Modernity and the Victorians

Abstract Modernity and the Victorians traces the impact of social-scientific theory on the historiography of Victorian Britain, before proposing an alternative conception of the political and social dynamics of the period. It begins with a sketch of the rise of social science as a method of understanding the world between the Enlightenment and the early decades of the twentieth century, covering both British and European developments, and giving particular attention to the theories of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. It then considers the forms of ‘modernization’ theory, and conceptions of the condition of ‘modernity’, which emerged in twentieth-century social scientific analysis, and traces how these came to be applied in historical scholarship on nineteenth-century Britain. The second half of the book makes the case that ‘modernization theory’ cannot be made to fit the facts of Victorian history. It argues instead that historians need to pay much closer attention to notions of the past, morality, and community if they want to understand how nineteenth-century Britain worked. The book is at once a piece of twentieth-century intellectual history, a contribution to the history of scholarship, a commentary on more recent historiography, and an attempt to intervene in current debates about the practice and future of political history.