participate in the same regime of creation which either integrates or puts in tension two logics, one of renewal, another one of innovation. These practices of composing and recomposing are also questioned in terms of regimes of authority. The interest of this approach is to show that, in various regions of the world, alternative solutions to “copyright” systems, certain old, others more recent, have been set up and are henceforth part of the new service economies sparked off by the democratization of digital technologies.
Daniel Roche's now classic Le peuple de Paris continues to inspire scholars in France and across ... more Daniel Roche's now classic Le peuple de Paris continues to inspire scholars in France and across the world interested in the daily lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-century Paris. The eighteen chapters in this collection edited by Pascal Bastien and Simon Macdonald are from a conference sponsored by the Institut d'Études Avancées in Paris in May 2017 that celebrated Roche and his enlightening approach to social and cultural history.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Books by Casey Harison
REVIEWS:
“This insightful and timely book covers events that have rocked Paris, from the French Revolution to the terror attacks of 2015, and paints an absorbing picture of successive people who have contributed to the creation of the modern city.” – Marisa Linton, Associate Professor of History, Kingston University, UK
“This is the kind of book instructors yearn for-a highly readable and cogent historical account of modern Paris, informed by the most recent insights and long established scholarship. Harison pulls off a difficult task with gusto, making the careening succession of French regimes since the Revolution appear straightforward, while enlivening that account with intriguing and surprising stories of streets, buildings and people. The Paris that emerges here is large, colorful and diverse, with its migrants, drifters and flâneurs, its high politics and low entertainments, its working men and women, its artists, rebels, courtesans and criminals. In tracing an expanding Paris from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, through five major revolutions, three occupations and two world wars, Harison deftly weaves together strands of social, political, economic and cultural history to give an engaging panorama of the city's past.” – Ian Coller, Associate Professor of History, University of California Irvine, USA
CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Communal Studies sponsored the conference on “Capitalism & Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana as part of the bicentennial celebration of New Harmony’s founding by German Harmonists in 1814. The Harmonists are fairly well known, at least among scholars, but New Harmony is probably most famous as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was especially the legacy of Owen that animated the proceedings and drew participants from across the Atlantic to this small town in southwest Indiana.
When the conversation about how to celebrate New Harmony’s bicentennial began, the possibility of the Center organizing a conference around the theme of “capitalism and socialism” came up. This seemed a great idea–a topic very much befitting New Harmony’s history, a good way to attract scholars who otherwise were probably unfamiliar with the Center for Communal Studies, and timely because the effects of the Great Recession were still with us. Indeed by the second decade of the twenty-first century, some of the momentous issues of Robert Owen’s day had again come to feel relevant in ways they had not for a generation or more. As a factory owner and manager in early nineteenth-century New Lanark, Scotland, Owen was a “success” in the new regime of modern capitalism. But as a critical observer of the effects of industrialization, he was also a committed reformer–one of the “utopian socialists” mentioned by Marx whose ideas were tremendously influential in his day. The thinking in planning the conference was that Owen’s work and the experiment he pursued at New Harmony again had currency as the world looked back on the 2008 economic crisis and as socialism, seemingly banished with the failure of Communist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century, has returned to the political and economic lexicon.
As the planning for the conference proceeded, more than one person pointed out that it appeared that in coming up with a title we had just “strung together a bunch of big words.” And in a way this was true, though we did so with the sense that the words–some of which did not exist or had only recently begun to show up in dictionaries in Owen’s day–represented modern ideas with origins mostly in the eighteenth century, whose promise Owen sought to understand in his own time and as we are still trying to sort them out nearly two centuries later. The processes represented by the words in the conference title–“capitalism,” “socialism,” “utopia,” “globalization,” “revolution”–were at the heart of what was called the “Social Question” when Owen arrived at New Harmony in 1825.
For Robert Owen and his contemporaries, the Social Question was part and parcel of the “industrializing” revolution for which Owen himself was as much responsible as any factory owner of his day. The status of the industrial working class–their living and working conditions in the nineteenth century’s “age of pauperism,” but also their political rights–were central to the original Social Question as the phrase gained currency in Western Europe and then the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Owen did not use the precise phrase in A New View of Society (1817) and The Book of the New Model World (1840), but the books are nonetheless filled with references to the “social” and to posing “questions” about the troubling condition of contemporary society. The modern social sciences represented among the chapters in this book took their shape during the second half of the nineteenth century partly as ways to understand and address the Social Question.
