A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  But Darwin was not all of nineteenth-century biology. Even before him, German researchers Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann had shown that all living things consist of cells. Another German, Rudolf Virchow, deduced illnesses from changes in cells, becoming the father of cellular pathology.10 French chemist Louis Pasteur proved the role of bacteria in illnesses. Research was nearing the borderlands between organic and inorganic, living and dead. There were biologists who already seemed to glimpse the answer to the question of the origins of life. Some asserted that they had created artificial cells, then as now.

  Knowledge dealing specifically with humans, their societies and their history underwent a similarly grand development. Psychology as an independent discipline was created in the late 1800s, though still squeezed between philosophy and biology – and, in fact, even physics.11 The unconscious depth of the soul had been a theme since the Romantic era, but only around the turn of the twentieth century did it form the centre of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.12

  Sociology is a child of the nineteenth century. Previously, society had been regarded above all from the point of view of politics. The political concept of status was now met by the class of sociology. People’s collaboration and conflict in their daily lives became the subject of systematic study.

  Statistics became important for development within sociology. It had older roots, but had now been made more stringent through the development of probability calculus at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Adolphe Quetelet created the concept of l’homme moyen (the ‘average man’) and tried to understand society as like a planetary system, in which the average being constituted the centre of gravitation.13

  Political economy, or economics, played an important role at a time when capitalism was advancing victoriously over Europe and the world. The tradition from Adam Smith’s 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, was taken up independently by David Ricardo. But towards the end of the nineteenth century, Smith’s central thesis – that the value of a commodity depended on the amount of work put into it – was increasingly abandoned. Instead, the relationship between supply and demand was regarded as crucial.14

  Even historical research underwent great changes during the nineteenth century. The once-obscure tradition of source criticism gained clarity and conciseness. Textual criticism made similar advances through new, grandiose editions of classic texts and historical documents. Knowledge of the past became more certain as the works of great authors, composers, and artists were made accessible as never before.

  … and of Philosophy

  The sciences specialized rapidly during the nineteenth century. Fields of specialization became smaller, and new borders were drawn between spheres of authority. What was lost in breadth was gained in depth.

  For the science from which nearly all modern disciplines issued – philosophy – specialization posed a challenge. Philosophy did not have obvious triumphs it could point back to. The questions of Plato and Aristotle remained under discussion.

  Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century thinker who in many respects set the agenda for nineteenth-century philosophy, himself had a background in science and stated that philosophers should not ask questions about the truth of advanced science but instead investigate why it was true. Mechanics was constructed in the same way as geometry. It was based on a number of obvious truths (axioms) but nevertheless dealt with reality. With its help, of course, the movements of projectiles and heavenly bodies could be calculated.

  Kant’s solution was to see the foundations of mechanics, like those of geometry, in people’s own understanding. The categories of understanding were also those of reality. The question of what reality is, beyond our knowledge of it, was impossible to ask.

  But Kant also held that there was a reality independent of us, and his many followers soon discovered that this implied a problem. The category of cause and effect belonged to the categories of understanding, but if there was an outside world that affected us, must it not thereby somehow cause our knowledge of it?

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte was among those who argued that we did not need to conceive a reality independent of ourselves. The world is our knowledge of it. It was a philosophical solution as productive as it was risky. The field lay open for grandiose speculation and passing fads. Those were the ‘wild years’ of German philosophy, as cultural and philosophical historian Rüdiger Safranski says. They fused partially with a powerful Romantic current centred on longing and feeling, imagination and creation. From this remarkable situation emerged the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who built a bridge between art and biology. His initial successes were spectacular, inspiring a generation of young men and women in everything from literary composition to medicine. One of the most outstanding was his wife, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, revolutionary and friend of Goethe. When she died prematurely, her husband ceased publishing books.

  Another thinker took the German stage instead: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had the same philosophical background as Schelling, but other sources of inspiration as well, among them more down-to-earth Scottish economic theory. Schelling saw lightning-quick inspiration as the chief source of knowledge. According to Hegel, the road to insight was long and strenuous. He became the philosopher of development above all.

  He called his method the dialectic, a concept from antiquity that denotes the art of setting argument against argument. According to him, it is not only thinking that advances dialectically, but reality as well. As a matter of fact, reality can only be provisionally distinguished from thought. They are part of an unceasing process characterized by what Hegel calls Aufhebung, or sublation.

  Such, according to Hegel, is the paradigm of both thought and reality. Something disappears, but reappears in a more complex context. An example: before the French Revolution, royal absolutism prevailed. With the revolution, all the powers that be were overthrown. But it could not rest there; complete freedom passed into the reign of terror. Out of this emerged Napoleon, who under his rule moulded together freedom and authority. Or, in the artificial language of Hegelianism: after the negation follows the negation of the negation (which is called synthesis in some popularizations, although Hegel distanced himself from the word with its oblique meaning of ‘final result’).

