Political Ideologies of the 19th Century

10 Key excerpts on "Political Ideologies of the 19th Century"

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  eBook - ePub

  Companion to the History of Modern Science

  • G N Cantor, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, M.J.S. Hodge, R.C. Olby(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  66 Science and Political Ideology, 1790–1848 Dorinda Outram DOI: 10.4324/9780203191873-74

  1. Introduction and Historiography

  Few topics have aroused such sustained debate, and posed such acute methodological problems in the history of science, as the relations between science and political ideology. The problem is especially acute for the period 1790–1848 because this was a period of great change and flux both in the content and insti-tutionalisation of science, and in the whole field of political ideology. In particular, in France, the Revolution which began in 1789 and ended in 1799, had produced radical and enduring questioning of previously held political ideas; a questioning which had affected most other European countries to a greater or lesser degree. At the same time, during the period 1790–1848, Britain experienced the first thoroughgoing industrialisation. This brought with it social strains, economic changes and a search for new ideas on many sides, to challenge or to justify the new social and political order which industrialisation brought with it.

  In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the history of science has failed to reach any historiographical consensus, or even a coherent tradition of approach to this question. Science and politics were generally, until quite recently, held rigidly separate by the practitioners both of science and of the history of science. History of science uncritically accepted the claims of nineteenth-century science that it was a value-free, apolitical activity, and it thus made little or no sense to integrate scientific and political ideas. In spite of obvious counter-examples in the real world such as Social Darwinism, or eugenics, this denial, within the history of science, of the links between science and politics held sway at least until the late 1950s.

  After that time, history of science itself gradually began to loosen its links with science, and to reforge its links with general history. A growing perception of the history of science as a historical discipline in its own right, rather than as an ancillary discipline to the sciences, allowed the gradual entry into the field of the problem of the relations between science and political ideology. At the same time, the increasing polarisation between right and left, which was a hallmark of political life in the 1960s in France, the United States and to a lesser extent Great Britain, also refocused attention on the pre-history of many radical ideologies which had pre-figured Marxism and socialism. All these changes ushered in more explicit recognition of connections between science and political ideology.

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  Handbook of Political Theory

  • Gerald F Gaus, Chandran Kukathas, Gerald F Gaus, Chandran Kukathas(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  28 European Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century R AY M O N D P L A N T Political thought in the nineteenth century developed against the background of momentous events and intellectual developments in the spheres of science, sociology, theology and history, and we need first of all to understand in broad terms the nature of some of these themes. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The French Revolution still exercised an enormous influence on both progressive and self-consciously reactionary thinkers. Many revolutions and insur-rections took place in Europe during this period (Hobsbawm, 1975). The post-Napoleonic period had been a very great disappointment to many radical thinkers and groups. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat by Napoleon of the forces of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation at Jena in 1806 there had been some political and social progress, particularly in Prussia where the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg were well on their way to producing a more liberal form of constitutional monarchy. Following the final defeat of Napoleon however, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia and Russia came into existence with a self-consciously reactionary agenda, which led to greater censorship and political persecution. Nevertheless in Russia in December 1825 there had been an attempted coup against the new Tsar Nicholas I and some of the Decembrist leaders were unexpectedly and rather incompetently executed. In France the Orleanist monarchy was overthrown in February 1848 as the result of popular insurrection. This set off some-thing of a chain reaction. By early March the south-western German states were affected, as was Bavaria by 6 March and Berlin by 11 March, and a National Parliament representing all the German states was set up in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main. By 13 March the uprisings reached Vienna, followed by Hungary, and Metternich, the architect of post-Napoleonic Europe, was forced to flee.