By the turn of the century and particularly after the First World War, the way of thinking about modernity represented by the Social Question faded as chattel slavery was abolished in those corners of the world where it persisted, and as political rights were won by workers, peasants and women. In the twentieth century, technology promised ways to improve the standard of living across the globe, while Marxism-Leninism and the great revolutions in Russia and China offered universal solutions to the on-going problems of modernity. By the 1930s, “Social Question” seemed like an old-fashioned way to formulate a plan for changing the world for the better.
Yet the underlying questions about how to live in the modern world did not fade away. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have once more taken up the Social Question as they have updated the phrase’s application. Pierre Rosanvallon, for one, formulated a “New Social Question” in terms of the “crisis” of the welfare state that began in the 1970s. He argues that socialism, which seemed an answer to the Social Question for part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is no longer an option because of its’ “deterioration… deriv(-ing) almost directly from the philosophical crisis of the welfare state.” For Rosanvallon, there has been a shift in the direction and the potential “answers” of Social Question in the second half of the twentieth century, but for other scholars who use the phrase it mostly continues to stand for alternatives to capitalism. Today the Social Question is less about gaining the right to vote for an industrial working class and more about guaranteeing the broader range of universal human rights for all. It is less about the path down which industry is carrying humanity and more about using technology and the sciences to raise the standard of living for the disadvantaged. Where the idea of sustainability was only implicit in the nineteenth century’s Social Question, it is explicit in the twenty-first century’s New Social Question.
We did not use the phrase in our conference title, but the idea of the Social Question was there in the panels at New Harmony. In hindsight, we can say that the bicentennial celebration at New Harmony offered a small opportunity to return to the Social Question and the fundamental issues that framed Robert Owen’s mental landscape, as they do for an even more integrated world today. We hoped that the conference and this book, which draws from papers presented at New Harmony, might represent, to borrow a phrase from Erik Olin Wright, a moment of “emancipatory social science.” The issues explored here include the globalizing aspirations of capitalism and socialism; the paths, including reform or revolution, toward capitalism or socialism; the degree to which the promises of material well-being and fulfilled political lives born of these siblings of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions remain achievable; and, finally, the opportunity to simply imagine “utopian” alternatives to the status quo. These are all aspects of A New Social Question.
Contributors to this volume come from fields in the social sciences and humanities. The coverage is transatlantic, with topics and authors from North America and Europe. The book is organized into sections on “capitalism,” “socialism” and “utopia.” Within sections, chapters are arranged chronologically. Particular topics include individual thinkers and theorists from the nineteenth century–Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Stuart Mill and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon–as well as analysis of contemporary topics, including the recent work of economist Thomas Piketty. Other chapters take up the interplay of religion, economics and “cybernetics” within these globalizing systems. The final section on “utopia” presents a synthesis on capitalism and socialism, concluding with a “Marxian critique of utopia.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Stalinist states across Eastern Europe a generation ago, it felt, as one scholar famously put it at the time that we had reached “the end of history.” The questions and contests that had animated university life, as they had defined politics and economics across the Atlantic and beyond for the previous two centuries, seemed to have been settled. But of course this was not really the case. As Joyce Appleby, David Harvey and Thomas Piketty have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it also reminded us that we have not reached the end of history. Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. The great questions of modernity, of capitalism and socialism, that troubled Robert Owen and inspired him to test his ideas for an alternative, “utopian” future along the banks of the Wabash River on what was then the frontier of the United States, persist, as they also provide an opportunity in this book to once again re-consider these enduring subjects.
Papers by Casey Harison
“’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were famous or infamous, depending upon one’s point of view, for producing rock and roll “operas.” Tommy from 1969 is the familiar example while 1973’s Quadrophenia is only slightly less well known. But before Tommy and Quadrophenia there was also what Pete Townshend, the group’s main songwriter, called a “mini-opera”: “A Quick One, While He’s Away” from 1966. “A Quick One” was a nine-minute Power Pop medley of short songs that tells the story of an affair between a young woman and an “engine driver” (“Ivor” [it rhymes]) that happens while her real “lover” is away. In due course, accompanied by the distinctive power chords of Townshend and riotous drumming of Keith Moon, there are acts of betrayal, loss, guilt, redemption and, at the end, forgiveness. “You are forgiven,” the lover informs the girl on the record, while in live performance Townshend happily shared the good news that, indeed, “You are all forgiven.”
