This chapter describes the many-sided aspects of Jewish life in Imperial Germany, in parallel to its general history up to 1914. Following an economic crisis 1873 and a decline of liberal faith, a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments spread – seemingly from Berlin – across the entire country. It brought about the establishment of new political parties with antisemitic programs, just when legal emancipation had been completed. This tension would become characteristic of Jewish life in the following era. It brought about extreme achievements in all spheres of life, but also daily confrontation with antisemitism. The latter deeply disappointed many Jews, but on the whole did not stop their integration and acculturation. Their fight against discrimination, moreover, strengthened their Jewish identity, despite further acculturation. The chapter describes Jewish cultural achievements as part of the period’s academic and artistic blooming, and the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie leading some of its members to disregard the dangers inherent in their situation.

Berlin’s grand hotel scene developed late and fast, with the first such property opening in 1875 and a dozen or so in operation by 1914. Four factors contributed to this expansion: First, the availability of credit and capital on a limited liability basis ensured that huge, expensive physical plants could be erected and maintained at a lower risk than before. Second, the technologies that such investment and innovation produced allowed grand hotels to offer more than their smaller counterparts ever could. Third, an increasingly mobile bourgeois society produced a growing demand for services and accommodations that only grand hotels could provide. And fourth, the maintenance of strict hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies, kept these large businesses running. Inequities inside grand hotels mirrored in microcosm classed power relations outside, though with some distortion. The superior control enjoyed by grand hoteliers, through surveillance and the social and gendered divisions of space, allowed the grand hotel to flourish as a social system, unimpeded by protest or resistance, well into the twentieth century. It was only in the decade after 1914 that the heterogeneity of grand hotel society became impossible to manage.

Molière is generally viewed as a comic author who mocks all aspects of society – aristocratic, bourgeois and peasant. However, he was himself part of this tripartite society and adopted points of view that, when we examine them, we see to be those of his caste – one of the people who dined at the King’s table. He was, in fact, at the intersection of two worlds, the court and the town (Paris), and in his works we meet individuals from different milieus, in the plays themselves but also making up the audiences that came to see them. He makes his characters ridiculous through exaggeration, thereby rendering less credible whatever they represent. When presenting different comic situations, Molière never comes down on one side or another. Instead, he offers suggestions, and leaves their appreciation up to the members of the public. They, according to their status or the circumstances in which they see the plays, receive them in one way or another, but always refuse to recognise themselves in any particular character. The focus of this article is, therefore, to determine whether Molière, whose criticism was so acerbic, really was this transgressive and subversive bourgeois author.

In this chapter I extend insights about the channels of professional continuity discerned in Chapter 4 to focus on the institutions that socialized the next generation of Soviet citizens. I first present Russia-wide data on resilience in education as related to the estates and follow this data analysis with a qualitative account of imperial schooling. Statistical analysis is strongly suggestive of the interconnected human-capital and estate drivers of spatial variations in educational attainment and institutions during the communist period and in the present. To unpack the causal mechanisms behind the statistical patterns, I adapted concepts of institutional drift and conversion to Russia’s post-revolutionary context. Insights from comparative historical analysis into institutional path-dependencies help dissect how the eclectic tapestry of schools catering to Samara’s educated society found its phoenix-like reincarnation in Soviet pedagogy, even when punctuated with closures and reforms. An exercise in historical forensics concerning the Samara Jewish School allows me to dissect some ways in which lower-status pedagogic old-timers capitalized on their new status as Soviet school headmasters. Finally, similar to patterns observed in Samara City, I dissect heterogeneity in demand for and supply of schooling within rural areas.

Examining privacy theory begins with what is absent from present accounts, that is, the central importance of our personal concerns about our existential reality. These concerns, and the disposition to seek ways to distance and camouflage them with constructed concerns, is at the heart of the inducements of what emerged as the mythological trajectory of Deity, State, Market and Technology. The impact of the ideas and practices left behind by these failed but persisting magnitudes is what is normalised in us and comes to comprise what we see as our private world. However, these ideas and practices are mythological subjections. There are two dominant present accounts of privacy, the ‘Constitutional’ (which is sourced from the ideas and practices of Deity, State and Market), which is primarily a bourgeois account, and the ‘Selected Flow of Information’ account (which is inspired by the movement of information within a social context, especially in the technological age). Given the mythological content of both accounts, the way forward needs to take an entirely different approach. This will relocate existential reality to the centre of its frame but also emphasise an ethic which rejects subjection, one framed by respectful self-responsibility.

The Prologue begins with brief accounts of the revolutions of 1848, first in France, then in Europe. This is followed by a substantial overview of the book, emphasizing its dual focus on the experience of nine writers from 1848 to 1852 and analysis of the texts in which each writer attempted to take the measure of the revolution and its aftermath. The rest of the Prologue provides comment on features of French political culture (1815–1848) that are important for an understanding of 1848. Themes include: the continuing weight of the memory of the first French Revolution; the emergence of political groups defined by their relation to conflicts and factions of 1789–1794; the development of working-class organization and protest; the emergence of republican and socialist movements; the influence of the press; the economic and social roots of the February Revolution. A substantial discussion of French rural society in the 1830s and 1840s emphasizes the plight of the peasant smallholder, which was poorly understood by the republicans who took power in February. We conclude with a discussion of the agricultural, then financial, crisis of 1846/47 which resulted in a loss of confidence in the July Monarchy on the part of the elites.

