Prof. Stephen Schloesser

This intellectual and cultural historical survey tells the story of early “modernity” as the invention of “subjective individualism” — the invention of the rights-bearing “subject” as the primary source of significance and value.  In theory, “modernity” is a rupture with “tradition”: it rejects traditional worldviews in which the community and communal values have priority over the individual.  In practice, “modernity” is always an ongoing negotiation with “tradition”: it rejects some traditional elements of communal coherence, maintains other elements, and morphs or hybridizes still others.  Topics will include: Christianity’s intellectual debt to Islam; Medieval “Christendom” as an organic mediation system; 1348: Black Plague blurring of purity/danger boundaries; Humanism’s “recovery” of antiquity; 1492: replacing Mediterranean-based “Christendom” with Atlantic-based “Europe”; 1492: Spain as the first modern nation-state: expulsion of Jews and Muslims; 1517: Protestant Reformation as epistemological crisis; Catholic Reformation as reiteration of mediation; 1618-1648: cultural catastrophe/ triumph of the nation-state system; Baroque absolutist culture— a response to trauma; “scientific revolution” as flight into certainty; witch hunts — women on the margins; inventing bourgeois life: luxury and slavery; Enlightenment(s) as radical temporalization; 1776/1789: American and French Revolutions — opposing accounts of unity, contract, and human nature.

Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00