Commentaries: McCants
Mccants: It has now been more than a half century since the publication of Hobsbawm’s formulation of the seventeenth century as a time of crisis. Yet the historical questions that Hobsbawm raised, and the historiographical solution that he offered, retain their vitality despite the numerous fier...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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MIT Press
2010
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58815 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2750-827X |
| Summary: | Mccants: It has now been more than a half century since the
publication of Hobsbawm’s formulation of the seventeenth century
as a time of crisis. Yet the historical questions that Hobsbawm
raised, and the historiographical solution that he offered,
retain their vitality despite the numerous fierce debates that they
have spawned during the intervening years. Unlike others before
him who had identified the various ills that befell Europeans who
lived at that time, he did not see the seventeenth century as merely
an age visited by the misfortune of numerous, but discrete, crises.
Rather, he argued that it was fundamentally, structurally, a moment
of crisis sui generis. Moreover, in keeping with his Marxist
intellectual foundations, he invested this crisis with a purpose, discarding
the lingering limitations (dare I say shackles?) of the old
feudal order and thereby opening a space for the industrial capitalism
that he understood to be the defining characteristic of the
modern economy. |
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