Chapter seventeen the experienCe of rupture and the history of memory Brecht deseure and Judith pollmann in the last three decades, the idea of modernity has become tightly bound to the study of historical consciousness. having abandoned the notion that there is only one path to modernity, more and more scholars have come to define modernity above all as a cultural habitus. modernity is now less about doing objectively 'modern' things than about a form of selfawareness that makes people think of themselves or others as modern. in this definition, modernity implies above all an awareness of change and a sense of the past as non-repeatable, in short a 'modern' form of historical consciousness.1 although scholars have differing views on the pace and nature of the emergence of this sense of a non-repeatable past, nearly all of them share the notion of a chronologically irreversible transformation, somewhere between 1500 and 1900, of pre-modern into modern ways of making sense of the past. typically, binary concepts are used to describe this transformation: from traditional to modern, from cyclical to linear, from continuous to discontinuous. modern ways of dealing with the past are thus assumed not to have complemented but to have replaced pre-modern ones.2 Both modernists and early modernists have long argued that the key catalyst for such a transformation of attitudes towards time and the past is the experience of rupture and crisis.3 schematically put, the argument 1 marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air. The experience of modernity (1st ed.
No abstract
Article 25 of the Belgian Constitution of 1831 specifi es that all powers emanate from the nation, but fails to defi ne who or what the nation is. This chapter aims at reconstructing the underdetermined meaning of national sovereignty by looking into a wide array of sources concerning the genesis and reception of the Belgian Constitution. It argues, fi rstly, that 'nation' and 'King' were conceptually differentiated notions, revealing a concern on the part of the Belgian National Congress to substitute the popular principle for the monarchical one. By vesting the origin of sovereignty exclusively in the nation, it relegated the monarch to the position of a constituted power. Secondly, it refutes the widely accepted defi nition of national sovereignty as the counterpart of popular sovereignty. The debates of the constituent assembly prove that the antithesis between the concepts 'nation' and 'people', supposedly originating in two rivalling political-theoretical traditions, is a false one. Not only were both terms used as synonyms, the Congress delegates themselves plainly proclaimed the sovereignty of the people. However, this did not imply the establishment of universal suffrage, since political participation was limited to the propertied classes. The revolutionary press generally endorsed the popular principle, too, without necessarily agreeing to the form it was given in practice. The legitimacy of the National Congress's claim to speak in the name of the people was challenged both by the conservative press, which rejected the sovereignty of the people, and by the radical newspapers, which considered popular sovereignty invalidated by the instatement of census suffrage.
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