This chapter takes up the theme of forgiveness from “A Quick One,” pairing it with the aural and physical violence that was a distinctive part of The Who’s “brand,” especially in the 1960s, and examining the two in the context of reflections on violence by Hannah Arendt, Gareth Stedman Jones and others. Aside from Townshend, who liked to talk and reflect on the larger meaning of rock and roll, the other band members did not over-intellectualize the smashing of instruments and the painfully loud music. But in hindsight the violent noise, the smoke bombs and the on-stage destruction were a reflection of a time and place – the Atlantic World of the 1960s – and of deeper chords in the relationship between music and violence.
"Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria:
Europe’s Social Question and the Legacy of French Communalism"
Paris and its revolutionaries were a long way from Corning, Iowa but female members of the Icarian colony there knew a lot about the best-known among them – Louise Michel. An intuitive utopian and lifelong rebel who became famous during the Commune of 1871, Michel was devoted to the “dream” of revolution and human emancipation. There was in the story of Michel and the Paris Commune a communalist spirit: nascent and unstructured, but apparent to empathetic observers in Iowa. There were many elements that drew the Icariennes to Michel: her experience as a female “soldier” in the Commune’s army; her passion for worker’s and women’s rights; and a bourgeoning communalist spirit. These were all personal embodiments of the “Social Question,” a widely-used phrase that described the gap between the promise of citizenship and improved standard of living coming from the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of actual conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. The creation of the first Icarian community in the United States was a response to Europe’s Social Question.
The Iowa Icariennes felt an affinity with Louise Michel, though she is not usually included among well-known figures like Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Yet a case may be made that Michel has a place alongside this group, and that the story of the Commune, Michel’s role in it and the larger Social Question have a salient, though sometimes forgotten role in the history of communalism. This article explores the nineteenth-century European roots of communalism in the Social Question via the role of Louise Michel and the Commune of 1871.
REVIEWS:
“This insightful and timely book covers events that have rocked Paris, from the French Revolution to the terror attacks of 2015, and paints an absorbing picture of successive people who have contributed to the creation of the modern city.” – Marisa Linton, Associate Professor of History, Kingston University, UK
“This is the kind of book instructors yearn for-a highly readable and cogent historical account of modern Paris, informed by the most recent insights and long established scholarship. Harison pulls off a difficult task with gusto, making the careening succession of French regimes since the Revolution appear straightforward, while enlivening that account with intriguing and surprising stories of streets, buildings and people. The Paris that emerges here is large, colorful and diverse, with its migrants, drifters and flâneurs, its high politics and low entertainments, its working men and women, its artists, rebels, courtesans and criminals. In tracing an expanding Paris from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, through five major revolutions, three occupations and two world wars, Harison deftly weaves together strands of social, political, economic and cultural history to give an engaging panorama of the city's past.” – Ian Coller, Associate Professor of History, University of California Irvine, USA
CASEY HARISON
In November 2014, the University of Southern Indiana’s Center for Communal Studies sponsored the conference on “Capitalism & Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution” at New Harmony, Indiana as part of the bicentennial celebration of New Harmony’s founding by German Harmonists in 1814. The Harmonists are fairly well known, at least among scholars, but New Harmony is probably most famous as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was especially the legacy of Owen that animated the proceedings and drew participants from across the Atlantic to this small town in southwest Indiana.
When the conversation about how to celebrate New Harmony’s bicentennial began, the possibility of the Center organizing a conference around the theme of “capitalism and socialism” came up. This seemed a great idea–a topic very much befitting New Harmony’s history, a good way to attract scholars who otherwise were probably unfamiliar with the Center for Communal Studies, and timely because the effects of the Great Recession were still with us. Indeed by the second decade of the twenty-first century, some of the momentous issues of Robert Owen’s day had again come to feel relevant in ways they had not for a generation or more. As a factory owner and manager in early nineteenth-century New Lanark, Scotland, Owen was a “success” in the new regime of modern capitalism. But as a critical observer of the effects of industrialization, he was also a committed reformer–one of the “utopian socialists” mentioned by Marx whose ideas were tremendously influential in his day. The thinking in planning the conference was that Owen’s work and the experiment he pursued at New Harmony again had currency as the world looked back on the 2008 economic crisis and as socialism, seemingly banished with the failure of Communist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century, has returned to the political and economic lexicon.
