Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. Our topic today will be conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism. Basically, we're discussing what happens in Europe after the revolution, the French Revolution, after 1815.
Um, because of the chaos and because of the instability that had occurred during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the rulers in Europe, as you've seen, wanted to restore stability and re-establish as much of the old ways in Europe. When they met after the Napoleonic Wars and after the French Revolution, of course, the people and institutions that wanted to re-establish this old order and go back to the way things were became known as the conservatives, the conservative order, or conservatism.
We had already discussed the very powerful countries in Europe such as Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria deciding to guarantee peace and continue to meet periodically after 1815. And of course, like I said before, they will establish, you know, we're not going to see a major war breakout. Of course, we have World War I, but that's in 1914, and that's a century later.
Of course, we have a lot of revolutions. As I mentioned, we had very famous men participating in the post-Napoleonic Europe such as Talleyrand, who is the French representative, and we had Metternich, who was a very famous Austrian diplomat, Clemens von Metternich. Um, we had Viscount Castlereagh, who was a very prominent British diplomat as well, British foreign secretary. We had Tsar Alexander, Tsar Alexander I, a very prominent figure here for Russia as well. And so all of these men in these countries will continue discussing Europe.
And, and as you can imagine, you know, the monarchs were mostly conservatives. Well, they were conservatives because they want to restore, they want to go back to the way it was and restore the old days. In fact, the Bourbon Dynasty, remember the Bourbons, the dynasty in France, the Bourbon Dynasty was restored to France after the Napoleonic Wars and Spain. And the wars of the Spanish Succession, when Philip, a relative of Louis XIV, was allowed to take over the throne in Spain.
So, not everyone felt that way, obviously. I mean, the French Revolution had had, um, put forth some very basic freedoms and ideas that a lot of people in Europe wanted to see happen. You know, we also, of course, had had the American Revolution as well. And so some of these ideas, especially the constitutions, having it written down, became very appealing to a lot of people in Europe. The people that wanted these constitutions, for the most part, they were known as the liberals, or of course, liberalism, as we see here. And there will be a lot of liberal uprisings that will take place in places like Italy and Spain, where people are wanting to see these constant written constitutions coming about. And of course, the monarchs are not, you know, not exactly enthused about that idea.
And of course, we have nationalism. Nations, this will become a huge problem, especially in the Austrian Empire, but elsewhere, of course, as well. Because you will have a group of people who want to see their nation created based on ethnicity, common history. And when you have an empire like the Austrian Empire, where you have so many different ethnic groups existing within the empire, and if one ethnic group wants to see their nation created out of that, you know, out of their ethnic group, then that's going to create problems for others within the empire. So, you know, you'll learn more about this nationalism that is growing here after the Napoleonic Wars as well.
And so, you know, people also are wanting to see not only written constitutions but representative governments. And we're coming out of that age of absolutism that you learn quite a lot about. And these absolute monarchs such as Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great and Joseph II of Austria, people want were wanting to see more representative governments and less of this absolute rule that had existed previous to the French Revolution. So all of this will create some chaos in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s and quite a lot of revolutions that take place in the year 1848 and 1849. Not major wars, of course, but revolutions.
So let's learn more about what's happening in Europe with these different beliefs and movements with conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism. The French Revolution and Napoleonic era spawned a number of ideologies that became increasingly important in the 19th century and then continued to influence life in the 20th and even in the 21st centuries. Among these are conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism.
Before we turn to these, however, it's necessary for a moment to talk about a different sort of intellectual movement that occurred in the 19th century that underlay all of these ideological isms that I've just mentioned, and that is Romanticism. Romanticism is often associated in the popular mind with romantic novels, with romantic music, romantic art, and all of that is a legitimate association. But Romanticism, as an intellectual movement, was to some extent a repudiation of the Enlightenment.
The Romantics, starting with Rousseau and continuing on into the 19th century, rejected the notion that reason was the only sure guide to wisdom, the only sure guide to truth. They put greater emphasis upon what they called sentiment, or what we might call emotion today. They also resurrected the importance of faith, in many cases, as opposed to reason.