  For several decades, Hegel had great influence in Germany among both conservatives and radicals. Then came reaction; he was treated as ‘a dead dog’, as Marx says in Capital. But his reputation grew in a number of other countries, especially the United States and Great Britain. In the latter, he had a central role in both philosophy and political thought. Leading liberal thinkers were deeply influenced by him.

  But philosophy also took many other paths around Europe and its relationship to the specialized sciences was managed in different ways. In France, Auguste Comte asserted that the philosopher should be a ‘specialist in general ideas’ who joined together all learning in a single system staking out the path from the simple and abstract (mathematics) to the most complex and concrete (what he called sociology). In England, Herbert Spencer – the man who both inspired and vulgarized Darwin – tried to do something similar.

  Others wanted to go back to Kant’s strict method, but to avoid the logical difficulty that made Fichte and others abandon him. The result was neo-Kantianism, which dominated philosophy in Germany – and also in part in Sweden – well into the twentieth century.

  John Stuart Mill, an older contemporary of Marx, combined traditional British imperialism with influences from German idealism in his own way. Like Marx, he was an economist, but no subverter of the discipline. Politically, he was a radical liberal and wavered between capitalism and socialism. He stood miles away from Spencer’s kind of merciless competitive liberalism.

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, philosophy took new paths. In England, a few young academics rebelled against the predominant Hegelianism and laid the foundations of what would come to be called analytical philosophy. On the Conti
nent, phenomenology took form. But now we are a good bit away from Marx’s lifetime.

  The only nineteenth-century philosopher who profoundly affected Marx was Hegel. He regarded the others with absentminded interest or pure contempt. Nevertheless, they were important elements in the background against which his life and thought played out.

  The Revolutions

  The French Revolution was an obvious reference point for most Europeans in the 1800s. The mere memory of it struck terror into the privileged classes, and instilled hope among the discontented and rebellious.

  It was a contradictory history. In only a few years, it changed its face again and again. It started as a protest against arbitrary royal power, and the powerlessness of the Third Estate against the nobility and the clergy. But its demands were soon radicalized, and new forces took over. Much was redone, from weights and measures and the calendar to schools and universities. Above all, relations among people were transformed. All revolutionaries agreed on greater political equality, even if not on how many would be given the right to vote. As regards social equality – the relation between the rich and the poor – opinions diverged widely.

  The necessary background to the revolution was eighteenth-century France’s combination of national destitution and brilliant intellectual creativity. The workers and small-scale craftsmen were starving; it was even worse for the immense rural underclass of small farmers and agricultural workers in the countryside. But before 1789, their combined wrath carried little weight against the absolute power that the king and his state apparatus possessed.

  Absolute power observed with distaste how new, radical ideas spread in ever wider circles. The representatives of these ideas spoke of enlightenment, which would put superstition and prejudice to flight and question everything that had tradition as its sole support. The chief work of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, published from 1752 to 1772, in which human reason constituted the sole guiding star and all the facets of reality were analysed.

  One of the original contributors to the encyclopaedia was Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Switzerland. But he soon left the project, and became the great naysayer of the Enlightenment. Faith in progress was hideous to him; his ideal was the simple life of a craftsman (but it is a lie that he ever would have wished to go ‘back to nature’). At the same time, it was his conviction that the people – all the people – should govern the country.

  It was this thought above all that guided the Jacobins, who with their leading representative Maximilien de Robespierre left their mark on the revolution during its most subversive period. It started with King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette being sentenced to death in 1793 and ended with the fall of Robespierre in July 1794. During their brief heyday, the Jacobins had the support of the more radical ‘Hébertists’, who under their leader Jacques René Hébert held a dominant position in Paris. But religion became a controversial issue between the Jacobins and the Hébertists. Hébert wanted to worship human reason alone. Robespierre, who believed in a sublime, rational God, could not tolerate that opinion and executed his opponent.

  Tens of thousands of other men and women who deviated from Robespierre’s line in one way or another shared Hébert’s fate during what the Jacobins themselves called la terreur, the Reign of Terror. In the end, Robespierre and his closest followers fell victim to the wave of killing they had set in motion.

  It is entirely too easy to reduce the period of Jacobin power to blood, tyranny, and executions. But it embraced more. There was a social pathos that was genuine. Property relations in society were to be changed. Everyone would get a portion of the country’s welfare. This ambition aroused bitter opposition among social classes that believed they had a right to more than others.

  For a short time, the Jacobins also implemented an idea launched back at the start of the revolution – that the right to vote should be linked to citizenship. Previously, it had always been associated with property; it was only property owners who were responsible for how society was governed. The Jacobins ensured the right to vote for all male citizens. But there were revolutionaries who wanted to go further and give all citizens, even women, the right to vote. There were three pioneers of this thinking: Olympe de Gouges, Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt, and Jean Antoine de Condorcet. All three were brutally forced aside by the ruling Jacobins. Olympe de Gouges was among those executed.

