Past and Present

Revolts Against Reason

After the French Revolution, confidence in the power of reason and social progress was diminished in some quarters: many conservatives were skeptical about human improvement and some radicals, including the Saint-Simonians in France (left), sought a different kind of community and a different future than one solely based on rationality. Some of these cultural movements proved enduring and persist today in novel but recognizable forms, such as the "back-to-nature" movement of the 1960s (right).

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Vote would not necessarily eradicate other persistent forms of injustice and inequality. To put it in the terms that were used at the time, socialists raised the “social question.” How could the growing economic inequalities produced by industrialization and the miseries of working people be remedied? This “social” question, socialists insisted, was an urgent political matter. Socialists offered varied responses to this question and different ways of redistributing economic and social power. These solutions ranged from cooperation and new ways of organizing everyday life to collective ownership of the means of production; some were speculative, others very concrete.

Socialism was a nineteenth-century system of thought and a response in large measure to the visible problems ushered in by industrialization: the intensification of labor, the poverty of working-class neighborhoods in industrial cities, and the widespread perception that a hierarchy based on rank and privilege had been replaced by one based on social class. For the socialists, the problems of industrial society were not incidental; they arose from the core principles of competition, individualism, and private property. The socialists did not oppose industry and economic development. On the contrary, what they took from the Enlightenment was a commitment to reason and human progress. They believed society could be both industrial and humane.

These radical thinkers were often explicitly utopian. Robert Owen, a wealthy industrialist turned reformer, bought a large cotton factory at New Lanark in Scotland and proceeded to organize the mill and the surrounding town according to the principles of cooperation rather than those of profitability. New Lanark organized decent housing and sanitation, good working conditions, child care, free schooling, and a system of social security for the factory’s workers. Owen advocated a general reorganization of society on the basis of cooperation and mutual respect, and he tried to persuade other manufacturers of the rightness of his cause. The Frenchman Charles Fourier, too, tried to organize utopian communities based on the abolition of the wage system, the division of work according to people’s natural inclinations, the complete equality of the sexes, and collectively organized child care and household labor. The charismatic socialist Flora Tristan (1803-1844) toured France speaking to workers about the principles of cooperation and the equality of men and women. Numerous men and women followed like-minded leaders into experimental communities. That so many took utopian visions seriously is a measure of people’s unhappiness with early industrialization and of their conviction that society could be organized along radically different lines.

Other socialists proposed simpler, practical reforms. Louis Blanc, a French politician and journalist, campaigned for universal male suffrage with an eye to giving working-class men control of the state. Instead of protecting private property and the manufacturing class, the transformed state would become “banker of the poor,” extending credit to those who needed it and establishing “associations of production,” a series of workshops governed by laborers that would guarantee jobs and security for all. Such workshops were established, fleetingly, during the French Revolution of 1848. So were clubs promoting women’s rights. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) also proposed establishing producers’ cooperatives, which would sell goods at a price workers could afford; working-class credit unions; and so on. Proudhon’s “What Is Property?”—to which the famous answer was “Property is theft”—became one of the most widely read socialist pamphlets, familiar to artisans, laborers, and middle-class intellectuals, including Karl Marx. As we will see, a period of economic depression and widespread impoverishment in the 1840s brought the socialists many more working-class followers.

Karl Marx's Socialism

The father of modern socialism, Karl Marx (1818-1883), was barely known in the early nineteenth century. His reputation rose later, after 1848, when a wave of revolutions and violent confrontation seemed to confirm his distinctive theory of history and make earlier socialists’ emphasis on cooperation, setting up experimental communities, and peaceful reorganization of industrial society seem naive.

Marx grew up in Trier, a city in the Rhineland close to the French border, in a region and a family keenly interested in the political debates and movements of the revolutionary era. His family was Jewish, but his father had converted to

KARL MARX, 1882. Despite the unusual smile in this portrait, Marx was near the end of his life, attempting to recuperate in Algeria from sickness and the deaths of his wife and daughter.

Protestantism to be able to work as a lawyer. Marx studied law briefly at the University of Berlin before turning instead to philosophy and particularly the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. With the so-called Young Hegelians, a group of rebellious students who chafed under the narrow thinking of a deeply conservative Prussian university system, Marx appropriated some of Hegel’s concepts for his radical politics. His radicalism (and atheism, for he repudiated all his family’s religious affiliations) made it impossible for him to get a post in the university. He became a journalist, writing now-famous articles on, for instance, peasants “stealing” wood from forests that used to be common land. From 1842 to 1843 he edited the liberal Rhineland Gazette (“Rheinische Zeitung”). The paper’s criticism of legal privilege and political repression put it on a collision course with the Prussian government, which closed it down and sent Marx into exile—first in Paris, then Brussels, and eventually London.