The Romantics also developed a a a very great interest in the past and in history, and that interest in history, in turn, led to a growing interest in nationalism. Nationalism drew part of its impetus not only from Romanticism but from the actual events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. For one thing, the French had set an example with their success in the 1790s and the early 19th century as to what a people could do if they were truly united as a nation. And even those nations who regarded the French as an enemy recognized that their success came from their national unity at times when they were able to work together. And therefore, other nations after 1815 will imitate that.
A second sort of negative way in which, uh, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era fostered nationalism is that after Napoleon had conquered, uh, much of Europe, it led to resistance to Napoleonic conquest and to French imperialism. That helped to create nationalism in Germany, nationalism in Italy, and so on. So nationalism was spawned, in in a sense, as a reaction to the French Revolution. However, it went on to become a full-blown ideology, as we'll see in a few minutes.
First, though, let us turn to conservatism and liberalism, the two ideologies which were the two most direct products of the French Revolution. And I must caution you that the terms conservative and liberal are, conservatism and liberalism meant something very different in the 19th century from whatever they might mean now. Both terms have become rather amorphous, but they meant something very precise in the 19th century and something very different from what we think of in terms of those labels today.
A conservative in the period just after 1815 was someone who rejected the ideals of the French Revolution, someone who wanted to go back to the way that Europe had been prior to 1789. Uh, the most prominent example of a conservative thinker who influenced thinking in the 19th century was the British thinker Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke had at one point been what you might think of as a 19th-century liberal. He had been a supporter, for example, of the American Revolution. But when the French Revolution broke out, he reacted against it and eventually wound up strongly condemning the French Revolution.
Furthermore, he rejected the entire ideology of John Locke, the notion that man is born with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, the notion that government exists only to protect those rights, and the notion that one has the right to revolution if a government fails to do that. Burke instead emphasized the organic nature of the state, the evolutionary nature of the state, the fact that the state has been built up by generation upon generation of history. And he argued that no one generation has the right to overthrow that. This became the the underlying basis for conservatism in the 19th century.
And what many conservatives sought to do was to restore the effectiveness of monarchy, to maintain the distinction among social classes, in which you had a monarch, a privileged aristocracy, a less privileged middle class, and a subordinate working class. This was part of the whole ideology. Conservatives, as a general rule, therefore, were resistant to any further change. Some wanted to roll back things to pre-1789. Even the most forward-thinking conservatives wanted to keep things as they were and not change any further. That meant conservatives were, of course, the opponents of liberals, but it also meant that conservatives were the opponents of nationalists, because as we'll see shortly, nationalists also wanted to carry out major changes in society in the 19th century.
Now, if we turn to liberals in the period just after 1815, those were individuals who embraced the ideals of the French Revolution, not necessarily the violence and the upheaval that had characterized certain phases of the Revolution, but they did believe in the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Furthermore, liberals were very strongly grounded in John Locke's ideas about inalienable rights and the right of revolution. Therefore, they were diametrically opposed to the beliefs of conservatives.
In fact, classical liberals, which is the term that we use to describe, uh, liberals in the 19th century, are really the ideological ancestors of both modern conservatives and modern liberals. Each group of which has taken some ideas from the classical liberals and gone on with them. Unless you are someone who wants to bring back monarchy and an aristocracy, you can't really be a conservative in the 19th century, since the word, although it means something very different right now.
Um, among the, uh, more prominent liberals in the early 19th century was a British thinker by the name of Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham invented an approach to liberalism that is sometimes called utilitarianism. Uh, it, if those of you familiar with the political thought of Thomas Jefferson, will recognize some of Bentham's ideas as well. Bentham argued that government should only do those things that have utility, that is, only those things that that are necessary, like defense, or those things which directly benefit the people of a state in some way. Otherwise, he believed government's power should be restricted. Again, the emphasis that liberals tend to embrace at this time is upon individual rights as opposed to the rights of the state, whereas conservatives tend to be state-oriented and even monarchy-oriented. Liberals at this juncture are more interested in individual rights. Therefore, for Bentham, the only time government should do anything is when government could do it better than an individual.