  After the fall of the Jacobins, a significantly more moderate faction took power. But ever since the beginning of the revolution, revolutionary France had been threatened by other powers, including its own aristocracy that had fled the country. Its enemies were successfully pushed back, but at the price of increasing militarization of the revolution. Ultimately, the cleverest and most successful of all the revolutionary generals took power alone: Napoleon Bonaparte, who after a few years proclaimed himself emperor. In some respects, Napoleon carried out the revolutionary programme; in many others, he broke completely with it. He was careful to keep the large majority of people on his side – for example, it was through a referendum that he ensured absolute power for himself, and he blocked all attempts to restore the privileges that applied before the revolution. He let the Jews – who, thanks to the revolution, could leave the ghettos – remain free; when Black slaves made a revolution similar to the French one in Haiti, however, he met them with brutal military force but was beaten back. He compromised with the Church, and created the modern state bureaucracy after the pattern of the army he so capably led. Above all, he was a warrior who traversed the European continent, victorious until he made the mistake of trying to conquer all of Russia. Weakened after the campaign for Moscow, he was defeated by his many enemies.

  The victorious powers let France remain a Great Power, but at the price of the reactionaries’ victory; a new king of the same dynasty as the old one was crowned, and the nobility and clergy waited hungrily to regain their privileges. But everything that had been changed during the revolutionary period up through Napoleon’s rule could not be undone. The new regime met stiff resistance. Dissatisfaction fermented, and in 1830 the ‘July Revolution’ broke out. Although craftsmen played a decisive role on the barricades, it was the upper bourgeoisie who won the day. A new king with limited power was installed, and the leading politician – François Guizot – restricted the right to vote to property owners. To everyone who could not reach the required level of assets, he directed a challenge: ‘Get rich! Get rich!’ (Charles Baudelaire, the first great poet of modernism, responded with the poem ‘Get Drunk!’)

  Such challenges aroused a growing anger. But it was now not only in France that the sitting regime was threatened, but in almost all of Europe. The 1840s were a remarkable decade, brimming over with new political ideas and programmes. The finale came in February 1848, when revolutions broke out, first in France and then in country after country over a large part of the continent – in fact, the unrest spread all the way up to Scandinavia. The scent of victory was in the air; ordinary people – craftsmen and workers – were full of hope. But the rebellion failed everywhere. France even got a new emperor, a second Napoleon. In Great Britain, the country that had gone the furthest in industrial and economic development, absolutely nothing happened politically.

  If anyone had said that these would be the last in the classic suite of revolutions initiated in 1640s England (where a king had also been executed, just as in France 150 years later), not many would have believed them. But that is how it was. Later revolutions on the continent came after devastating wars. Only one of them – the Russian Revolution in 1917 – resulted in a regime that was in existence for a longer period.

  The deep economic crisis of 1856–57 did not lead to any political revolutions; afterwards, a prolonged economic boom set in that certainly did not lift the poor out of their poverty but nevertheless soothed their minds. A series of limited wars took place. Prussia emerged victorious from several showdowns with its neighbours, and after the last one – against Fr
ance – a number of previously separate German states united in 1871 under Prussian supremacy in what was called the German Reich. Up until then, there had been a motley collection of kingdoms, duchies, and of free cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. (Some of the duchies were not much larger than a stage for light opera.) But even after Napoleon’s defeat, Prussia had secured a dominant position among the German-speaking states. Its only real counterweight was the great Habsburg Empire, with its political centre in Vienna and an overwhelmingly non-German – Slavic or Hungarian – population. After the revolutions of 1848–49, Hungarian ruling families strengthened their position and the result was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which existed until the end of the First World War.

  But after 1871 the German Reich stood out as the strongest power on the European continent. After its victory against France, it subjugated two important French provinces: Alsace and Lorraine.

  In war-torn France, a rebellion broke out in Paris, led by a motley band of craftsmen, workers, intellectuals, and even an officer. The result was the Paris Commune, a political experiment characterized equally by creativity and confusion, and after two months it was brought to an end with great brutality by the recently defeated troops now led by a strong French bourgeoisie. Order was restored, but the memory of the short-lived experiment in socialism lived on, especially inspiring the revolutionaries in Russia.

  The economic boom broke in 1873, but this did not lead to any great disturbances. Europe’s Great Powers devoted themselves with renewed energy to subjugating territories in foreign lands – Africa in particular. Colonialism was not a new phenomenon; the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English had already conquered large territories on other continents – in fact, a number of smaller states had tried to grab some of the overabundance that countries, defenceless against European cannons, offered. But towards the end of the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, this unscrupulous treatment accelerated. New states – above all Germany and Belgium – joined the race.