As the planning for the conference proceeded, more than one person pointed out that it appeared that in coming up with a title we had just “strung together a bunch of big words.” And in a way this was true, though we did so with the sense that the words–some of which did not exist or had only recently begun to show up in dictionaries in Owen’s day–represented modern ideas with origins mostly in the eighteenth century, whose promise Owen sought to understand in his own time and as we are still trying to sort them out nearly two centuries later. The processes represented by the words in the conference title–“capitalism,” “socialism,” “utopia,” “globalization,” “revolution”–were at the heart of what was called the “Social Question” when Owen arrived at New Harmony in 1825.
For Robert Owen and his contemporaries, the Social Question was part and parcel of the “industrializing” revolution for which Owen himself was as much responsible as any factory owner of his day. The status of the industrial working class–their living and working conditions in the nineteenth century’s “age of pauperism,” but also their political rights–were central to the original Social Question as the phrase gained currency in Western Europe and then the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Owen did not use the precise phrase in A New View of Society (1817) and The Book of the New Model World (1840), but the books are nonetheless filled with references to the “social” and to posing “questions” about the troubling condition of contemporary society. The modern social sciences represented among the chapters in this book took their shape during the second half of the nineteenth century partly as ways to understand and address the Social Question.
By the turn of the century and particularly after the First World War, the way of thinking about modernity represented by the Social Question faded as chattel slavery was abolished in those corners of the world where it persisted, and as political rights were won by workers, peasants and women. In the twentieth century, technology promised ways to improve the standard of living across the globe, while Marxism-Leninism and the great revolutions in Russia and China offered universal solutions to the on-going problems of modernity. By the 1930s, “Social Question” seemed like an old-fashioned way to formulate a plan for changing the world for the better.
Yet the underlying questions about how to live in the modern world did not fade away. Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have once more taken up the Social Question as they have updated the phrase’s application. Pierre Rosanvallon, for one, formulated a “New Social Question” in terms of the “crisis” of the welfare state that began in the 1970s. He argues that socialism, which seemed an answer to the Social Question for part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is no longer an option because of its’ “deterioration… deriv(-ing) almost directly from the philosophical crisis of the welfare state.” For Rosanvallon, there has been a shift in the direction and the potential “answers” of Social Question in the second half of the twentieth century, but for other scholars who use the phrase it mostly continues to stand for alternatives to capitalism. Today the Social Question is less about gaining the right to vote for an industrial working class and more about guaranteeing the broader range of universal human rights for all. It is less about the path down which industry is carrying humanity and more about using technology and the sciences to raise the standard of living for the disadvantaged. Where the idea of sustainability was only implicit in the nineteenth century’s Social Question, it is explicit in the twenty-first century’s New Social Question.
We did not use the phrase in our conference title, but the idea of the Social Question was there in the panels at New Harmony. In hindsight, we can say that the bicentennial celebration at New Harmony offered a small opportunity to return to the Social Question and the fundamental issues that framed Robert Owen’s mental landscape, as they do for an even more integrated world today. We hoped that the conference and this book, which draws from papers presented at New Harmony, might represent, to borrow a phrase from Erik Olin Wright, a moment of “emancipatory social science.” The issues explored here include the globalizing aspirations of capitalism and socialism; the paths, including reform or revolution, toward capitalism or socialism; the degree to which the promises of material well-being and fulfilled political lives born of these siblings of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions remain achievable; and, finally, the opportunity to simply imagine “utopian” alternatives to the status quo. These are all aspects of A New Social Question.
