3. the Great Watershed: 1750–1790
3. Th e Great Watershed: 1750–1790 Th e Problem of Progress Political and intellectual historians tend to regard the middle of the eighteenth century as a major watershed for at least two important reasons: it marks the beginning of the great transformation of western society called industrialisation, and it is the period when the modern world, represented fi rst of all by the idea of progress, makes a breakthrough after roughly a century and a half of fermentation. Modernity, however, is not just characterised by mechanisation, innovation and progress, but also by its very opposite. Almost from the moment the idea of progress is generally adopted as a universal law applicable to a wide range of areas, a counter- movement springs to life, consistently undermining it. It is possible to argue, in other words, that the primary feature of modernity is precisely the tug of war between a series of mutually incompatible, or at least hostile, positions. Nowhere does this ambiguous feature of modernity – this “cocktail of primitivism and progress” (Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes in Carruthers and Rawes eds. 2010, 4) – rise more clearly to the surface than in the North; nowhere does it produce a more vibrant dialectic between utopian and dystopian visions; and nowhere does it become more intimately involved with the search for national and regional identities. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, the North, in short, enters into a more than two-hundred-year-long and at times highly dramatic struggle to identify its own soul, in which forces of the rational and the irrational, the forward-looking and the backward-looking, the civilised and the primitive, the urban and the rural, constantly vie for supremacy.
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