This chapter looks at sections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835-40). Tocqueville uses ‘democracy’ as a social rather than narrowly political concept, i.e. a concept that points to a general tendency underlying the development of modern society. Tocqueville regrets the decline of aristocratic society and its values but thinks it is irreversible. Instead, he finds in the USA some of the mechanisms – including religion and ‘individualism properly understood’ – that can turn democracy into a good thing, after all.

In the first volume of Capital (1867), Karl Marx sarcastically turns the concept of ‘fetishism’, a concept with which defenders of bourgeois capitalist modernity including Hegel, Comte and Tyler classified (and denigrated) non-European civilizations, against modern civilization itself. In his description of the ‘commodity-fetish’ as the basic structure of the form and dynamic of modern society Marx unfolds what all subsequent sociology would address as the complex play of structure and agency.

The status of the woman within a newly formed family unit is dependent on a number of factors, the most important of which are her economic power and her position within the marital relationship. This chapter explores the legal structures underpinning women's status within the family unit. The improvement in their economic status had profound effects on women's social standing. The combination of a change in the marriage ceremony and a more exacting social attitude brought about a complete transformation in the financial status of women. The twelfth century witnessed fundamental changes in the status of Jewish women as far as their relationships with their husbands and within the family is concerned. In all areas where Jews lived among Christians, they adapted their patterns of family life to the life style of their environment.

The theme of this chapter is that historians of philanthropy have started out with a definition of what ‘philanthropy’ is, even if the word was never used in their centuries, and proceeded from there. Prime examples are the two major histories of philanthropy in England, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, W. K. Jordan’s Philanthropy in England 1480–1660 and David Owen’s English Philanthropy 1660–1960. For the nineteenth century there is one history that excludes anything where the gifting of private money was not vital, another that includes social reform movements, and yet another that defines philanthropy simply as ‘kindness’. None of them are alert to what contemporaries thought of ‘philanthropy’. I go on to consider the ways in which in recent years historians have turned to the anthropological model of gift relationships to understand philanthropy and how concepts of ‘civil society’ have generated new thinking.

This chapter draws primarily on periodical literature to show the meanings attached to philanthropy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Philanthropy was a feeling of love for humanity that brought pleasure, even rapture, to those who experienced it, all the more so as it was envisaged as universal in extent, covering all humans in the globe. The word was not used to describe what are often considered to be the hallmarks of eighteenth-century philanthropy, the voluntary hospitals, the Marine Society and other institutions. There was criticism, for example by Adam Smith, of the claim that mere humans could love all other humans, even some suggestions that misanthropy was more characteristic of humanity than philanthropy. But in the vast majority of references philanthropy was a sensation experienced in the body; it was not something that urged you to do anything or to spend money.

This chapter provides an overview of the origins of material culture studies and the disciplinary specialisms that have had the strongest bearing on their development. The theoretical underpinning of material culture studies will be elucidated through a clear and concise discussion of the work of philosophers and social theorists – making clear that 'things' have agency. The chapter demonstrates that by viewing the objects of the past as inanimate and inactive as compared with the living, breathing humans who made, exchanged, and used them - researchers can miss the dynamism of the object-person interactions that took place many decades or centuries ago. Moving on from the theoretical principles that have shaped the study of material things, the chapter discusses the circumstances that brought about historical material culture studies. It also considers the particular place of historical work within this context and the many potentialities material culture history offers for future research.

This chapter examines an essay by Ferdinand Tönnies that serves as the ‘Introductory Article’ to the English edition of his famous Community and Association (originally 1887; more often rendered Community and Society). Tönnies proposes to examine societies under the perspective of how their members will and want things, and distinguishes between ‘natural’ and ‘deliberate will’, from which he derives his two ideal-types of society-as-community and society-as-society (or association). Tönnies is on the one hand nostalgic about a lost world of (village-type) communal life, on the other hand describes modern society merely as a temporary form of appearance of what still remains its essence – community life.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, one of the pioneers of sociology in the USA, formulated in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) a powerful argument on identity in modern society. He describes post-emancipation Afro-Americans as ‘born with a veil’ as they are only indirectly able to gain consciousness of themselves, namely through the eyes of the others who despise them; at the same time, though, the resulting ‘double consciousness’ of being both of and not of this society, can be turned into an advantage: the broken, indirect and precarious vision may see more and deeper. Du Bois talks about more than cognition and epistemology, though: both the African and the American strive to be ‘co-workers’ in the ‘kingdom of culture’. Overcoming ‘the color-line’ is indispensable to the creation of a better, modern, human and humane civilization.