Copyright 1996, 1998, 2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
From 1600 onward, Europe passed through a succession of revolutionary changes of enormous scope. All of these changes had strong roots in the past and all of them developed over long periods of time and developed first in diverse parts of Europe. They are, very simply stated, the Scientific Revolution, the Political Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Each of these movements had a major impact on the Nineteenth Century.
When we think of the Scientific Revolution, we think of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. We are thinking, therefore, of revolutionary ways of thinking about the solar system, motion, and gravity. But the long term impact of these events in astrophysics was the conception of a "New Science" which was observational and experimental. The New Science was also richly mathematical, creating mechanical models of the world that could be represented mathematically. People like Francis Bacon and John Locke were quick to see the implications of the New Science for critical thought as a whole. Bacon seized upon the motto that "knowledge is power," and developed a general approach to logic based on his understanding of science. Locke outlined a complete theory of human knowledge based on the idea that we learn everything we know in experience and devised a whole new theory of the qualities of objects (primary and secondary) and how they relate to our experience of them. As developments in physics continued, new ideas arose in chemistry and physiology. Chemistry itself passed through an important revolution in its understanding of the chemical composition of air and the consequent theory of combustion, in the 1780s. In the next century, geology, biology, and sociology became modern sciences.
By the Eighteenth Century the developments of Modern Science had been so impressive that there was a genuine flowering of optimism in Europe as well as a real inflation of the European ego. Humanity was on an ascending course in the development of civilization. Everything could be known; it was merely a matter of time and effort to perfect human knowledge. European intellectuals like Voltaire traveled to the centers of science and returned to their own countries to push knowledge forward. We call this the Enlightenment. With the Enlightenment came the concept of "history" --- that is, "human history" --- as a positive development of human society and human power. How had this happened? Where might it go?
Ironically, the Enlightenment contained the driving force that destined its own disappointment; by the end of the Nineteenth Century, indeed, one might ask whether the Enlightenment was not merely the first act of hubris of an enormous human tragedy. Inevitably, the very science that had given humans such strength of mind and purpose peered into the deepest origins and workings of man, making the great apes his ancestors and leaving him no real purpose. Indeed, human knowledge of the universe made it clear that man, humankind, and even the earth we inhabit are mortal --- everything to be swallowed up, eventually, in the process of our sun's own evolutionary journey. The apparently simple Copernican removal of earth from the center of the universe to a mere planet of the solar system had, by the end of the Nineteenth Century led to the removal of humankind itself from grace and salvation. "God is dead!" pronounced Nietzsche; and not only that, "We have murdered God." Nietzsche, James, and Freud pushed to understand man from a new perspective --- psychology. As C. G. Jung observed, in the next century, the science of psychology manifested itself in Europe by the end of the Nineteenth Century because the troubled evolution of the human mind demanded it. Psychoanalysis was necessitated by the loss of man's innocence.
Just as modern scientists had questioned the authority of classic texts as depositories of knowledge, others soon questioned authority in social spheres. The authority of the Christian Church had already been questioned and challenged through the Reformation. In the 1600s the absolute authority of monarchy was questioned, beginning in the English Civil War and moving through Cromwell's Commonwealth toward the ultimate eclipse of English absolutism in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government set the rational basis of authority in a "social contract." In the next century, the American colonials declared their independence from English rule and, guided by Locke as well as other political theorists, framed principles of republican self government. Almost coincident with the framing of the US Constitution, the French rose in a violent revolution with bloody consequences to an absolutist French nobility that had kept itself significantly out of touch with the practical world. Ramifications of the French Revolution were enormous and lasted well into the Nineteenth Century, affecting all the rest of Europe. By 1917 Russian absolutism was dead as well.
What we call Germany did not exist at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Instead, there were thirty-nine small states, even several city states, held loosely together under alliances controlled by religious and economic interests. (See map of the German Confederation.) But post-revolutionary, Napoleonic France was the western neighbor of this complex; and empire hungry Russia was its eastern neighbor. The pressure for some form of unification was great; furthermore, the mold of the "modern industrial nation state" was becoming the obvious path of future political evolution. In 1871, Germany became a unified nation state under the guidance of the Prussian Otto von Bismarck, who had led them in a successful and brief war against France.
One could look at all of this as a magnificent popular ascendency, a "democracy of the civilized world," but one should look more closely at the factions that worked together in promoting these political changes and at their diverse motivations. The Political Revolution is almost coincident with the ascent of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Not only was authority questioned but social classes were entirely re-defined and wealth was being re-distributed. The rise in commerce was putting more property and wealth in the hands of merchants and capitalists; and they, in turn, desired political systems that would guarantee the stability of manufacturing and trade, as well as protect their accumulated properties. As serfs became the proletariat, the laboring class, they began to ask whether they were any better off under capitalists than they had been under absolutist monarchs. Under capitalism, indeed, people left the land (where survival at least was guaranteed) and populated new cities (where they could survive only as wage laborers). In the cities, people met and lived under entirely new social conditions that generated entirely new social problems. But also, once people were thoroughly committed to lives disconnected from the land, they had also stepped beyond any practical check on population. All European populations expanded well beyond the natural carrying capacities of the land and forced emigration into other parts of the world.
In sum, three great revolutions were born in Europe prior to 1800 --- modern science, representative government, and capitalist industrialization. Each of these signals a great intellectual transformation of European thinking and a new era of human boldness and confidence. At the same time, however, each of these carried a dark side that Europeans would have to confront. Modern science inevitably turned to the study of man himself and eroded faith in the divine destiny of human life. While industry could build and manufacture at an incredible rate, it often seemed that its cost would be child labor, poverty, and life in poisonous cities. The new nation states, while apparently more representative of the popular will, nevertheless protected the interests of the rich and became aggressively imperialistic. As the European powers divided up the remainder of the world into colonial enclaves, they began to war among themselves. Just as the Eighteenth Century represents the positive side, the Enlightenment, the Nineteenth Century represents the coming of ambiguity, the loss of innocence, and the time for questioning what had happened. Much of this ambiguity was lost in the Twentieth Century as the world was swept by two World Wars and then dominated by a Cold War. Science itself, which had demonstrated human enlightenment, now demonstrated human foolishness through the development of nuclear and biological weapons.
Back to Course Notes or back to Course Home Page.