Another important liberal thinker who comes in the middle of the 19th century is the English thinker John Stuart Mill, who again emphasized individual liberty, who emphasized the rights of all individuals, all social classes, but also of both men and women, placing him ahead of a great many thinkers in that regard.
Now, among conservatives then, for much of the 19th century, the emphasis is on stasis, upon keeping the monarchy strong, upon preserving the rights of the aristocracy, on maintaining the existing structure. Among liberals, the emphasis was upon change, moving towards more individual freedom, and also towards more constitutional government. Constitutional government would place limits on the monarchy if there was one. Constitutional government would place limits upon the government, whatever form it might take, and constitutional government would enshrine protections of individual rights to life, liberty, and property.
Now, one of the things that you have to keep in mind is that in the 19th century, in Europe, at least, almost every state was still a monarchy, whether it was a constitutional monarchy in Britain or an absolutist monarchy as in Russia or something in between. So, even liberals in their ideology are usually talking about government that involves a king or a queen or an emperor. There was a subset of liberals, the the most radical group, if you will, who were Republicans with a small R, you might say, that is, they believed that the ideal state ought to be a republic, and a republic is any state that has no monarch. So they advocated the creation of states without monarchs. These Republicans are going to have only limited success in the 19th century.
Among the Republicans, even though not all Republicans favored full-fledged democracy, uh, the the Democrats with a little D were those who wanted everyone to have a vote, and they are in in a sense, even more radical than the rest of the liberals. Aside from political notions about, uh, liberalism, there are also some other thinkers who influence liberal ideas about economics. Nowadays, we tend to think of Adam Smith, the 18th-century economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations, as a bastion of conservatism, but he actually, in the 19th century, was someone who informed liberal thought about things because Adam Smith argued for the idea of laissez-faire, the idea that government, as much as possible, should stay out of the economy, should not regulate the economy. And this was entirely in keeping with liberal thought in the 19th century. Liberal thought favored as little government interference in anything as possible, while conservatives tended to favor a more statist, monarchist approach.
Now, alongside this, there existed a number of nationalistic thinkers. Some of these thought about nationalism in fairly abstract philosophical terms. Others of them were interested in making nationalism into an active political force. Let's talk first about those who were theoreticians, if you will.
Now, one of these was the German thinker Immanuel Kant. Kant is important for a number of reasons in the history of philosophy, but in respect to the history of political thought, he is a pivotal figure in the development of nationalist ideology. He didn't actually start out to create nationalist ideology, but his ideas helped to do so. One of the things that that Kant was interested in was the uniqueness of nations. And when he used the term nation, he didn't necessarily mean state. He meant people who spoke the same language, people who were of the same ethnicity. This might be people who already had a state. The English were people who spoke a common language, shared a common ethnicity, and had an English state. The French were another people who spoke a common language, shared an ethnicity, and had a common state. But the Germans at this time, although they spoke a common language and shared an ethnicity, were spread out over close to 40 states. The Italians were in a similar position, as were a number of ethnic groups in Southeastern Europe. Therefore, when Kant talks about nations, he's talking about the groups with a common language and ethnicity. Nevertheless, what he emphasizes is that each is unique, that each has its own character, that each has its own cultural peculiarities. And again, the way that he gets at this is by looking at their history.
And Kant eventually came to the conclusion that the best way for each nation to achieve freedom, to maximize freedom, was through the state, not to state as conservatives conceived it, necessarily, with a class-oriented monarchical society, but a state which had a constitution. This idea was picked up by a number of his followers. And among the most prominent thinkers among the nationalists were a lot of Germans. There's a good reason for this: there wasn't a single Germany yet. Many of the Germans hoped to create a single Germany, and therefore this is a philosophical problem that they focus on a great deal.