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  The Modern World-System IV

  Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914

  • Immanuel Wallerstein(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Centrist Liberalism as Ideology e French Revolution . . . is the shadow under which the whole nineteenth century lived. —George Watson (1973, 45) 1 In 1815, the most important new political reality for Great Britain, France, and the world-system was the fact that, in the spirit of the times, political change had become normal. “With the French Revolution, parliamentary reform became a doctrine as distinct from an expedient” (White, 1973, 73). Furthermore, the locus of sovereignty had shied in the minds of more and more persons from the mon-arch or even the legislature to something much more elusive, the “people” (Billing-ton, 1980, 160–166; also 57–71). ese were undoubtedly the principal geocultural legacies of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period. Consequently, the fundamental political problem that Great Britain, France, and the world-system had to face in 1815, and from then on, was how to reconcile the demands of those who would insist on implementing the concept of popular sovereignty exercising the normal-ity of change with the desire of the notables, both within each state and in the world-system as a whole, to maintain themselves in power and to ensure their continuing ability to accumulate capital endlessly. e name we give to these attempts at resolving what prima facie seems a deep and possibly unbridgeable gap of conicting interests is ideology. Ideologies are not simply ways of viewing the world. ey are more than mere prejudices and presuppositions. Ideologies are political metastrategies, and as such are required only in a world where political change is considered normal and not aberrant. It was precisely such a world that the capitalist world-economy had become under the cultural upheaval of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period.

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  The historian between the ethnologist and the futurologist

  A Conference on the Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist, Venice, April 2–8, 1971

  • Jerôme [Ed.] Dumoulin, Conference on the Historian Between the Ethnologist and the Futurologist(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  However, we discover that historicism from the very beginning found a way out of this dilemma by interpreting social institutions like the states as individual totalities (Troeltsch), obeying certain inherent principles like the reason of state or the principle of nationality. Modern historical literature is full of anthropomorphisms of W. Mommsen: On the position of political history 141 this kind which allowed the extension of the operation called Verstehen to various complex social phenomena. The other way out of this dilemma consisted in interpreting social movements and parties largely, if not exclusively, in terms of their ideological orientation. The history of political parties was up to the recent past almost identical with the history of their ideological orientation, though Bryce's and Ostrogorsky's studies pointed already at the end of the century in a different direction. This method of historical explanation was, by the way, by no means restricted to the sphere of political history. The famous thesis of Max Weber on the origins of capitalism fits very well into this pattern; according to Weber it was specific outer-worldly values which induced the pioneers of modern industrial capitalism to burst through the fetters of a tradition-bound economy and to set in motion economic forces which eventually ended up in revolutionizing social systems everywhere in the world. The tendency to explain developments in the social sphere primarily in terms of specific religious or pseudo-religious values which motivated the respective social groups was in the early 20th century widespread and lost its great fascination only gradually. The methodological outlook of traditional political historiography was heavily attacked by Marxism even at an early stage of its development. Already in the Deutsche Ideologie Marx wrote: ...we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived.

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  The Origins of World War Two

  The Debate Continues

  • Robert Boyce, Joseph A. Maiolo(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The former’s strength resided in western Europe where the concerns of a rising urban middle class were best served by parliamentary representation and a code of civil rights. By contrast, in agrarian eastern Europe a more traditional and hierarchical social system based on deference and prescriptive rights still held sway. This ideological schism between western and eastern Europe shaped international affairs throughout most of the nineteenth century. Thus, in the years of further revolution, 1830 and 1848, the eastern European I DEOLOGY 229 monarchies of the Habsburg Empire, Prussia and Russia, guided by the Austrian arch-conservative, Chancellor Metternich and his successors, presented a fairly solid anti-revolutionary front. But in Great Britain and much of western Europe liberals and radicals were accorded a sympathetic hearing and asylum. After 1870 and the unification of Germany Chan-cellor Bismarck, in imitation of Metternich, struggled to hold the three eastern European empires together on the basis of the monarchical prin-ciple and common ideological opposition to republican France. Only after Bismarck’s forced resignation in 1890 was the ideological divide crossed. In a diplomatic revolution autocratic Russia joined republican France and liberal Britain in a triple entente encircling the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This alignment of powers that went to war in 1914 therefore crossed the accepted ideological boundaries. None the less, the First World War, with each passing year, witnessed an exponen-tial and portentous application of ideology to the war aims of all the combatants. The groundwork had been laid in the previous half-century, which saw a growing tendency to dress up conventional foreign policy interests in an ideological guise, above all that of Social Darwinism with its reverberations of imperialism and racism.

