Institutional sociology and early modern history: Sources and methodologies

Welcome and introduction:
Felicita Tramontana (Università Roma Tre) and Massimo Rospocher (FBK-ISIG)

Birgit Emich (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Institutional sociology for the pre-modern era: Were there organisations in early modern Europe?

An important component of institutional sociology is the sociology of organisation. With categories such as membership, decision-making, procedures and formalisation, organisational sociology also offers many impulses for research into the early modern period. However, one first encounters a fundamental problem: did organisations even exist in early modern times? After all, organisations in the sense of sociological theory should work without regard to the person (“ohne Ansehen der Person”). Early modern society, on the other hand, was not only stratified into ranks, i.e. horizontally organised, but also vertically linked through clientele and patronage. But how could organisations function in a society for which the status and standing of the person was of central importance? The lecture attempts to show that there was a specific pre-modern variant of organisation that was able to process social difference and formalise informality.

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin – Institute for Advanced Study)
State and Political History in a Culturalist Perspective

The so-called cultural turn has provided the most important methodological stimuli for Early Modern studies and continues to do so. In this article I first define what I mean by cultural turn and show which fundamental features the various relevant theoretical approaches have in common. Secondly, I ask how these assumptions have changed the historians’ perspective on all subjects, and which new ways of investigation result concerning political history. Thirdly, I illustrate this on the basis of a concrete micro-historical example, turning to a central moment within European political history, the Peace of Westphalia, and show how the phenomenon of sovereignty and the so-called “European state system” is seen from a culturalist perspective.

Discussant:
Christian Windler (Universität Bern)

Organizers:
Felicita Tramontana (Università Roma Tre)
Sandra Toffolo (FBK-ISIG)

Co-Organizers:

This research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme as part of the project ‘HOLYLAB – A global economic organization in the early modern period: The Custody of the Holy Land through its account books (1600-1800)’ (Grant Agreement 101001857)

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Image: Biblioteca FBK