Uh, the, the thinker Fichte picked up on Kant's idea of the state being the ideal source for freedom and emphasized that greatly. A Lutheran German pastor by the name of Herder also put a great deal of stress upon the importance of creating a German nation, as did the thinker Schelling. But by far the most influential of the German nationalist thinkers was the great German philosopher Hegel.
Now, both Hegel and Kant can be very daunting to read. Their writing is very dense, it's very abstract in many cases, but Hegel's arguments about nationalism can actually be summed up in a way that is fairly simple. Hegel started his theory by focusing upon history, and Hegel believed that history had occurred in a series of stages. He identified those stages as first of all, the Oriental stage. And, and when he says Oriental, he doesn't mean the Far East. What he's talking about is the, the point in history when the great civilizations in the West were in what we now call the Middle East, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, and so on. He characterized this stage as a stage of despotism, that's his term for it. The second stage was what he called the Greco-Roman stage, in which a few people, other than the monarch, enjoyed freedom, that is, aristocrats. And he believed that the ultimate stage of history would be a third stage, which he patriotically identified as the German stage, in which all people would be free.
That probably strikes you right away that this is something of an oversimplification of historic periodization. What you have to bear in mind is that Hegel is doing his thinking about this in the early 19th century, when the knowledge of medieval and ancient history was much less than it is now, so it tended to lead to simplifications about history, regardless of a person's ideology. What's more interesting about Hegel is how he believed this historical process of change from Oriental to Greco-Roman to German stages took place, or was taking place. What he proposed is what we call a dialectical theory of history. A dialectical theory is one in which you have two opposing interests, what Hegel called a thesis and an antithesis, that is, an existing situation or paradigm and an opposing situation or paradigm which are in conflict, and out of that conflict between thesis and antithesis, and over a period of time, you get a new model or paradigm through a process of synthesis. So you have a thesis, an antithesis, you have struggle, and then you get a new thesis. That through the process of synthesis, of course, says Hegel, once you have a new thesis, there is a tendency for a new antithesis to develop, the struggle to continue, a new synthesis, and so on down the line.
And he believed that this had occurred in the following way: in the Oriental phase, the phase of despotism, the only truly free individual in society was the monarch, the king or the emperor. So the existing thesis was despotism. In opposition to that, there was a group, the aristocracy, according to Hegel, who opposed that, who wanted a share of that freedom, and through struggle with the existing despotism, eventually brought about a synthesis which gives us the Greco-Roman period, in which you have a monarch and an aristocracy sharing power. However, says Hegel, there eventually is opposition to that opposition, that is continuing in his own time, in which all people demand freedom. And his belief was that the struggle between a system dominated by monarch and aristocracy and the desire of all people to have freedom would eventually lead to a new synthesis in which the state, especially the German state, would become the source of freedom for all. Hegel's wish was for a German state with the German constitution, which would guarantee rights to all German people.
Now, that is an explanation of history that is oversimplified in all kinds of ways. It simply doesn't work when subjected to closer analysis, because in fact, the kind of conflict that Hegel describes has occurred far more times and in far more complex ways than his system allows for. Again, though, it is a reasonably good explanation for what people knew about history at the time. Where it becomes a particular interest, though, is when other people began to take up Hegel's theory. Conservatives used it to justify the existing state. They said, well, if we look at Hegel, you know, this could all go too far. Liberals, on the other hand, used Hegel's dialectical structure to argue for change, to say where Hegel says things are going is exactly where we want to go.
But what really threw an interesting complexion onto all of this was when Hegel's ideas were taken up by Karl Marx. Marx, who was a, a socialist, and then later on a communist. Before we get to Marx, however, I need to talk a little bit about the development of socialism. And again, uh, just as I emphasize that conservatism and liberalism meant different things in the 19th century than they do now, I also want to emphasize that in the 19th century, socialism on the one hand and communism on the other were two very distinct things. One grows out of the other, but they are nonetheless two different things.
