Carlton J. H. (Carlton Joseph Huntley) Hayes - A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

Title: A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

Author: Carlton J. H. Hayes

Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6417] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 8, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE VOLUME I 1500-1815

This book represents an attempt on the part of the author to satisfy a very real need of a textbook which will reach far enough back to afford secure foundations for a college course in modern European history.

The book is a long one, and purposely so. Not only does it undertake to deal with a period at once the most complicated and the most inherently interesting of any in the whole recorded history of mankind, but it aims to impart sufficiently detailed information about the various topics discussed to make the college student feel that he is advanced a grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading in large standard treatises. All too frequently, however, such assignments, excellent in themselves, leave woeful gaps which a slender elementary manual is inadequate to fill. And the student becomes too painfully aware, for his own educational good, of a chasmal separation between his textbook and his collateral reading. The present manual is designed to supply a narrative of such proportions that the need of additional reading will be somewhat lessened, and at the same time it is provided with critical bibliographies and so arranged as to enable the judicious instructor more easily to make substitutions here and there from other works or to pass over this or that section entirely. Perhaps these considerations will commend to others the judgment of the author in writing a long book.

Nowadays prefaces to textbooks of modern history almost invariably proclaim their writers' intention to stress recent happenings or at least those events of the past which have had a direct bearing upon the present. An examination of the following pages will show that in the case of this book there is no discrepancy between such an intention on the part of the present writer and its achievement. Beginning with the sixteenth century, the story of the civilization of modern Europe is carried down the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with constant crescendo. Of the total space devoted to the four hundred years under review, the last century fills half. And the greatest care has been taken to bring the story down to date and to indicate as clearly and calmly as possible the underlying causes of the vast contemporaneous European war, which has already put a new complexion on our old historical knowledge and made everything that went before seem part and parcel of an old rgime.

As to why the author has preferred to begin the story of modern Europe with the sixteenth century, rather than with the thirteenth or with the French Revolution, the reader is specially referred to the Introduction. It has seemed to the author that particularly from the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century dates the remarkable and steady evolution of that powerful middle classthe bourgeoisie which has done more than all other classes put together to condition the progress of the several countries of modern Europe and to create the life and thought of the present generation throughout the world. The rise of the bourgeoisie is the great central theme of modern history; it is the great central theme of this book.

Not so very long ago distinguished historians were insisting that the state, as the highest expression of man's social instincts and as the immediate concern of all human beings, is the only fit subject of historical study, and that history, therefore, must be simply "past politics"; under their influence most textbooks became compendiums of data about kings and constitutions, about rebellions and battles. More recently historians of repute, as well as eminent economists, have given their attention and patronage to painstaking investigations of how, apart from state action, man in the past has toiled or traveled or done the other ordinary things of everyday life; and the influence of such scholars has served to provide us with a considerable number of convenient manuals on special phases of social history. Yet more recently several writers of textbooks have endeavored to combine the two tendencies and to present in a single volume both political and social facts, but it must be confessed that sometimes these writers have been content to tell the old political tale in orthodox manner and then to append a chapter or two of social miscellany, whose connection with the body of their book is seldom apparent to the student.

The present volume represents an effort really to combine political and social history in one synthesis: the author, quite convinced of the importance of the view that political activities constitute the most perfect expression of man's social instincts and touch mankind most universally, has not neglected to treat of monarchs and parliaments, of democracy and nationalism; at the same time he has cordially accepted the opinion that political activities are determined largely by economic and social needs and ambitions; and accordingly he has undertaken not only to incorporate at fairly regular intervals such chapters as those on the Commercial Revolution, Society in the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution, and Social Factors, 1870-1914, but also to show in every part of the narrative the economic aspects of the chief political facts.

Despite the length of this book, critics will undoubtedly note omissions. Confronting the writer of every textbook of history is the eternal problem of selectionthe choice of what is most pointedly significant from the sum total of man's thoughts, words, and deeds. It is a matter of personal judgment, and personal judgments are notoriously variant. Certainly there will be critics who will complain of the present author's failure to follow up his suggestions concerning sixteenth-century art and culture with a fuller account of the development of philosophy and literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century; and the only rejoinders that the harassed author can make are the rather lame ones that a book, to be a book, must conform to the mechanical laws of space and dimension, and that a serious attempt on the part of the present writer to make a synthesis of social and political facts precludes no effort on the part of other and abler writers to synthesize all these facts with the phenomena which are conventionally assigned to the realm of "cultural" or "intellectual" history. In this, and in all other respects, the author trusts that his particular solution of the vexatious problem of selection will prove as generally acceptable as any.

In the all-important matter of accuracy, the author cannot hope to have escaped all the pitfalls that in a peculiarly broad and crowded field everywhere trip the feet of even the most wary and persistent searchers after truth. He has naturally been forced to rely for the truth of his statements chiefly upon numerous secondary works, of which some acknowledgment is made in the following Note, and upon the kindly criticisms of a number of his colleagues; in some instances, notably in parts of the chapters on the Protestant Revolt, the French Revolution, and developments since 1848 in Great Britain, France, and Germany, he has been able to draw on his own special studies of primary source material, and in certain of these instances he has ventured to dissent from opinions that have been copied unquestioningly from one work to another.