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Gerard Delanty offers a critical interpretation of the European heritage today in light of recent developments in the human and social sciences, and in view of a mood of crisis in Europe that compels us to re-think the European past. One of the main insights informing this book is that a transnational and global perspective on European history can reorient the European heritage in a direction that offers a more viable way for contemporary Europe to articulate an intercultural identity in keeping with the emerging shape of Europe, and with its own often acknowledged past. He argues that the European heritage is based less on a universalistic conception of culture than on a plurality of interconnecting narratives. Such a perspective opens up new directions for scholarship and public debate on heritage that are guided by critical cosmopolitan considerations that highlight contention, resistances, competition, and dissonance. He argues that the specificity of the European dimension of culture is in the entanglement of many cultures rather than in an original culture. The cultures of Europe are not separated but have been shaped in close interaction with each other and with the non-European world. Nations are not therefore unique, exceptional, or fundamentally different from each other. The outcome of such intermingling is a multiplicity of ideas of Europe that serve as shared cultural reference points.
List of contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: The Past in the Present
Part I: Making Sense of a Transnational World
2. Transnationalism in Historical and Sociological Analysis
3. Modernity and the Plurality of Europe
4. Europe Unbounded: Critical Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Eurocentrism
Part II: Encounters, Routes, Transfers, and Entanglements
5. Cultural Encounters and European Civilisation
6. Europe and Modernity as Reference Cultures
7. The Making of European Society and the Entanglement of Capitalism and Democracy
8. The Legacy of European Integration: Europe in the World
Part III: Looking to the Future
9. Solidarity as a Political Legacy for Europe Today
10. Making Sense of Brexit: A Divided Nation in a Divided Europe
11. Europe Beyond the Crisis: Re-Inventing the European Heritage
About the author
Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His other recent books include The Cosmopolitan Imagination (2009), Formations of European Modernity (2013), and Community (3rd edition 2014).
Summary
Gerard Delanty offers a critical interpretation of the European heritage today in light of recent developments in the human and social sciences, and in view of a mood of crisis in Europe that compels us to re-think the European past. One of the main insights informing this book is that a transnational and global perspective on European history can reorient the European heritage in a direction that offers a more viable way for contemporary Europe to articulate an intercultural identity in keeping with the emerging shape of Europe, and with its own often acknowledged past. He argues that the European heritage is based less on a universalistic conception of culture than on a plurality of interconnecting narratives. Such a perspective opens up new directions for scholarship and public debate on heritage that are guided by critical cosmopolitan considerations that highlight contention, resistances, competition, and dissonance. He argues that the specificity of the European dimension of culture is in the entanglement of many cultures rather than in an original culture. The cultures of Europe are not separated but have been shaped in close interaction with each other and with the non-European world. Nations are not therefore unique, exceptional, or fundamentally different from each other. The outcome of such intermingling is a multiplicity of ideas of Europe that serve as shared cultural reference points.