Socialism, a mode of life, of course, is nothing new in the 19th century. Socialism with a with a small S, if you like, uh, is something that existed wherever, uh, primitive societies had shared land or shared their goods or shared the fruits of their labor. But socialism as a philosophy, as a political ideology, is something relatively new in the 19th century. And it too grows out of the French Revolution. If the French Revolution suggested that all men are equal, that all men should be free, that all men are brothers, it was very easy for some people to go from that to saying that not only should all people have equal liberty and an equal role in politics, but that all men should have an equal share of wealth. And out of that grows a sort of informal notion of socialism that will become more prominent as the 19th century goes along.
Uh, there were, in fact, a handful of socialists in France during the revolution. There was even a small group of full-fledged French communists who wanted to do away with private property altogether. They were led by a French communist named Babeuf, who alarmed the Directory to a considerable degree in the late 1790s, but he and his followers wound up being arrested and put in jail and proved to be far less of a threat to the Directory than a certain fellow named Napoleon Bonaparte turned out to be. Still, the ideas survived 1815 and continued to exist and gained some footing among people because of the Industrial Revolution.
As the Industrial Revolution progressed, it produced more and more jobs in a new sort of social class, the urban proletariat, that is, people who lived in the cities, who worked for wages in factories or who worked for wages in mines or what have you, and who did not fall into the traditional peasant class, the traditional middle class, or certainly the traditional aristocracy. And these individuals often lived in in fairly harsh conditions, and there were therefore were susceptible to an ideology that proposed to improve their lot in life.
Socialists in the 19th century had some common characteristics about what they believed. For one thing, they believed that the distribution of wealth is unjust if some people have far more wealth than they need to survive and others have just barely enough or not enough at all. They also suggested that the way to deal with this, what they saw as an unjust situation, was by common ownership of property, common ownership of the means of production, common profit from anything that was produced. So for them, in agriculture, this would mean common ownership of the land. In industry, it would mean common ownership of the factory. In mining, it would mean common ownership of the mine, and so on. And they believed that each person who worked should receive a more or less equal share, or at least equitable share, based on what he contributed. So socialists, obviously, were talking about far-reaching changes in society, changes that went well beyond what liberals were talking about, and certainly far beyond what conservatives found acceptable.
Early in the 19th century, there was a, a group of thinkers who subsequently have come to be labeled the utopian socialists. Now, that label is an insult. It was not adopted by these thinkers themselves. It was used about them by Marx and others who came later. A Utopia, of course, is an imaginary perfect society, and to call somebody a utopian is, in one way, to suggest that he's sort of living in a fantasy world. So when Marx and some of his communist brethren described the the socialists that we're about to discuss as utopian, they didn't mean that as a compliment at all. Of course, one could argue, and I will, that Marx was in many ways utopian himself. But first of all, let's take a look at the so-called utopian socialists.
Uh, the first of them was a Frenchman, interestingly, a French aristocrat, the Count Henri de Saint-Simon, who was alarmed by what he saw as social and economic injustices in France. And by the way, you don't have to be a socialist or a liberal or anything else to recognize that there were certainly social injustices in France at the time. Uh, he believed, Saint-Simon did, that many of these injustices stemmed from the practice of laissez-faire, that is, he blamed capitalism for these injustices. And he argued that the state, the French state, ought to reorganize society in such a way that people did not exploit one another. He was not very specific about how that ought to happen. He is, in many ways, the most abstract of the utopian socialists, because he talks about what should be, but he doesn't talk about how it should be accomplished. He is, however, the the source of a quote often attributed to to many different socialists that actually stems from him: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his work." In other words, he believed that society should use each individual in terms of what he was capable of doing, or she was capable of doing, and reward each accordingly.
