The Role of Culture in Global Structural Transformation: Opera and the Baroque Crisis in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Abstract

There is increasing awareness that the world is going through fundamental changes at the level of the basic organization of the global political economy, and of the belief systems that have sustained human social and political life for the last several centuries. The seventeenth century was such a time, in which what we now call central and western Europe passed through a “fundamental historical crisis,” an age in which all human institutions—political, economic, social, cultural—were in the midst of crisis and change that only rarely occurs on such a scale. Analysts have observed the development of the states-system, or capitalism, or absolutism, or modernity, or new forms of family. This article concentrates on culture and cultural change, neglected subjects in political science. The “invention” of opera was an important development that signalled and influenced political-economic change in seventeenth-century Europe.