Reflections on national cultures - part V

This series of posts took an interesting turn when I read Howard Wiarda’s “Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance” from 2014 which offers a fascinating account of how (over 2000 years) people have tried to convey a sense of the moral meaning of their collective lives. Almost all studies of political culture begin after the 2^nd World War and are academic in nature. The beauty of Wiarda’s book is he devotes and entire chapter to much earlier efforts to describe other worlds.

It was this which encouraged me to  start my list of texts with Madame de Stael but it could (and should) have gone back, if not to Plato (as Wiarda does) to Montesquieu whose Persian Letters (1721) gave some great insights into the mores of upper-class French society in the period before the French revolution. 

Modern academics have three problems in dealing with national cultures –

·       they assume they have to quantify everything (the great weakness of Basanez’s book);

·       they are, for the most part, specialists and

·       they lack a soul and therefore the sensitivity to grasp the essence of things

The one exception to the last generalisation are the historians – of whatever sort. Of necessity they have to cover all aspects of life. That’s why a cultural historian like Peter Gay’s book on the Viennese middle-class is in the list – and also the intellectual historian Daniel T Rodgers’ Age of Fracture about the 4 US decades after 1970.

And Kristan Kumar – whose The Idea of Englishness; English culture, national identity, social thought figures as a must-read - is a sociologist who, as a breed, still manage to keep their fingers on the pulse of nations. 

Perhaps my next project might be to identify the title which best conjures up the soul of each nation. “Natasha’s Dance – a cultural history of Russia” wold probably be my selection for Russia - although that country’s indigenous music, poetry and so many of their own writers have had such incredible talent as to make it easier to go for a general compendium such as Orlando Figes’. Perhaps only the Germans can compete with this richness – although few of us know much about the Chinese….