While in Paris, Marx studied early socialist theory, economics, and the history of the French Revolution. He also began a lifelong intellectual and political partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Engels was the son of a textile manufacturer from the German Rhineland and had been sent to learn business with a merchant firm in Manchester, one of the heartlands of England’s Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 19). Engels worked in the family business until 1870, but this did not prevent him from taking up his pen to denounce the miserable working and living conditions in Manchester and what he saw as the systematic inequalities of capitalism (The Condition of the Working Classes in England, 1844). Marx and Engels joined a small international group of radical artisans called the League of the Just, in 1847 renamed the Communist League. The league asked Marx to draft a statement of its principles, published in 1848 as The Communist Manifesto, with Engels listed as a coauthor.

The Communist Manifesto laid out Marx’s theory of history in short form. From Hegel, Marx imported the view of history as a dynamic process, with an inner logic, moving toward human freedom. (This is a good example of the larger influence of conservative historical thinking.) In Hegel’s view, the historical process did not unfold in any simple and predictable way. Instead history proceeded “dialectically,” or through conflict. Hegel saw the conflict as one between ideas: a “thesis” produced an “antithesis,” and the clash between the two created a distinctive and new “synthesis.” In a classic example, Hegel posited that the natural but limited freedom of the savage (thesis) encountered its opposite (antithesis) in the constraints imposed on the individual by the family and by the developing institutions of civil society. The result of this clash was a new and superior freedom (synthesis), the freedom of individuals in society, protected by moral customs, law and the state.

Marx applied Hegel’s dialectic, or theory of conflict, to history in a different way. He did not begin with ideas, as Hegel had, but rather with the material social and economic forces. According to this materialist vision, world history had passed through three major stages, each characterized by conflict between social groups or “classes” whose divisions were linked to the underlying economic order: master versus slave in ancient slavery, lord versus serf in feudalism, and bourgeois capitalist versus proletariat (industrial laborer) in capitalism. For Marx, this “class struggle” was the motor of human history. He believed that the feudal stage of history, where an aristocratic class dominated the enserfed peasantry, had ended in 1789, with the French Revolution. What followed was a new order, dominated by an entrepreneurial middle class—he called them “bourgeois”—who built the world of industrial capitalism.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels admired the revolutionary accomplishments of capitalism, saying that the bourgeoisie had “created more impressive and more colossal productive forces than had all preceding generations together.” But, they argued, the revolutionary character of capitalism would also undermine the bourgeois economic order. As capital became more concentrated in the hands of the few, a growing army of wageworkers would become increasingly aware of its economic and political disenfranchisement. This struggle between competing classes was central to industrial capitalism itself. Eventually, The Communist Manifesto predicted, recurring economic crises, caused by capitalism’s unending need for new markets and the cyclical instability of overproduction, would bring capitalism to collapse. Workers would seize the state, reorganize the means of production, abolish private property, and eventually create a communist society based on egalitarian principles. In other words, this ultimate revolution would abolish the division of labor altogether, ending the class conflict that had been the motor of history and ushering in a future whose outlines Marx could only hesitantly describe.

What was distinctive about Marx’s version of socialism? It took up the disparity between public proclamations of progress and workers’ daily experiences in a systematic, scholarly manner. Marx was an inexhaustible reader and thinker, with an extraordinarily broad range. He took insights where he found them: in British economics, French history, and German philosophy. He wove others’ ideas that labor was the source of value and that property was expropriation into a new theory of history that was also a thoroughgoing critique of nineteenth-century liberalism. Most important, he differed from his utopian socialist predecessors by identifying industrial laborers as a revolutionary class and by linking revolution to a vision of human history as a whole. Because the Marxist view of history began with assumptions about the economic or material base of society, and because he borrowed the idea of the dialectic from Hegel, his theory of history is sometimes referred to as dialectical materialism.

Citizenship and Community:

Nationalism

Of all the political ideologies of the early nineteenth century, nationalism is most difficult to grasp. What, exactly, counted as a nation? Who demanded a nation, and what did their demand mean? In the early nineteenth century, nationalism was usually aligned with liberalism against the conservative states that dominated Europe after Napoleon’s fall. As the century progressed, however, it became increasingly clear that nationalism could be molded to fit any doctrine.

The meaning of nation has changed over time. The term comes from the Latin verb nasci, “to be born,” and suggests “common birth.” In sixteenth-century England,