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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
For the better part of the past generation, social scientists have devoted much of their best effort to the study of modernization. Economists have examined growth and development. Demographers have detailed the demographic transition. Anthropoligists have observed the dissolution of traditional societies. Social psychologists have measured the emergence of achievement motivation. Sociologists have traced the myriad patterns of secularization, professionalization, bureaucratization, and rationalization. Yet for all their effort it seems scarcely an exaggeration to call modernization still the critical enigma of contemporary social science. Its meaning appears to recede ever further from us. Its substance grows more mysterious the more that it is studied, and its origin and evolution become more inexplicable.
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10 Kellenbenz, “Technology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution,” 264–65, 178; Braudel, The Mediterranean, 369, and see also 282, 363, 367.
11 Glamann, Kristof, “European Trade 1500–1750,” in Cipolla, , ed., Fontana Economic History, 468Google Scholar; Sella, “European Industries,” 365–67; Braudel, F. P. and Spooner, F., “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” in Rich, E. E. and Wilson, C. H., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, v. 4 (Cambridge, England, 1967), 429Google Scholar; Deane, Phyllis and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth 1688–1959: Trends and Structures (Cambridge, England, 1962), 38Google Scholar (though see pages 79–80 for growth at a rate quite comparable to that postulated by Kuznets in the first half of the eighteenth century); Kuznets, Simon, “Capital Formation in Modern Economic Growth and Some Implications for the Past,” Third International Conference of Economic History (Paris, 1968), 30–31Google Scholar; Minchinton, Walter, “The Pattern and Structure of Demand 1500–1750,” in Cipolla, , ed., Fontana Economic History, 168, 94–95Google Scholar. A very cautious attempt to find some modest structural antecedents for modernization is Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization”; see also Richard, and Tilly, Charles, “Agenda for European Economic History in the 1970s,” Journal of Economic History, 31 (1971). 184–98Google Scholar. But even Mendels admits that it is difficult to give so much as a “quasi-empirical definition of the beginning of proto-industrialization” in precisely those “more advanced European regions” where it matters most, and his critics have contended that his argument hinges on a “mythological model” of the period preceding “proto-industrialization” anyway. See Mendels, “Proto-industrialization,” 247–48, and Thrupp, Sylvia, “Comments,” Journal of Economic History, 32(1972), 292–94.Google Scholar
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16 Spagnoli, Paul, “Review,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1974), 665–66Google Scholar. See, generally Henry, Louis, Anciennes Familles Genevoises (Paris, 1956)Google Scholar; Hollingsworth, T. H., The Demography of the British Peerage, supplement to Population Studies, 18 (1964)Google Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., “Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (1966), 82–109CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Goubert, Pierre, “Historical Demography and the Reinterpretation of Early Modern French History: A Research Review,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1970), 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., “The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3(1972), 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Laudrie, Le Roy, “A Long Agrarian Cycle,” 148Google Scholar; Wells, Robert. “Family History and the Demographic Transition,” Journal of Social History, 9 (1975). 1–19CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Hareven, Tamara, “Introduction: The Historical Study of the Family in Urban Society,” Journal of Urban History, 1 (1975), 259–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Wells, “Family History and Demographic Transition,” 5–6; se also, e.g., Furstenberg, Frank, “Industrialization and the American Family: A Look Backward,” American Sociological Review, 31 (1966), 325–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and O’Neill, William, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven, 1967), 17Google Scholar. Wrigley suggests a somewhat similar inversion of the conventional causal account but places his emphasis on the structure rather than the value orientation of the distinctive European family constellation. On his own terms such structure simply cannot bear the explanatory weight because it was, on his own insistence, characteristic in England for at least two or three centuries before early modern times. Precisely as a structure of such “long standing,” it cannot credibly be held responsible for specific transformation in a particular period so remote from its own earliest existence. See Wrigley, E. Anthony, “Reflections on the History of the Family,” Daedalus, 106:2 (1977), 76–77Google Scholar. Other attempts to ascribe causal import to demographic structures are even more embarrassing. Hajnal’s analysis of the emergence of a European pattern of marriage, for example, has been cited as a source for “a remarkable variety of behavioral developments” ranging from the rise of masturbation to the witch craze to the Reformation itself; and the authors of these explanations have taken Hajnal’s time of transition to be the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, as the logic of their exposition has required, despite the fact the Hajnal’s own argument lodged it rather clearly in the seventeenth century. Such misreadings testify, as much as anything, to the prevalent determination to find some sort of structural explanation for even the most elusive phenomena. See Bossy, John, “Review Article: Holiness and Society,” Past and Present, 75(1977), 125–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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19 Davis, Natalie Z., “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Daedalus, 106: 2(1977), 87–114Google Scholar; quotations on 87, 108, 90, 108.
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23 As early as 1938, Lucien Febvre called for attention to such an “histoire des mentalites collectives.” See Stone, Lawrence, “The Disenchantment of the World,” New York Review of Books, 17 (December 2, 1971), 17.Google Scholar
24 Thomas, Keith, “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), 102–3Google Scholar. Natalie Z. Davis similarly pronounces the confidence of early modern French families “curious” and devotes much of her elegant and intricate investigation of other transitions, in other essays, to the discovery of reciprocal influences between mental set and material circumstance; see Davis, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny,” 90, and Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). Any number of other scholars are, of course, at least as equivocal regarding the relation of psychological and structural elements; see, e.g., Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family, (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, and Stone, Lawrence, “The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage,” in Rosenberg, Charles, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia, 1975)Google Scholar. Still the most sophisticated effort to identify structural factors behind motives and mentalities is Weinstein, Fred and Piatt, Gerald, The Wish to be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar.
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26 In the specific instance of early modern Europe, such skepticism would seem especially urgent, since, as La Roy Ladurie has said, “from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, the economy was the handmaiden rather than the mistress, the follower rather than the leader.” “Motionless History,” 133. And of course the very point of invoking economic rationality as a mark of modernity for Max Weber was that the primacy of purely economic calculations of advantage was so distinctive and, in truth, aberrant among men.
27 Service, Elman, Primitive Social Organization (New York, 1964), 178–84Google Scholar; Sahlins, Marshall, “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist, 63 (1961), 323Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony, The Concept of Social Change (Boston, 1973), 132Google Scholar. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), 148Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 407Google Scholar. Smith, The Concept of Social Change, 78; Wiener, Jonathan, “Modernization Theory and History: Achievements and Limitations,” paper, Social Science History Association meeting, Madison, Wisconsin, April, 1975, esp. 10–11, 18–19Google Scholar. DeMause, Lloyd, “The Formation of American Personality through Psychospeciation,” Journal of Psychohistory, 4 (1976), 2Google ScholarPubMed. Even explanations that claim an empirical foundation because they can be construed as tests rather than applications of their premises almost invariably fell short of their ideal in practice. This is because few devotees of a theoretical position truly do abandon their postulates under pressure or even suppose that it is their postulates that are up for empirical examination. There are always fudge factors available, and it is always possible to asperse the observed variance from expectations rather than from the basis of the expectation itself. In the revealing words of Daniel Lerner, lamenting the disturbingly wide variety of modernizing patterns of traditional societies, these “deviations from the regression line,” as he calls them, arise because “people don’t do what, on any rational course, they should do.” Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1964), viiGoogle Scholar. For a symptomatic instance in the realm of modern econometric orthodoxy, see Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar and the authors’ essentially unrepentant response to withering criticism.
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