Another utopian socialist, another Frenchman, as a matter of fact, was a man by the name of Charles Fourier, who believed that most of the social ills in France and elsewhere were due to what he thought of as an improper social and physical environment. And therefore, what he suggested doing was creating ideal communities. These communities he referred to as phalanges. And a phalange, in Fourier's idea, was to be a community of a thousand or so people on, uh, about five thousand acres of land, where everyone would own all things in common, and where everyone would share in what they produced. Now, this never got very far in Europe because it was just about impossible to find any place where there was five thousand acres of land that didn't belong to somebody already. Fourier's ideas, however, were tried in the 19th century on the American frontier, where there was an abundance of land. And those of you who have studied studied frontier communities in 19th-century America will recognize that communities like Oneida, for example, were experiments in Fourier's type of socialism, where that broke down, however, was that there was so much land on the frontier in America that there wasn't much need for individuals to live in phalanges. You could have all the land you wanted if you were simply willing to work it. And so very frequently, these phalanges broke down in the face of the attraction of greater individual ownership of land.
Still a third French utopian socialist, and the, and the only one who was actually active in politics, was a man by the name of Louis Blanc. Louis Blanc was actually elected to office after the revolution in France in 1848, and he had a practical plan. Unlike Fourier, who had only vague ideas, and Saint-Simon, whose ideas were even more abstract, Louis Blanc had a definite proposal for how, uh, socialism should work. He recommended setting up workshops, self-sufficient units in which groups of people work together to produce one product or another, and again, shared ownership of the means of production and shared whatever profits were made. A number of these were actually set up in Paris and elsewhere after the 1848 French Revolution. How well they would have worked in the long run, we don't know, because there was a backlash against Louis Blanc, and the workshops were all shut down within less than a year.
The most successful of the utopian socialist experiments came, in fact, in Britain, and it came about in the oddest sort of way, because it was set up not by a political thinker, not by a group of workers, but in fact by an owner, by a man by the name of Robert Owen. Robert Owen inherited and took over control of a group of cotton mills in New Lanark, Scotland, in the 19th century. And right off, he was appalled by the conditions that the workers in these areas were living in. And what he decided to do was to create a model community. He built better housing for all the workers, he provided medical care for all the workers, he provided a reasonable salary for all the workers, and he discovered that production went up. So his investment paid off. He took better care of his workers, they became more productive, they made more money, he made more money, everybody was happy. The only problem is that when Owen tried to duplicate this experiment elsewhere, it didn't work. Why that is, it remains something of a mystery, but it only worked out well in one place. And so while Owen was very successful with New Lanark, he did not become a model for a wider application of his methods.
Now, in the meantime, as the utopian socialists were attempting, through largely peaceful means, to bring about the changes that they wanted, there was also a growth in more revolutionary types of socialism, and this led into full-blown communism. One reason that the utopian socialists were never terribly successful is that they never inspired a widespread movement among the workers, among the urban proletariat. The fact of the matter is that most of the workers spent all their time working. If you're working an 18-hour day, seven days a week, you don't have a lot of time for reading political tracts, if you can read at all, and you don't have a lot of time for organizing.
Uh, what some of the more radical socialists began looking for was a way to get the lower classes actually involved, in other words, a way of creating a mass movement. One of these was a Frenchman named Auguste Blanqui, who founded something called The Society of Families, which later became The Society of Seasons. It started out as a socialist organization, but it became a full-blown communist organization. And, and the big changes that occurred within The Society of Seasons as it became a communist rather than a socialist organization is that it came to advocate the abolition of all private property, which is not something that most socialists were calling for, and it came to embrace revolutionary methods, including, if necessary, the violent overthrow of government.
Meanwhile, there was a, in France at the time, a group of individuals who had been forced to leave Germany because of their political views being too radical. A group of German exiles who founded an organization of their own called the League of the Just, not to be confused with the Justice League, which is something altogether different. The League of the Just originally was led by a man named Wilhelm Weitling, and it quickly proceeded to move from a socialist agenda to a communist agenda, expressed in initially in Weitling's document, The Guarantee and Harmony of Harmony and Freedom, which was published in 1842.
Now, in 1844, a couple of new German exiles joined the League of the Just, a German exile named Karl Marx and his partner Frederick Engels. And they quickly took over the League of the Just, changed the name to the Communist League, and proceeded to write a new program for the league, which they published in 1848, right in the middle of the Revolutions of 1848, and which, of course, is known as The Communist Manifesto.
