Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. While it tracks career patterns, with all their continuities and interruptions, it reveals the original ways that people were coming to understand the course of their personal, professional, and political lives in an era of revolutionary turmoil and how they reconfigured those lives in the half-century that followed. The book argues that a succession of political regimes and a shift from a world of favor and privilege to a world of right formed the context for changes in how people spoke of their own lives, careers, and desires and how they juxtaposed their own life histories with emerging narratives of a more public and national history. It uses the example of the magistracy to get at ideas of public service and entitlement, but it balances the development of state institutions with people's uses of those institutions, and it shows how people tried to make sense retrospectively of their experiences as they made themselves both heroes and victims on the French historical stage. As they aged and as one cohort replaced another, their narratives of self and career evolved into something increasingly formulaic and recognizably modern"--
In Aging in World History, David G. Troyansky presents the first global history of aging. At a time when demographic aging has become a source of worldwide concern, and more people are reaching an advanced age than ever before, the history of old age helps us understand how we arrived at the treatment of aging in the modern world. This concise volume expands that history beyond the West to show how attitudes toward aging, the experiences of the aged, and relevant demographic patterns have varied and coalesced over time and across the world. From the ancient world to the present, this book introduces students and general readers to the history of aging on two levels: the experience of individual men and women, and the transformation of populations. With its attention to cultural traditions, medicalization, decades of historical scholarship, and current gerontology, Aging in World History is the perfect starting point for an exploration of this increasingly universal aspect of human experience.
Entitlement and Complaint explores the early history of the right to retirement and the shaping of the modern life course, applying cutting-edge insights from social, cultural, and political history as well as gerontology to an extraordinarily rich collection of retirement dossiers from the post-Revolutionary French Ministry of Justice. While it tracks career patterns, with all their continuities and interruptions, it reveals the original ways that people were coming to understand the course of their personal, professional, and political lives in an era of revolutionary turmoil and how they reconfigured those lives in the half-century that followed. The book argues that a succession of political regimes and a shift from a world of favor and privilege to a world of right formed the context for changes in how people spoke of their own lives, careers, and desires and how they juxtaposed their own life histories with emerging narratives of a more public and national history. It uses the example of the magistracy to get at ideas of public service and entitlement, but it balances the development of state institutions with people's uses of those institutions, and it shows how people tried to make sense retrospectively of their experiences as they made themselves both heroes and victims on the French historical stage. As they aged and as one cohort replaced another, their narratives of self and career evolved into something increasingly formulaic and recognizably modern"--
This book explores a dramatic change in French attitudes toward aging and the aged in the eighteenth century from one extreme of ridicule and neglect to another of respect and care.
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