WIGH Seminar: Charles Maier, “The New Spirit of the Laws: Rethinking Political History Since the World Wars”

“The New Spirit of the Laws: Rethinking Political History Since the World Wars”
Charles Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University

Commentator: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

This graduate-faculty research seminar is designed to bring together interested faculty and students on a continuing basis to cover topics on global history. It is part of History 2950A, Approaches to Global History, and includes both reading sessions designed for graduate students and research sessions open to the interested public during which students and faculty participants will present current research. Faculty participants will be drawn from a number of schools, and, most especially, from the group of fellows in global history who are spending the academic year 2018/19 at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Discussions will be moderated by Professors Sven Beckert, Charles S. Maier, and Sugata Bose.

Papers will be pre-circulated and are available by request to jbarnard@fas.harvard.edu one week ahead of time.

Unless otherwise noted, all meetings are in the Lower Level Library, Robinson Hall, 35 Quincy Street, from 3:45-5:45pm.

Excerpt from the paper:

The Challenge:  New eras evoke new histories.  As current political and economic constellations change they cast a different light upon the past, bring hitherto unremarkable features into sharper relief, and broaden the landscape that must be held in the frame of vision.  We are compelled to see differently.  Readers of this book grew up in more hopeful times.  The grand narratives of the twentieth century, at least those centered on Europe and America, traditionally focused on the long struggle between democratic ideologies and their authoritarian or totalitarian competitors: Fascism and Nazism, conventionally classified on the Right, and Communism, definitively on the Left.  This history culminated in 1945 or 1989, depending on the conflicts under scrutiny – whether World War II or the Cold War.  For historians concerned with the populations that lived in Asia and Africa, the passage from colonial domination to independent statehood played a similar role in organizing a narrative of events that culminated between 1945 and the 1960s, but the reflections that follow are not really focused on that experience, nor on the post-colonial states of the “Global South.”  They represent a conceptual introduction to a revised perspective on the last hundred years: no longer an “age of extremes,” but no longer a simple passage to liberal democracy either.

Sadly, the optimism that the final decade of the twentieth century portended in so many countries has not lasted. The narratives that climaxed with the fall of communist regimes in Europe, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and the restoration of democracies in Latin America, have not prepared us to explain the darker developments that have developed since. But it is not just the civic successes of the 1980s and 1990s that have been cast into shadow; much of twentieth century history seems nullified. The intense sociopolitical discipline and commitments nurtured by the world economic crisis of the 1930s, the Second World War, the Cold War, and anti-colonial struggles seem to have yielded since the 1970s to an often surly fragmentation of collective engagements. Large-scale institutions have disappointed their publics.  Historians face the challenge not only of explaining the happy provisional ending of the 1990s, but the democratic discontents of today.  The challenge – at least from our present vantage -- is to construct a narrative and analysis that better take account of current developments than the cheerful and sometimes smug story we told about the success of democracy after 1989.