Now, The Communist Manifesto is a fairly short piece of work, and as a work of political propaganda, whether whether you agree with it or not, you probably don't, I don't either, it is it is nonetheless a brilliant piece of propaganda. It also contains all the basic ideas that Marx and Engels would later expand at great great length in such works as Marx's Das Kapital. So let's take a look at what those are.
One of the things that that shows up in Marx's ideas and, uh, Engels' ideas as well, is the idea of an economic interpretation of history. For Marx, everything about history hinges upon the economy. It's not ideas, it's not politics, it's not religion. All those things, he believes, are simply manifestations of a more basic economic idea. In addition, he put a great deal of emphasis on the idea of class struggle. And here Marx took up Hegel's dialectic and plugged into it a new set of variables. Rather than emphasizing who was free, whether it's the despot, the aristocracy, or all people, he emphasized in his dialectical theory who controlled the means of production.
Now, again, Marx frequently oversimplifies history, and he does that for the same reason as other 19th-century thinkers. He has less to work with than we have now, particularly about the Middle Ages and the ancient world. But here's how he laid it out: he argued that in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, the principle means of production was land, and therefore those who controlled land controlled everything else. They controlled politics, they controlled the church, they controlled society. Well, who owned the land? The monarchy and the aristocracy, by and large. In opposition to them, there rose up in the late Middle Ages a middle class, a, a commercial class, who made their living not from land, but from capital, that is, from money and from goods. And Marx believed that the struggle had already occurred in which the middle class had forced the monarchy and the aristocracy to compromise, and there was a new synthesis in which monarchy, aristocracy, and middle class shared power.
But Marx argued there was another phase coming, because with the Industrial Revolution, he said, the urban proletariat was now the controller of the means of production. What made things happen in the factories? Labor. What made things happen in the mines? Labor, and so on. And so he argued now the middle class, the capitalists, were in struggle with the working class, the laborers. And he believed that ultimately the working class would triumph, and that this would lead to yet another new synthesis, which would produce not the state, like Hegel had said, but a stateless, classless, proletarian society. No state, no social classes.
And here Marx becomes rather amorphous about what this will actually look like. He also believed that this would probably occur through violence. He didn't necessarily advocate it, but he didn't necessarily discourage it either. He argued that the situation in Europe would deteriorate, the rich would get richer, that the poor would get poorer, and that eventually the situation would become so unbearable that the lower classes would rise up in revolution, overthrow the capitalist classes, seize control of the means of production, and abolish state and class. And that is, in fact, what he and his communist followers advocated.
Now, I want to stress here that many socialists regarded Marx as far too radical. Marx regarded many socialists as far too unradical. So there, there are gradations all across the political spectrum, from very reactionary conservatives to conservatives who are willing to think about at least some reform, uh, to liberals who are basically liberal monarchists, to liberals who are liberal Republicans, to liberals who want a republic and full-fledged democracy, to socialists, to communists. And of course, you can go beyond that even to the anarchists, who wanted to do away with government altogether.
A prominent example of an anarchist is, uh, Joseph Proudhon, the French thinker who is famous for the, the statement "Property is theft," who wanted to do away with private property, but who also wanted to do away with government altogether. Another influential anarchist of the 19th century was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who believed also that that property and government all had to go away. So there is a very broad array of political ideologies here.
Now, when it comes to Marx, Marx, of course, is to be one of the most influential of all these thinkers, because his ideas are taken up in the 20th century, uh, by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, uh, by Mao in Communist China, and by many others elsewhere. Nowadays, of course, communism is largely in abeyance. Almost every communist state in the world having fallen apart. It remains in existence in China, sort of, in Vietnam, sort of, in Cuba, sort of, and in North Korea. Even there, it has been adulterated by some capitalist practices.
