Claeys - Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century thought

Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought

Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought

Edited by Gregory Claeys

First published 2005
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

2005 Routledge Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 0-415-24419-6

Contents

Editors

Volume editor

Gregory Claeys

Professor of History,

Royal Holloway, University of London

Consultant editors

F.C. Beiser

Syracuse University

(Germany)

Christopher Duggan

University of Reading

(Southern and Eastern Europe)

Pamela Pilbeam

University of London

(France)

Chushichi Tsuzuki

Hitotsubashi University

(Japan and East Asia)

Contributors

Evelina Barbashina

F.C. Beiser

Fritz Breithaupt

Anthony Brewer

Robert Brown

Gavin Budge

Evgenia V. Cherkasova

Gregory Claeys

Gill Cockram

N.D. Daglish

Simon Dentith

Michael S. Dodson

Christopher Duggan

Peter Field

David Gladstone

Olaf Hansen

Malcolm Hardman

Jennifer Harrison

Clive E. Hill

Alan D. Hodder

H.S. Jones

Pierre Kerszberg

Alan R. King

Tim Kirk

Detmar Klein

D.M. Knight

Timothy Larsen

Oliver Leaman

Kyoo Lee

Michael Levin

Andre Liebich

Sandy Lovie

Elizabeth McCardell

Donal McCartney

Erin McKenna

Takashi Mitani

John Morrow

Kathryn Oliver Mills

John S. Partington

Pamela Pilbeam

Liz Potter

Simon J. Potter

John Pratt

Pamela Ralston

David Rose

Roland Sarti

David A. Shafer

Martin Simpson

Franz Solms-Laubach

Sue Stedman-Jones

Shannon Stimson

Dan Stone

C. Takeda

Sheila Thomas

Noel Thompson

Kathryn Tomasek

Lyman Tower Sargent

Keith Tribe

Chushichi Tsuzuki

Karine Varley

Georgios Varouxakis

Richard Whatmore

Introduction

The Wonderful Century: The Idea of the Nineteenth Century and its Critics

Viewed at its culmination, the nineteenth century appeared incontestably to have been the most extraordinary epoch that had ever occurred. In it, as Alfred Russel Wallace insisted in The Wonderful Century. Its Successes and its Failures (1898), humankind had progressed as far as in the whole of preceding human history. Principally this was a function of science and technology. It was an age richer in inventions than any other: steam-power, railways, gas illumination, electricity, refrigeration, the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, the phonograph, vaccination, anaesthetics, photography, radiation to name but a few. Comforts increasingly abounded, and those who could enjoy their benefits found their lives immeasurably enriched. The world shrank rapidly: travel and communication were vastly easier; telescopes reached out into the universe, while microscopes and scalpels divulged a new world within. Life-expectations were greatly extended. Perceptions were sharpened, and urbanity and sociability expanded. These changes were intimately bound up with the fact that Europeans, in particular, left the land in ever-greater numbers for the bright lights of ever-larger cities, where, if they were well off, their standard of living and life-chances advanced steadily, while if they were not, they might well decline. But for all classes the experience was astonishing, bewildering and provocative.

The epoch could not but be an age equally richer in ideas than any other, and self-consciously, from the outset, an age of transition, where the rest of human history became the old, to be swept away, along with most of its best-loved certainties, by the brave new world of modernity. To describe the new, and to appraise its development, required new ideas: revolution, social welfare, the international market and division of labour, race, democracy, equality, feminism, industrialism, rationalism, capitalism, Romanticism, utilitarianism. Linking the two great achievements, political and technological, of the epoch, were the nouveaux riches, the triumphalist middle class or bourgeoisie, throughout the civilized world enriching itself, promising affluence to others, and everywhere disdainful of both the idle, parasitic ruling landed elite above them, whose titles and privileges they coveted, and those among the hapless workers and peasants beneath them who were unwilling to enlist under the banner of the new order. Justifying their economic rights by the new political economy, for which capital accumulation was the raison dtre of modernity, and their political rights by the need to protect and foster this wealth, the middle classes increasingly embraced a secular, hedonistic, world-view in which the pursuit of pleasure became the highest aspiration of humankind, and modern standards of taste became increasingly those of the mass of consumers. Yet the new ideal met with fierce resistance from Romantics, some evangelicals, some conservatives, socialists and others, to whom a fragmented, atomized individualism coupled to an exploitative factory system and decaying, impoverished urban existence held out no hope of real human amelioration. It was, thus, a century of widespread strife, social and economic as well as intellectual, in which the concept of struggle would finally emerge as the master-metaphor of the epoch, and war fought with the newly invented machine-gun and tank, and in the air and under the water, would be seen by some as a desirable way of testing and improving national virtues. And it was the age in which the greatest utopian ideal ever conceived, an internationalist communist order, would by 1900 increasingly be seen as the sole alternative to capitalist exploitation, inequality and militarism.

Eight leading ideas held sway over the imagination of the period: revolution, nationalism, industrialism, liberalism, socialism, evolutionism, scientific and technical progress, and, finally, civilization, which binds many of the rest together.

The nineteenth centurys moment of initial self-definition was indisputably the French Revolution, with its sweeping assault on corrupt privilege and feudal unfreedom, and its bold assertion of equality, natural rights and personal freedom. Following close upon the American Revolution, the fall of the Bastille heralded an uncompromising assertion of popular sovereignty, and of national, ethnic and personal liberation. Man, Rousseau had said, had been bom free, but found himself everywhere in chains; this was the century, revolutionaries asserted, in which humanity was to be unshackled. But, though Florence Nightingale recalled an old legend that the nineteenth century is to be the century of women , the female sex largely remained enchained throughout it. Enslaved peoples regained their liberties by stages through the period, though not necessarily any recognition of their common or fundamental humanity, or security from conquest and bondage masquerading as the White Mans Burden possibly the most cynical concept of the epoch.