Department of History
Fieldston School_________________________________________________________________
The Birth of Modern Europe
Documents on Modernity and The City
Document A: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The New Eloise (1761)
I am beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges
you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I’m
getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my
heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I
am and who I belong to.
Document B: Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (1776)
Of the Division of Labour
THE greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater
part of the skill, dexterity,
and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been
the effects of the division
of labour.
The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will
be more easily understood by
considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is
commonly supposed to be
carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried
further in them than in others
of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to
supply the small wants of but
a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small;
and those employed
in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse,
and placed at once
under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary,
which are destined to supply
the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the
work employs so great a
number of workmen that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse.
We can seldom see
more, at one time, than those employed in one single branch. Though in such
manufactures, therefore, the
work may really be divided into a much greater number of parts than in those
of a more trifling nature, the
division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less observed...
This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division
of labour, the same number
of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances;
first, to the increase of
dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which
is commonly lost in passing
from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great
number of machines which
facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many...
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts,
in consequence of the division of
labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence
which extends itself to the
lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work
to dispose of beyond what
he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same
situation, he is enabled to
exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes
to the same thing, for the
price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they
have occasion for, and they
accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty
diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society.
Document C: Karl Marx, The Communit Manifesto (1848)
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance
of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept
away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that
is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled
to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with
his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin
of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground
on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed
or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction
becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that
no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions
of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products
of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence
of nations.
Document D: Baudelaire, On the Modern Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine
Arts (1855) and "The Painter of Modern Life,"
originally published as "Le peinture de la vie moderne" in the Paris
newspaper Le Figaro (1863)
Take any good Frenchman who reads his newspaper in his cafe, and
ask him what he understands as progress, and he will answer that it is steam,
electricity and gaslight, miracles unknown to the Romans, whose discovery bears
full witness to our superiority over the ancients. Such is the darkness that
has gathereed in that unhappy brain!
Be very sure that this man, such I have depicted him -- this solitary,
gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human
desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more
general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking
for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity'; for I know of
no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business
to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history,
to distill the eternal from the transitory. Casting an eye over our exhibitions
of modern pictures, we are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress
all their subjects in the garments of the past. ... By 'modernity' I mean the
ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is
the eternal and the immutable. ... This transitory, fugitive element, whose
metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.
By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and
indeterminate beauty...
Document E: John Stuart Mill, The Subjugation of Women (1869)
The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two
sexes- the legal subordination of one sex to the other- is wrong in itself,
and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought
to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege
on the one side, nor disability on the other...
Document F: Antonio Sant’Elia and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto
of Futurist Architecture (1914)
The utter antithesis between the modern world and the old is determined by all
those things that formerly did not exist. Our lives have been enriched by elements
the possibility of whose existence the ancients did not even suspect. Men have
identified material contingencies, and revealed spiritual attitudes, whose repercussions
are felt in a thousand ways. Principal among these is the formation of a new
ideal of beauty that is still obscure and embryonic, but whose fascination is
already felt even by the masses. We have lost our predilection for the monumental,
the heavy, the static, and we have enriched our sensibility with a taste for
the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift. We no longer feel ourselves
to be the men of the cathedrals, the palaces and the podiums. We are the men
of the great hotels, the railway stations, the immense streets, colossal ports,
covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions.
Document G: Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles
(1889)
Modern systems!--Yes, indeed! To approach everything in a strictly methodical
manner and not to
waver a hair's breadth from preconceived patterns, until genius has been strangled
to death and joi
de vivre stifled by the system--that is the sign of our time. We have at our
disposal three major
methods of city planning, and several subsidiary types. The major ones are the
gridiron system, the
radial system, and the triangular system. The sub-types are mostly hybrids of
these three.
Artistically speaking, not one of them is of any interest, for in their veins
pulses not a single drop of
artistic blood. All three are concerned exclusively with the arrangement of
street patterns, and hence
their intention is from the very start a purely technical one. A network of
streets always serves only
the purposes of communication, never of art, since it can never be comprehended
sensorily, can
never be grasped as a whole except in a plan of it.... They are of no concern
artistically, because
they are inapprehensible in their entirety. Only that which a spectator can
hold in view, what can be
seen, is of artistic importance, for instance, the single street or the individual
plaza
Document H: Otto Wagner, The Architectural Record 31 (May 1912)
The considerations about to be presented apply to no one city, but to large
cities in general, although
there may be particular cities which stand out prominently by reason of their
pressing need for the
solution of the problems of future expansion as well as of the improvement of
present conditions.
What follows represents neither the radicalism of the iconoclast nor the wail
of the traditionalist on
the subject of city-planning, but proceeds from the fundamental assumption that
the most important
element in the solution of any such problem is the practical fulfilment of a
definite purpose, and that
art must impress its stamp upon whatever may result from the accomplishment
of this purpose.
Since our manner of life, our activities and our technical and scientific achievements
are different
from what they were a thousand years ago or even a short time since, and are
the results of constant
development, Art must give expression to the conditions of our own time. Art
must therefore
conform its city plan to the needs of the mankind of today
Document I: Sigmund Freud, Civilation and Its Discontents (1930)
If civilization requires such sacrifices, not only of sexuality but also of
the aggressive tendencies in
mankind, we can better understand why it should be so hard for men to feel happy
in it. In actual fact
primitive man was better off in this respect, for he knew nothing of any restrictions
on his instincts.
As a set-off against this, his prospects of enjoying his happiness for any length
of time were very
slight. Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for
a measure of security.
We will not forget, however, that in the primal family only the head of it enjoyed
this instinctual
freedom; the other members lived in slavish thraldom. The antithesis between
a minority enjoying
cultural advantages and a majority who are robbed of them was therefore most
extreme in that
primeval period of culture. With regard to the primitive human types living
at the present time,
careful investigation has revealed that their instinctual life is by no means
to be envied on account of
its freedom; it is subject to restrictions of a different kind but perhaps even
more rigorous than is that
of modern civilized man.