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  The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism

  Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925

  • James J. Connolly, James J. CONNOLLY(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Most scholars emphasize cultural conflicts as the essence of Gilded Age politics; even those stressing economic conflict present parties as obstacles to working-class con-sciousness because of their reliance on culturally divisive issues. The perception of party politics as a direct extension of social conflict governs what Richard McCormick has called “the party period in American history.” 2 A fixation with the social bases of politics has diverted attention from the creative role that parties played. The process of systemati-cally organizing cultural hatreds into partisan loyalties did more than just reproduce preexisting social identities; it also created a new one. Party conflict was more than a surrogate for other clashes. In the late nineteenth century, partisanship was a vocabulary of public identity in and of itself. When they went to the polls, marched in torchlight pa-rades, or attended a political rally, Americans were participating in rituals affirming their party membership. While this affiliation was inextricably bound up with other communal allegiances, it was a dis-16 • Politics and Society at the End of the Nineteenth Century crete identity as well. Few alternative forms of political identification existed in a public life dominated by parties. To act politically in this era was, for all but a few, to act as a partisan. 3 Though a campaign of ethnic rapprochement seemed implausible for Boston as the nineteenth century neared its end, it developed none-theless. The steady influx of immigrants, the constant remapping of the city’s social geography, and the prevalence of culturally divisive issues threatened to undermine conciliatory efforts. Yet spokesmen for the city’s two leading ethnoreligious groups—Irish Catholics and An-glo-Protestants—continued to emphasize comity over conflict and in-sisted that intergroup cooperation was now the dominant charac-teristic of the city’s public life.

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  Political Conflict in America

  • A. Ware(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Furthermore, the multilayered nature of American government means that some central and widely held values may both gain expression and generate poli- cies to realize them, at levels below that of national politics. Between them state party platforms, or policy positions taken by individual congressional candidates, might well reveal evidence of beliefs and values within a party relating to policy areas in which an initiative was less likely to emanate from the president or from a unified national party. The “pieticals” of the mid-late nineteenth century (and their equivalents, in the late twentieth century) who, as was seen in chapter 2, wanted to impose a particular moral order on the country, usually pursued their agendas through subpresidential politics. They directed their efforts at chang- ing local ordinances, state laws, and, by the early twentieth century in the case of prohibition, by directing their efforts toward members of Congress. The most radical change in social policy of that generation was not a matter on which either Wilson and the Democrats (in 1912 and 1916) or Hughes and the Republicans (in 1916) had said much. The mobilization of support for what would become the Eighteenth Amendment was conducted below the level of national presiden- tial campaigns. Nor indeed is there any discussion of prohibition by Gerring, for the obvious reason that both major parties had always tried to avoid it. The transmission of ideas in the arena of national political contests can tell us only so much about the kinds of ideologies we find infusing partisan politics, and pol- itics more generally, in the United States. By contrast, in Europe we can learn far more about the parties from their national utterances, especially their man- ifestos. In many European countries there are no other comparably significant levels of political contestation in which ideas can be promoted.