Contributors to this volume come from fields in the social sciences and humanities. The coverage is transatlantic, with topics and authors from North America and Europe. The book is organized into sections on “capitalism,” “socialism” and “utopia.” Within sections, chapters are arranged chronologically. Particular topics include individual thinkers and theorists from the nineteenth century–Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, John Stuart Mill and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon–as well as analysis of contemporary topics, including the recent work of economist Thomas Piketty. Other chapters take up the interplay of religion, economics and “cybernetics” within these globalizing systems. The final section on “utopia” presents a synthesis on capitalism and socialism, concluding with a “Marxian critique of utopia.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Stalinist states across Eastern Europe a generation ago, it felt, as one scholar famously put it at the time that we had reached “the end of history.” The questions and contests that had animated university life, as they had defined politics and economics across the Atlantic and beyond for the previous two centuries, seemed to have been settled. But of course this was not really the case. As Joyce Appleby, David Harvey and Thomas Piketty have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it also reminded us that we have not reached the end of history. Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. The great questions of modernity, of capitalism and socialism, that troubled Robert Owen and inspired him to test his ideas for an alternative, “utopian” future along the banks of the Wabash River on what was then the frontier of the United States, persist, as they also provide an opportunity in this book to once again re-consider these enduring subjects.
“’You Are Forgiven’: Reflections on Violence, Redemption and The Who”
The Who were famous or infamous, depending upon one’s point of view, for producing rock and roll “operas.” Tommy from 1969 is the familiar example while 1973’s Quadrophenia is only slightly less well known. But before Tommy and Quadrophenia there was also what Pete Townshend, the group’s main songwriter, called a “mini-opera”: “A Quick One, While He’s Away” from 1966. “A Quick One” was a nine-minute Power Pop medley of short songs that tells the story of an affair between a young woman and an “engine driver” (“Ivor” [it rhymes]) that happens while her real “lover” is away. In due course, accompanied by the distinctive power chords of Townshend and riotous drumming of Keith Moon, there are acts of betrayal, loss, guilt, redemption and, at the end, forgiveness. “You are forgiven,” the lover informs the girl on the record, while in live performance Townshend happily shared the good news that, indeed, “You are all forgiven.”
This chapter takes up the theme of forgiveness from “A Quick One,” pairing it with the aural and physical violence that was a distinctive part of The Who’s “brand,” especially in the 1960s, and examining the two in the context of reflections on violence by Hannah Arendt, Gareth Stedman Jones and others. Aside from Townshend, who liked to talk and reflect on the larger meaning of rock and roll, the other band members did not over-intellectualize the smashing of instruments and the painfully loud music. But in hindsight the violent noise, the smoke bombs and the on-stage destruction were a reflection of a time and place – the Atlantic World of the 1960s – and of deeper chords in the relationship between music and violence.
"Louise Michel, the Paris Commune and Icaria:
Europe’s Social Question and the Legacy of French Communalism"
Paris and its revolutionaries were a long way from Corning, Iowa but female members of the Icarian colony there knew a lot about the best-known among them – Louise Michel. An intuitive utopian and lifelong rebel who became famous during the Commune of 1871, Michel was devoted to the “dream” of revolution and human emancipation. There was in the story of Michel and the Paris Commune a communalist spirit: nascent and unstructured, but apparent to empathetic observers in Iowa. There were many elements that drew the Icariennes to Michel: her experience as a female “soldier” in the Commune’s army; her passion for worker’s and women’s rights; and a bourgeoning communalist spirit. These were all personal embodiments of the “Social Question,” a widely-used phrase that described the gap between the promise of citizenship and improved standard of living coming from the Atlantic and Industrial Revolutions, and the reality of actual conditions of life for most people in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas. The creation of the first Icarian community in the United States was a response to Europe’s Social Question.
The Iowa Icariennes felt an affinity with Louise Michel, though she is not usually included among well-known figures like Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier. Yet a case may be made that Michel has a place alongside this group, and that the story of the Commune, Michel’s role in it and the larger Social Question have a salient, though sometimes forgotten role in the history of communalism. This article explores the nineteenth-century European roots of communalism in the Social Question via the role of Louise Michel and the Commune of 1871.
"As digital technologies set off new modes of writing, listening, exchanging, circulating and data storaging, as well as new forms of authority, economies and types of relationships to time and to the world, this set of texts questions notions of musical and choreographic creation in our globalized context. Through a series of case studies which go beyond the North/South, written/oral, learned/popular and sacred/secular dichotomies, we better understand how these practices participate in the same regime of creation which either integrates or puts in tension two logics, one of renewal, another one of innovation. These practices of composing and recomposing are also questioned in terms of regimes of authority. The interest of this approach is to show that, in various regions of the world, alternative solutions to “copyright” systems, certain old, others more recent, have been set up and are henceforth part of the new service economies sparked off by the democratization of digital technologies.
Table of contents here: http://www.cairn.info/revue-volume-2014-1.htm"