First Moderns

The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought by William Everdell ISBN:0226224813

Cosma Shalizi review:

Everdell (pace reviews quoted on the back cover of the paperback) has no interest in modernity (beyond wondering if it means "anything at all beyond a change in the pace of change": p. 9), and concerns himself with Modernism.

Essentially, he says, Modernism is about points, dots, jumps, mosaics, dissonance and sharp cuts, as opposed to smears, smooth flows, gradual change, unity, blending; "statistics, multiple perspective, subjectivity, and self-reference," all of which, Everdell assures us, "can be shown to have devolved from the collapse of ontological continuity" (p. 11).

The first field in which continua were broken up, Everdell says, was pure math, particularly analysis

Having begun the story of the embrace of discontinuity in math, Everdell traces it through Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, Seurat, free verse, the neuron doctrine of Ramón y Cajal, concentration camps, psychoanalysis, mutations, quantum mechanics, Russell's mathematical logic, Husserl's phenomenology, movies and relativity, before finally coming to Pablo Picasso, Strindberg, Schoenberg, James Joyce and Kandinsky.

I'm less taken with the argument Everdell is advancing: I have reservations about some of his cases, and a scruple about method.

Other choices are less happy; let me complain about physics in particular

I also want to pick on Sigmund Freud. Everdell never does say why psychoanalysis is any more fragmentation-prone than the preceding fifty years

I'd go further and say that any psychology which aspires to adequacy has got to take the mind to pieces, and that one of the many problems with psychoanalysis is that it is far too timid in doing so.

Now let's talk about method.

there's no question that there were a lot of people who, about the turn of the century, embraced discontinuity

But it's easy to dig up other bits-and-pieces notions from earlier in the nineteenth century, and to his credit Everdell mentions many of them

Contrarily, lots of people in Everdell's period were very into continuity, and some of those, like Bergson

What I want, in other words, is a test of Everdell's thesis against the null hypothesis that Modernists were no more apt to disintegrate things than were comparable people in the nineteenth century

If I may speculate wildly: the period where Everdell sees the origins of discretization, collage, mosaics, etc., is also the one where economic and technological historians see the birth of the information society.

If nothing else, the book is a fabulous tour through almost the whole of the European house of intellect between about 1880 and 1913