Volume 26, Number 6 · April 19, 1979
Goodbye to Nearly All That
By Lawrence Stone
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition
by Alan Macfarlane
Cambridge University Press, 216 pp., $6.95 (paper)
It is not often that a book appears which challenges the whole corpus of conventional wisdom about the evolution of the modern world; which sets out to show that not just one but a whole pride of emperors have no clothes. Nor are the emperors obscure princelings: Marx and Weber are the main targets, but Tocqueville, Durkheim, and Tönnies are there too. Also included among those marked down for execution is almost every scholar who has ever attempted a general interpretation of the English transition from traditionalism to modernity. Tawney, Postan, Hilton, Hill, Homans, C.B. Macpherson, C.H. Wilson, this reviewer[1]—we all rattle along in the tumbrel together, along with many others.
Review, 1792 words
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