EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E 
A History of the World since 1300
Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
https://www.coursera.org/#course/wh1300
C O U R S E   L E C T U R E 
20th Century Questioning of Reason
Notes taken on February 10, 2018 by Edward Tanguay
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protest movements
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the right to be included in public life
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the right to be included in the interdependent system of economies
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suffragettes argued that they deserved these rights because they were reasonable creatures as well
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people began to wonder about this faith in the ability of people to reason
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could rationality from the 18th century characterize the nature of the modern age
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where all humans capable of being reasonable creatures
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this faith began to be infected by anxiety
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economic forces were creating irrational creatures
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modernity and modernization was producing the opposite of what the Enlightenment figures had once optimistically projected forward
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mass society was becoming a concern
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no longer were cities the home of gentlemen salons
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they were becoming the centers of consumption, often out of control
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cities became crowded, noisy, crime-ridden spaces that were not the products of the Enlightenment that was once promised
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villages were coming apart and losing their traditions
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Impressionism
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Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
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Le pont Boïeldieu à Rouen, soleil couchant, temps brumeux (1896)
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the city is crowded and gray
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the smoke and fumes are the dominant factor
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he also had beautiful paintings of the countryside
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he was capturing here the sense that the community is being lost and replaced with society
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the church and mosque are no longer the buildings that anchor the community
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but factories
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was pulling back the veil
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disclose something more primeval about our natures
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order was being undone
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the philosophers of the 18th century had indicated that we should not worry since we all have an innate capacity to reason
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but people were beginning to worry
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the social sciences
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resulted from an emerging concern for society
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John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
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not just an economist but in many ways a sociologist, psychologist, political scientist
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sociology, psychology and political science were all disciplines born in the late 19th century
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these sciences were torn between an earlier optimism about an Enlightenment faith and the discontents about what modernization was breeding
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the mechanism creating this world threatened to despoil individual's singularity and particularity
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Max Weber (1864-1920)
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made the case for modernization
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became the founder of modern sociology
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the nature of modernization subjective human beings to ubiquitous rules, routines, enforced punctuality, mindless toil, losing their souls, and disenchantment with everyday life, and being governed by bureaucracy, a word that in the 20th century gained increasing currency as people felt that they were being ruled by these invisible, inanimate organizations
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Protestantism was an important force in producing capitalism
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also concerned that this newly, inquisitive self, this consumer, was losing their soul
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modernization threatened to create a utopian world in which machines are masquerading as men
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José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917)
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denounced materialism
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Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
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nobody who incarnated this materialist spirit than the India Mahatma Gandhi
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wears very little
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demonstrates the denial of material possessions
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suggests that we should go back to tradition
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making clothes that we make for ourselves
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it gets destroyed in the course of interdependence
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simple work for self-sufficiency
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many started to begin to argue against the Enlightenment movement
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we are much more governed by passion, unreason and desire
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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
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the founder in some respects of psychology
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1900 The Interpretation of Dreams
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you can get a glimpse of people's inner worlds
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it is full of darkness, passion, and desire, and not ration, calculating intention
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was fascinated by the role of mythology
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Greek myths and other myths that told tales of our inner lives
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humans are at their base sexual animals with basic passions, not just the calculating, possessive, individualists seeking property and maximizing their utilities
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this was not altogether new
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what he did was to systematize this thought and burrowed the deepest
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we are not just ruled by our consciousness but we carried around with an an engine of unconsciousness
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these desires need to be process or repressed and expressed in other ways
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so the triumph of civilization was not the triumph of reason
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but our ability to contain, repress, and channel ourselves
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we see the emergence of the modern social sciences
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seeking to explain the modern condition and its pathologies
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psychology associated with criminology
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women were seen by many to be the most vulnerable
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Cesar Lombroso (1835–1909)
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book: La Donna Delinquente
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the delinquent woman
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her pose on the cover of his book: one of temptation in front of pigs
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the dark side of human nature gained focus in the 20th century
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something in the air that was producing these anxieties even when modernity was promising so much