HIST 122: HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION II
Prof. Steven E. Harris; sample final exam
I. Identifications: 15 points. Identify (who, what, when, and where), and explain the significance of 3 out of the following 4 items. Your answers must be written in complete sentences in a full paragraph(s) (no bullet points).
1.Futurist Movement3. Committee of Public Safety
2. Ludwig Erhard4. Politics Derived from the Words of Holy Scripture
II. Passage identifications: 30 points. Identify (who, what, when, and where) and explain the significance of 3 out of the following 4 passages. Your answer must address both the significance of the passage itself and the overall document from which it originates. Your answers must be written in complete sentences in a full paragraph(s) (no bullet points). Your answers should be in your own words and should not include lengthy quotations from the passages. If you include quotations, limit them to a phrase or a few words at most.
1. “We may already derive one consolation from this discussion: our mortification and our painful disillusionment on account of the uncivilized behaviour of our fellow-citizens of the world during this war were unjustified. They were based on an illusion to which we had given way. In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed. The fact that the collective individuals of mankind, the peoples and states, mutually abrogated their moral restraints naturally prompted these individual citizens to withdraw for a while from the constant pressure of civilization and to grant a temporary satisfaction to the instincts which they had been holding in check. This probably involved no breach in their relative morality within their own nations.”
2. “Connected as are all the works of the universe one with another – forming one whole, which we, for the convenience of our limited minds, break down into fractions – every future improvement in society will radiate in some unknown or known way from the Great Exhibition. To pretend to foresee all its consequences, is to claim the prerogatives of the Almighty; but we may surely yet humbly predict, as amongst them, the elevation in mental dignity and material well-being of the working multitude. It was observed when railways came into use that they would place all travellers on an equality. The poorest would be obliged to use them, and the rich would have nothing better. If crystal palaces can be erected cheaper than any other kind of dwelling, and if the richest can have no better houses, the poorest will have them also, and another step will be made by all towards reaching that high but equal level to which the natural development of society is rapidly leading.”
3. “The advantage that liberty, as the ancients conceived it, brought to the people was to be counted among the number of those who governed: a real advantage, a pleasure both flattering and real. The advantage which modern liberty procures for the people is to be represented, and to participate in this representation through its choice. It is doubtless an advantage, since it is a guarantee; but the immediate pleasure is less vivid: it includes none of the satisfactions of power; it is a pleasure of reflection, while that of the ancients was a pleasure of action. Clearly the former is less attractive; one could hardly demand of men as many sacrifices to obtain and preserve it.”
4. “If the atomic bomb were merely another though more devastating military weapon to be assimilated into our pattern of international relations, it would be one thing. We could then follow the old custom of secrecy and nationalistic military superiority relying on international caution to prescribe [proscribe] the future use of the weapon as we did with gas. But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into the old concepts. I think it really caps the climax of the race between man’s growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control – his moral power. If so, our method of approach to the Russians is a question of the most vital importance in the evolution of human progress.”
III. Unknown section: 10 points. Read the text below and answer the following questions: What is the author arguing about standardization? Into which grand narrative of Western Civilization would you place this author and why? To what other thinkers, texts, or ideologies is this author most similar and why? (Discuss at least two other thinkers, texts, or ideologies.) Your answers must be written in complete sentences in a full paragraph(s) (no bullet points). Your answers should be in your own words and should not include lengthy quotations from the passage. If you include quotations, limit them to a phrase or a few words at most.
“The elementary impulse of all national economy proceeds from the desire to meet the needs of the community at less cost and effort by the improvement of its productive organizations. This has led progressively to mechanization, specialized division of labor, and rationalization: seemingly irrevocable steps in industrial evolution which have the same implications for building as for every other branch of organized production. Were mechanization an end in itself it would be an unmitigated calamity, robbing life of half its fulness and variety by stunting men and women into sub-human, robot-like automatons. (Here we touch the deeper causality of the dogged resistance of the old civilization of handicrafts to the new world-order of the machine.) But in the last resort mechanization can have only one object: to abolish the individual’s physical toil of providing himself with the necessities of existence in order that hand and brain may be set free for some higher order of activity…. There can be no doubt that the systematic application of standardization to housing would effect enormous economies – so enormous, indeed, that it is impossible to estimate their extent at present.
“Standardization is not an impediment to the development of civilization, but, on the contrary, one of its immediate prerequisites…. The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing ‘tyranny’ of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot sustain the briefest examination. In all great epochs of history the existence of standards – that is the conscious adoption of type-forms – has been the criterion of a polite and well-ordered society; for it is a commonplace that repetition of the same things for the same purposes exercises a settling and civilizing influence on men’s minds…. The most admired cities of the past are conclusive proof that the reiteration of ‘typical’ (i.e. typified) buildings notably enhances civic dignity and coherence…. A prudent limitation of variety to a few standard types of buildings increases their quality and decreases their cost; thereby raising the social level of the population as a whole. Proper respect for tradition will find a truer echo in these than in the miscellaneous solutions of an often arbitrary and aloof individualism because the greater communal utility of the former embodies a deeper architectural significance. The concentration of essential qualities in standard types presupposes methods of unprecedented industrial potentiality, which entail capital outlay on a scale that can only by justified by mass-production.”
IV. Map quiz: 10 points. Identify the countries in the list by placing their corresponding number on the map below.
1. Czech Republic 2. Ukraine 3. Poland 4. Italy5. Spain
V. Essay: 35 points. Answer one of the two questions below in an extended and well-structured essay. Your essay must have a title and an argument. You must support your argument with sufficient evidence by discussing, analyzing, and correctly identifying specific texts and their authors, events, individual persons, and groups, as well as the dates/years for these persons, events, and documents. Indicate in your blue book which question you are addressing (1 or 2).
1. The search for an ideal organization of society based on wholeness, harmony, and overcoming social and individual divisions has shaped much of modern Western thought. What role has the exclusion of social groups played in the development of this way of thinking? Your answer must address at least three texts and relate each text to the other in an overall argument.
2. What were the most fundamental features of the conservative critique of revolution and radical change in modern Western thought? How has this critique developed since the late 18th century? In answering this question, you must discuss at least two conservative thinkers and the revolutionary changes they resisted.
1