The thing about Marx is that he was right about some of the social problems that existed. Certainly there were inequalities, certainly some of these stemmed from the Industrial Revolution. Where most people have abandoned him was in his solutions. The idea that we should abolish the state, abolish property, abolish, um, uh, the whole existing system of things. And in fact, as a historian and as a predictor of future history, there are an awful lot of holes in Marx's ideas. For example, it is true that the rich got richer in the 19th century, but the poor got less poor. In the last third of the 19th century, prosperity increased for almost everybody, and therefore there was less incentive for violent revolution and more incentive for working-class people to try to become part of the political process rather than overthrowing the political process.
Marx also predicted that religion would go away. He believed, Marx was an atheist himself, he believed that religion, uh, was simply created to make people feel comfortable. He referred to it as the "opium of the masses," and he expected it to fall apart. Exactly the opposite has taken place. Another thing is that he assumed that people would be willing to embrace violence as a way of bringing about social change, and in most cases, that proved not to be the case. Finally, and, and this is a very profound weakness in in Marxism, he believed that communist revolution would occur first in the most industrialized societies. And by that, he meant Britain, which was the industrial leader of the world in the 19th century, and Germany, which was running a close second. In fact, the only place where successful communist revolutions took place in the 19th, in the 20th century, rather, was in peasant societies, exactly the opposite of what Marx had predicted. And most of those revolutions have gone by the wayside.
Now, to go back to my original point, underlying all of these belief systems is a certain amount of Romanticism. Ultimately, whether one was a conservative, a liberal of any kind, a socialist, a communist, or even an anarchist, there was no way to empirically prove that you were right. What you might believe very strongly in your principles, but ultimately they're all based on faith, they're all based on emotion. Conservatives had a very romantic attachment to the past, to the good old days, to the golden age, if you will. Liberals had a very romantic belief that you could bring about change by simply applying Enlightenment ideals. It may seem like a paradox to think in a romantic way about the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but that's precisely what a lot of liberals did. Socialists also did the same thing, and although Marx and his fellow communists like to think of themselves as these scientific thinkers as opposed to all the others, they did the same as well.
Now, along with these major groups, there were some interesting little offshoots that developed in the 19th century that that tried combining various ideas in interesting ways. One of these was a group of people called the Christian socialists in Britain. Uh, nowadays one doesn't normally think of those two things as going together, but in fact, a lot of the humanitarian ideals of Christianity and a lot of the more humanitarian ideals of socialism, not necessarily communism, sort of mesh. And so you had individuals like, for example, Charles Kingsley in Britain, who advocated on the basis of Christian thought the idea of implementing some socialist practice, and who argued that laissez-faire, uncontrolled, was likely to lead to injustice.
Beyond that, there was also a strain of humanitarianism that ran across most political ideologies, uh, a recognition that there were people in industrialized societies who were suffering, that there were people in agrarian societies that were suffering, and there was a sort of general sense, whether based on Christian faith or on Enlightenment principles or some combination of the two, that it was incumbent upon people to look after those less fortunate than themselves. And you can find this, uh, all over the place. Uh, on, on the one hand, one certainly finds it in the thinking of Christian socialists and of liberals, but one of the most prominent humanitarians of the 19th century was in fact Benjamin Disraeli, who became famous as the leader of the British Conservative Party in the latter part of the 19th century.
So, in sum, the 19th century is an ideologically rich period, offering all sorts of assessments of history, all sorts of predictions for the future, and all sorts of solutions for society's problems, many of them springing from ideas first stimulated by the French Revolution and the conquests of Napoleon.
Okay, so now that we've learned a lot about, uh, where, you know, people stand in Europe and basically why we're going to see these revolutions or these liberal uprisings taking place throughout Europe and throughout a lot of the different countries in Europe, when we come back for our next lecture, we'll kind of change topics a bit and we'll discuss the First Industrial Revolution, which is actually very interesting. It begins in Great Britain, eventually it will spread to the European continent, and it will be very important, uh, as we progress and we move, of course, into the 20th century. It'll eventually spread to the United States. It takes quite a little bit longer, of course, but it will eventually get here in the mid-19th century. Until next time.