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  Modern Political Ideologies

  • Andrew Vincent(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Burke reckoned on a property-owning franchise of roughly four hundred thousand citizens. British conservatives, however, adapted more pragmatically to democracy than (at least initially) many of their European counterparts. Conservatives in the nineteenth century also had a very ambivalent reaction to industrialization and the rise of liberal political economy. There has been a strong anti-industrial, anti-individualistic strain in conservatism, from Justus Möser and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, through William Cobbett 62 CONSERVATISM and Benjamin Disraeli at mid-century, to Charles Maurras, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson in the early twentieth century. Industrialization and individualism often meant the decline of community, tradition, order and religion. There is therefore a recognizably anti-capitalist streak in conservative thought (see Dawson 1931; Eliot 1939; Maurras in McLelland ed. 1971). None the less, the political success of the Conservative Party in Britain into the twentieth century was based upon its ability to adapt to and find a modus vivendi (at times an immensely enthusiastic one) with the industrial and indeed the democratic ethos (Smith 1967, 2; Blake 1985, 24–5; Hoover and Plant 1989, ch. 1). The Nature of Conservatism There are three broad approaches to the study of conservatism: the historical nation state, chronological and conceptual approaches. These are not mutually exclusive. They often overlap quite considerably in some studies. None of these approaches, except one dimension of the conceptual view, identifies any distinctive or necessary ideological conservative position. The historical nation state idea argues that conservatism can only really be classi-fied in terms of the particular historical and cultural circumstances of the nation state in which it occurs. In other words, it is German, British and French conserva-tism which are of most interest, not some over-arching theory.

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  Handbook of Party Politics

  • Richard S Katz, William J Crotty, Richard S Katz, William J Crotty(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Party-based politics was one of the transforming inventions of the 19th century. Of course, par-ties were not unknown before this time, but it was not until the 19th century that they emerged as central organizing features in many coun-tries’ politics. Before this, parties were loose groupings at best, linked by support for a par-ticular leader or political idea. Often they were equated with ‘factions’, unwanted divisions that endangered the national order. Yet despite these widespread and deep-rooted anti-party biases, during the 19th century parties took on a well-defined shape both inside and outside of the legislatures in many countries. These changes in political parties coincided with, and stimulated, a much wider transfor-mation of politics. Across Europe and North America the 19th century witnessed a broad movement towards mass electoral politics. As the electorate grew, so too did the seeming inevitability of party-organized electoral com-petition. Because of this, the presence of multi-ple, competing, political parties gradually came to be considered one of the hallmarks of a democratic regime: as E. E. Schattschneider (1942: 1) would put it in the middle of the 20th century, ‘political parties created democracy, and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties’. Along with this shift came new definitions that highlighted electoral aspi-rations as the most important feature which distinguished political parties from other groups seeking to influence public policy. In the succinct words of Anthony Downs (1957: 25), a party is ‘a team seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election’. Though electoral compe-tition came to be seen as a core activity for parties, in more elaborate functionalist descrip-tions parties did much more than this.

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  The Essential World History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • William J. Duiker, Jackson Spielvogel(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  After 1815, the political philosophy of conservatism was supported by hereditary monarchs, government bureaucracies, land-owning aristocracies, and revived churches, both Pro-testant and Catholic. The conservative forces were dominant after 1815. One method used by the Great Powers to maintain the new status quo they had constructed was the Concert of Europe, according to which Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria (and later France) agreed to convene periodically to take steps that would maintain the peace in Europe. Eventually, the Great Powers adopted a prin-ciple of intervention , asserting that they had the right to send armies into countries where there were revolutions to restore legitimate monarchs to their thrones. Forces for Change Although conservative governments throughout Europe strived to restore the old order after 1815, powerful forces for change—liberalism and nationalism—were also at work. Liberalism owed much to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions; it was based on the idea that people should be as free from restraint as possible. Politically, liberals came to hold a common set of beliefs. Chief among them was the protection of civil liberties, or the basic rights of all people, which included equality before the law; freedom of assembly, speech, and the press; and freedom from arbitrary arrest. All of these freedoms should be guaranteed by a written document, such as the American Bill of Rights. In addi-tion to religious toleration for all, most liberals advo-cated separation of church and state. Liberals also demanded the right of peaceful opposition to the gov-ernment in and out of parliament and the making of laws by a representative assembly (legislature) elected by qualified voters. Thus, many liberals believed in a 500 j CHAPTER 19 The Beginnings of Modernization: Industrialization and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning.

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