This book presents a conception of modern personal identity in terms of consent, equality, and autonomy. For modern persons, these concepts function as moral values, evaluations, and virtues.... Show moreThis book presents a conception of modern personal identity in terms of consent, equality, and autonomy. For modern persons, these concepts function as moral values, evaluations, and virtues. Taken together they form a cultural identity that I refer to simply as ‘modern’. This cultural identity bridges the personal life of individual human persons and the institutional life of corporate persons. The shared sense of ‘modern’, with consent, equality, and autonomy as core moral values and chief virtues, forms and informs the (moral) governance and government of modern selves, modern corporations, and modern societies. One can be a ‘modern woman’ or a ‘modern man’, but one can also be a member of a ‘modern state’. There are ‘modern corporations’; and one can join a ‘modern church’ or a ‘modern party’ (cf. Nowoczesna in Poland); one might be subject to ‘modern law’; and one could participate in ‘modern marriage’. Each example shares the same sense of ‘modern’. In this way, modern cultural identity is a ‘constitution’ of a particular kind. I call it ‘the egalitarian constitution’. It is the contemporary instance of the soul-state analogy, an idea originally popularized by Plato. Show less
The study of revolutions is at the forefront of the growing field of International Historical Sociology. As International Historical Sociology scholars have sought to uncover the spatio-temporally... Show moreThe study of revolutions is at the forefront of the growing field of International Historical Sociology. As International Historical Sociology scholars have sought to uncover the spatio-temporally changing character of international relations, they have come a long way in overcoming ‘unilinear’ and ‘internalist’ conceptions of revolutionary modern transformation. In this article, I re-evaluate the extent to which the International Historical Sociology of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ has succeeded in remedying unilinear conceptions of the transition to modernity. I argue that ‘consequentialist’ approaches to the study of bourgeois revolutions tend to obscure the radically heterogeneous character of revolutionary transformations, both within and outside Western Europe. Drawing on Political Marxism and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of Jacobinism, I first provide a non-consequentialist reading of the revolutions of modernity within Western Europe, and then utilize this reinterpretation to provide a new interpretation of the Turkish Revolution (1923–1945). My aim is to demonstrate that a non-consequentialist conception of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ will enable us to historicize and theorize more accurately the co-constitution of international relations and revolutionary processes, hence providing a stronger foundation for the International Historical Sociology of modern revolutions. Show less