While cultural practice in the Ottoman port cities showed a rather liberal blending of various shades of modernity, discourse produced by the middle classes intended to rein in the freedom identity development. In chastising mimicry of the West as well as insufficient mastery of modern etiquette, Turkish and Greek bourgeois picked up uponcriticism of port city society by foreign observers. The attribution of class characteristics to nations is also characteristic both of the foreign observers and the local middle class. Attempts to conform to international middle class standards is combined with the need for national distinguishability. Only in rare cases did individuals who did not comply with the conformity the middle class attempt to impose and out themselves as "super-Westernized."

The polyvalence of late Ottoman port city society, with its many different ethnic and religious communities, overseas and local cultural influences, and the failure of the Ottoman state to provide a convincing common identity for its heterogeneous population combined to make identity building a highly complicated process. Depending on individual stance, locals could find this predicament a possibility to carve out an identity that transgressed against more narrow, community-determined norms. Others however, felt the challenge to develop a personality that met the standards of the coming twentieth century a burden they could not creatively master within the commercial surroundings of the port city. Especially the bourgeois and the ecclesiastical elites of the respective communities, aimed not to negate the possibilities of the age as a whole, but to restrain most forms of individualist and in their eyes morally precarious pursuits, thus restricting the manifold possibilities contemporaries actually had to develop their personality.

To provide the proper background to understand jazz in the GDR (founded in 1949), the book opens with a brief historical account of jazz in Germany prior to the creation of the East German state.examines the arrival of jazz in Germany after World War I, offering a brief synopsis of the cultural politics of the Weimar (1919-1933) and the National Socialist (1933-1945) eras. These years witness the influx of jazz music and dance culture into the defeated German empire, its ambivalent reception by the bourgeoisie, and the emergence of deep questions about national cultural identity against newfound American trends and influences. Under the twelve years of National Socialism, these questions took on new dimensions: Nazi propaganda unequivocally ostracized jazz as an emblem of racial transgression, categorizing it alongside other degenerate works, yet also recruited the popularity of the music for propagandist purposes throughout the regime, even until its collapse.

Communist efforts to recruit students and often unsuccessful attempts to tap into the student movement were contingent on GMD education in overseas Chinese schools. The Guomindang promoted Asianist ideas aiming to increase Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, including the idea of a regional International of Nationalities. On one hand, the GMD’s education policies were responsible for the rise of Chinese identification among the locally born Chinese. The rise of Chinese identity among locally born Chinese contributed to increasing the MCP’s popularity among students on the eve of the war and after the start of the Japanese occupation in 1942. On the other hand, the younger generation of Malayan-born Chinese rebelled against GMD indoctrination, which, however, successfully instilled in them identification with China. Both the MCP and the Communist Youth League had similar shortcomings due to the lack of cadres, finances, and knowledge of language. Teachers in Chinese schools, who often had communist views, instilled in their students the “modern” cosmopolitan outlook, which included Western music, arts, and communism.

Due to its Chinese membership and its national status as the communist party of Malaya, the MCP embraced two national identities, Chinese and Malayan, and represented two nations. Bolshevik language both empowered and hindered the MCP as a Chinese association and as a communist party. By 1934, dictated by the MCP’s logic of survival as an overseas Chinese organization, the MCP started to practice United Front tactics. Over the course of the 1930s, the MCP was supported by some affluent members of the Chinese community, as the overseas bourgeoisie were concerned about a better government in China. Yet the radical antibourgeois and anti-British language of the MCP resulted in a loss of support among affluent members of the Chinese community on the eve of the war. The majority of the Chinese community was neither anti-British nor anticapitalistic. The Bolshevik concept of a proletarian nation and anti-British rhetoric hindered the MCP in its ability to attract a following and excluded the Chinese bourgeoisie as potential members of its communist party. At the same time, the Bolshevik language of the revolution helped to strengthen the MCP’s ambitions.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments about Muslim and Western countries’ comparative conditions of development and their historical origins. It emphasizes that these countries are similar, at least comparable. It reiterates that neither Islam nor Western colonialism can simply explain the problems of violence, authoritarianism, or socioeconomic underdevelopment in Muslim countries. Thus, both essentialist and post-colonial explanations are unsatisfactory. Instead, the ulema–state alliance, which emerged in the eleventh century and marginalized intellectual and bourgeois classes, has been the main reason for Muslims’ long-lasting problems. At the end, the book recommends that Muslims pursue a political and socioeconomic reform to revive the intellectual and economic dynamism they had in early Islamic history. For such a reform to take place, Muslims need creative intellectuals and an independent bourgeoisie, who can balance the power of the ulema and state authorities.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.

The chapter begins with some etymological discussions of the meaning of the words ‘household’, ‘home’ and ‘family’, and concentrates – but not to the exclusion of those social ranks below and above – on the urban bourgeoisie, from among whom Chaucer himself came, and from members of whom his audience was, probably, mostly drawn. It then goes on to consider servants and apprentices, as inevitable accompaniments of this rank, and also looks at the relations between husband and wife, including the roles of wives and widows, and the architecture of urban bourgeois homes. It concludes by looking at those above and below this rank, particularly the nobility, whose ‘great households’ have left considerable evidence of their organisation, but also includes the humbler households, about whom we can say comparatively little, because of the limitations of the evidence.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.