3. Manorialism

Parallel to the military and political system called feudalism, and acting as the foundation, was an economic system known as manorialism. The two systems were distinct and could exist without each other, but they were often linked by the fact that a vassal generally be received as a fief, the lordship of one or more small, self-sufficient farming villages called manors. Although the typical manor never existed, and although the manorial system was not found in southern Europe and in the Celtic countries, the general features of this system as it prevailed in the feudal Europe of the eleventh century can be broadly sketched. [excerpt

6. Ian T. Ramsey

In view of the requirement of verifiability that is demanded by certain philosophical schools, there seems little justification for what are conventionally recognized as theological statements. Certainly no one man has yet succeeded, except perhaps to his own satisfaction, in expressing religious notions in such language and in verifying by such a method that universal consent is gained for the validity of his system. If the charm of empirical verification is not invoked, then for some minds there is little reason to say anything. Obviously, given such rigid requirements for securing a sympathetic audience, theological discussion may find itself standing tongue-tied in the wings while logic and empiricism dominate the stage. But faced with the possibility of the eventual demise of theology, an effort is made to translate religious experience into intellectual terms which are acceptable to these critics. [excerpt

2. An Agricultural Revolution

While capitalism was making rapid strides toward dominating English industry, changes were taking place in agriculture which made it more efficient and productive, and which prepared it to be fitted eventually into the industrial capitalistic pattern. Actually, changes in the direction had been occurring in English agriculture since the revival of trade discussed in earlier chapters. [excerpt

5. The Search for Meaning

It is possible to draw certain parallels between the West\u27s present predicament and similar periods of radical change and the dislocation of values, and so to suggest that this sort of thing has happened before, that man has always come our of such situations and landed on his feet, that history is basically cyclical, and that there is no need to be unduly alarmed about our contemporary situation. While it is possible to make a very convincing case for this argument, there are three major factors which are new today. Thanks to our past territorial expansion and new techniques of communication, there is no area of the Western World whose ideas and institutions have been unchanged, Today\u27s changes are immediately carried to all parts of the world. Thus there are no longer any isolated areas to which people can go to escape change and its consequences. Also, thanks to the same means no classes in society are immune from these changes. Whereas in earlier centuries such changes affected only minority groups and limited areas, now they affect all groups and all areas. And further, as we have already noted, this combination of factors, plus the size of our institutions and their competition with one another, have served to increase the rate of change. These three new factors have helped to make our contemporary crisis both more widespread and penetrating than the others which Western Civilization has experienced. [excerpt

1. A Brief Survey of Christendom, 500-1100

The towering institution of the Middle Ages was the Church. From birth until death both the highest lord and the lowest serf felt its influence in some way or another, directly or indirectly. After about the year 1000 all men in Western Europe, except for a few Jews and Muslims, were its members. They were expected to support the Church in every way. It was not possible for one with a secular turn of mind to go to the priest and ask, in effect, to have his name erased from the Church\u27s rolls. Even the passing of time was now reckoned from the supposed year of Christ\u27s birth, following the calculations of a sixth century monk. [excerpt

4. The Church\u27s Bid for Intellectual Leadership

We have already noted the Church\u27s claim to teach in all its fulness every doctrine that men ought to be brought to know, and that regarding things visible and invisible, in heaven and on earth. During the Dark Ages it was too busy with other problems to be able to concern itself much with education. While there were sporadic attempts earlier, it was only during the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the Church turned more seriously to the problem of educating its members. This work was carried on primarily in the monastery and cathedral schools. But, because the monasteries of this time were mainly concerned with their own internal problems of reform, and because they were ill-equipped to take care of students who might not be monastically minded, the work of education fell mainly on such cathedral schools as those at Canterbury, Paris, Chartres, and Toledo. [excerpt

2. Rome: Roman Civilization

For our purpose, the importance of the Romans lies in the fact that it was most directly from the ruins of their civilization that our own developed. Therefore, before completing the account of the decline and fall of their empire, we will consider the cultural contributions made by the Romans. The Romans were not great cultural innovators. During the early republic, they were a simple agricultural people who were isolated from the civilizations upon whom the Greeks had drawn as well as from the Greeks themselves. As they began to expand, they came into contact with the Greeks -- first in southern Italy and then in the Balkans -- and began appropriating from them. But this was not properly Greek (or Hellenic) Civilization from which they were borrowing. It was what is known as Hellenistic, and that requires some explanation. [excerpt

1. The Advent of Modern Democracy

Everywhere there was a strong tendency to modify the concepts of political liberalism into a justification of democracy. By and large, this was not the result of the creation of a completely new political theory. The advocates of democracy tended to justify their doctrine with natural-rights theories from the Enlightenment, with a utilitarianism reminiscent of John Stuart Mill, with deductions drawn from the romantic glorification of the individual, or with appeals to the record of the United States. In general, they took over the concepts of the middle-class liberalism of the nineteenth century. However, the very logic of the liberal position in an increasingly industrialized world forced democrats to advocate the removal of many of those limitations on popular participation in government which liberals earlier had thought necessary. With victory apparently in sight in the years 1871-1914, democracy can be studied through its acts, in the difficult task of putting into practice under widely divergent conditions those general concepts which had been forged in an earlier age. In the process strongly egalitarian institutions were developed which became identified with democracy in the minds of most Westerners. It is in the observations of this process that we can test the definition of democracy as government responsible to the will of the people. [excerpt

2. The European Balance of Power, 1500-1789

The years between 1500 and 1789 were characterized by keen rivalries, at first primarily dynastic but later national in nature, as one state after another sought to establish its hegemony on the continent of Europe. Some powers, such as Spain and Sweden, declined. Others, such as Prussia and Russia, appeared for the first time as states to be reckoned with. Especially after about 1600 European diplomats, jealous of the relative position and security of their own countries, thought in terms of maintaining a balance of power, to prevent any one state or bloc of stats from dominating the Continent. This idea, like the practice of diplomacy, has been traced to the Italian city-states, whose leaders in the fifteenth century strove to prevent any one of their number from achieving a position from which it could control Italy. [excerpt

1. Introduction

Criticism of the methods and conclusions of the Enlightenment was initiated almost as soon as the movement itself had begun. It is for this reason that this chapter follows immediately after the one on the Enlightenment, rather than after the later chapters on nationalism, liberalism, industrialism, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences. These movements made their appearance during the latter part of the eighteenth century, but often served only to broaden and strengthen the earlier criticisms of the Enlightenment and the demands for a more adequate way of thinking than it offered. The movements of thought with which we are concerned in this chapter — evangelism, utilitarianism, romanticism, and idealism — started in the eighteenth century and became characteristic elements of Western culture during the first part of the nineteenth century. After about 1848 other currents of thought, mainly social and scientific, tended to supplant them. [excerpt