Böcker av Jerrold (New York University) Seigel

How should we understand Europe's special role in world history, and the enduring impact it made on the rest of the globe? Jerrold Seigel traces both the positive and negative sides of the continent's special role to its absence of effective central authority, the division and competition between its states and peoples, and its propensity for developing autonomous spheres of activity. Remaking the World analyzes how these features fostered Europe's characteristic preoccupation with a politics of liberty, its evolution of an aesthetic sphere animated by values specific to itself, its singular capacity to revolutionize scientific understanding, and its ability to prepare and carry out the first transition to a modern industrial economy. Extended and substantive comparisons with Africa, India, China, and the lands that came under the rule of the Ottomans demonstrate the absence of similar phenomena elsewhere, whereas in Europe they also helped generate the malign force of imperial expansion.

Turning life into art, Bohemia became a space where many innovative and original figures-some famous, some obscure-found a home.

What does it mean to be modern? In the nineteenth century a consensus emerged that Western Europe was giving birth to a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values played a key role. Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity.

This is a magisterial 2005 account of how major Western European thinkers have confronted the self since the seventeenth century. Jerrold Seigel explores the ways in which key figures have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of inner tensions and external pressures.