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1 Considering the Subject The roots of the modern world can be located in the new kind of society that emerged after the year 1000—distinct from its ancient predecessors and its modern successors. This transition may have been provoked by changes in the network of social relations that were due to population growth and technical change, but once the transition was under way, both population growth and technical change became at least partly endogenous . Technical developments and, in particular, the division of labor were partly a response to the new climatic trends, spatial expansion, and deepening of market relations, but they were also partly a consequence of investment in improved equipment and superior management technologies. Another way of conceiving of these interactions is by describing them as a positive feedback process—an autocatalytic cycle in which population grew partly in response to improved peasant prosperity, which it, in turn, enhanced. Material forces thus interacted with biological and cultural factors to frame the ways in which participants understood their actions. Indeed , many novel processes—religious and spiritual, legal and constitutional , social and economic, technological and demographic—recombined to create a social mutation. Together, these changes “played a decisive role in the emergence of the modern world.”1 For, as Jacques Le Goff writes,“In the history of civilizations, as in that of individuals, childhood is decisive. Much, if not everything, is then at stake.”2 To highlight the lineages of this 1. Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, 1987), 480. For a similar suggestion see R. I. Moore, “Duby’s Eleventh Century,” History 69 (1984): 36–49. 2. Medieval Civilization 400–1500 (Oxford, 1988), 113. In another essay, Jacques Le Goff suggests a chronology that is quite similar to the one I am advancing ; Le Goff, “For an Extended Middle Ages,” in The Medieval Imagination (Chicago, 1988), 18–23. mutation, I have avoided the normal periodization of European history by seeking the roots of early modernization in what is usually considered to be the high Middle Ages. This is an explicitly teleological procedure— assigning purpose and design to processes that were not conducted according to any kind of master plan. Indeed, it is good to recognize at the outset that “historical thinking is always teleological”3 because, as E. H. Carr writes, “History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society that has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past.”4 In following this line of reasoning, I have discovered the origins of the world we have made one thousand years ago, in the reorganization of an earlier European world. The year 1000 ushered in an extended “historical moment ” involving a lengthy and protracted process in which a new social formation took shape. 1. At the Dawn of Modernity describes the first phase of early modernization, the protracted transition away from antiquity and toward the creation of a novel social formation.What is at issue in describing early modernization is not a factor-chain approach but rather a form of network analysis that pictures society as an interdependent whole. To construct this picture we need to concentrate on “the relations between the parts, rather than on the parts themselves. Instead of a causal chain we have a network of mutually dependent relationships; and these relationships are such that a change in any one of them will have clearly determinable effects upon the others.”5 Social reproduction is ultimately based on a family system producing human capital and providing the substructure of all social relations.6 At the 2 / Considering the Subject 3. Johan Huizinga, quoted in E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961), 108. 4. Carr, What Is History?, 132. Carr seems to be predicting that our lack of con- fidence in the present would lead to intellectual fascinations with post-modernism, new historicism, and the end of history that have been so dominant since the social democratic vision disintegrated. 5. Edward J. Nell,“Economic Relationships in the Decline of Feudalism:An Examination of Economic Interdependence and Social Change,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 313–350. 6. I would be remiss not to mention that my own earlier studies on the demographic history of English industrialization provided the starting point...

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