Evocative analysis of a watershed
Review Essay of Eric Hobsbawm's 19th century trilogy
This trilogy covers Europe from the French Revolution to the eve of World War I. Though Hobsbawm is often criticized as basic and obvious, I read his trilogy as a review and articulation of a number of issues that have long fascinated me, that is, the watershed developments that shape the modern world (e.g., the establishment of constitutional democracy, industrialization, and secularization, to name just a few). It can also serve as a splendid introduction to these issues. The approach is not narrative, but coolly analytic.
The first book (The Age of Revolution, Europe 1789–1848) is about a double revolution. First, there was a political revolution of profound importance: the French Revolution swept away the old order of aristocratic privilege, opening jobs in government and the military to talent. At least for a time, the traditional hierarchies disappeared, crushed finally by a violent purge of those in power.
Many in the US think that this is misplaced emphasis, that the American Revolution is the one of real significance. However, I think Hobsbawm makes a convincing case that it was France's that was most important because it was also a social revolution. The American one left most social structures in place, life could go on more or less the same as before, as a free-enterprise society whose hierarchies and privilege already were far more fluid than those in Europe; its value was in the creation of democratic institutions that could evolve, which occurred later in Europe.
This also meant that, in Europe, the old certainties began to disappear, freeing peasants from hereditary obligations. Peasants were free to stay put or migrate to cities to seek entirely new kinds of careers without traditional protections. Of course, they also lost the safety-net obligations traditionally furnished by from property owners or aristocrats, however minimal they might have been. In addition, as people increasingly lived outside of the narrow confines of rural communities, the church began to lose its monopoly hold on the popular imagination. Ironically, it was the dictator Napoleon who spread many of the ideas of the French Revolution to the rest of Europe by force.
The second revolution was industrial and perfectly symbiotic with the French socio-political revolution: it was a new means of production and organization of both the economy and society, which combined to form the capitalist system. A new class arose, the bourgeois, who invested in business and accumulated capital, basing their livelihood not on static agricultural resources and property ownership, but on an ever-changing, dynamic "market" for goods.
At the very beginning, Hobsbawm identifies three parts that fit capitalism together in Britain: 1) the invention of the textile industry; 2) a rise in steel production, principally for machine tools and railroads; 3) the creation of a new market of consumers, who would buy the new goods and find employments making them. It represented a huge expansion in trade. The new economic actors – bourgeois managers and their working class counterparts – fundamentally transformed the urban landscape as cities and transportation networks grew to unprecedented proportions.
Interestingly, Hobsbawm also convinced me that the vision of ever-rising living standards – now such standard fare in our political salesmanship – were impossible to foresee, particularly at the beginning. That means that the early capitalist system survived by brute force rather than good will. As markets matured and the original textile industries were no longer profitable, it was the workers who bore the costs in the form of reduced salaries and living standards, often in the most horrible of urban slums. This explains the rise of socialism, also coeval with the industrial revolution, an ideology preaching a radically different means of ownership of production. It reached a crisis point in the 1840s with a major depression and food-production catastrophe, of which the Irish potato famine was merely one example. The crisis led directly into the transnational insurrectionary convulsions of 1848, the consequences of which were only worked out after World War I in more democratic regimes, but also in the birth of the USSR, the radical communist experiment.
These are the core ideas of the first book. But Hobsbawm doesn't stop there: he also explains the intellectual currents of the time in a way that fits with his core ideas. This is about the transition away from Enlightenment reason, particularly as it was imposed by authoritarian despots to shape societies. The ideas that rose in their place were those of the Romantics, with their respect for a nascent idea of the unconscious, the view of society as an organic construct that evolved in multiple directions, the relativism that was replacing the certainties of a mechanistic worldview, and the rejection of simplistic quasi-platonic ideals. These changes came with the sweeping away of traditional social structures and certainties, in particular the consolations of pervasive religious fundamentalism.
The next volume (The Age of Capital, 1848-1875) covers the golden age of bourgeois – “liberal” – democracy. Beginning with the failure of the radical democratic revolutions of 1848, this era was one of relative stability in an otherwise tumultuous century. For the moment in an era of steady economic growth, the concerns of the working class faded into the background as societies become part of a global market (living standards at last began to rise), authoritarian regimes begin to make some modest concessions, and the bourgeois emerge as the dominant economic and political class.
If the violent revolutions of 1848 were smashed by reactionary forces allied to the old regimes, the ruling class recognized that it would have to make concessions that favored the development of inchoate democracies. That meant that, with the exception of Russia and Turkey, the traditional authoritarian, aristocratic regimes all but disappeared. In their places arose limited democracies that were powered not by traditional aristocrats, but a new class of industrialists and businessmen. It was an important step towards constitutionalism as the new ideal for the developed world. While weak, with perhaps only 10-20% of the population enfranchised to vote and various authoritarian reactions such as that of Napoleon III, in my opinion this represents great progress and possibility.
On the economic front, change was rapid and portentous of a transformation of society so fundamental that we are still in the midst of it. First, as factories arose, the cities grew massively with both peasants and immigrants (particularly in the Americas). Urban dwellers were a huge sea of people in often horrible working conditions and as yet relatively disorganized politically. Second, the world economy began to forge intimate interconnections, forming the first truly global market. Though autarkic regions remained, many areas became integrated in a new kind of trade regime, with monocultures, raw materials in exchange for industrial goods, and a myriad of other arrangements. As a result, economic slowdowns could become world wide depressions. Third, new technologies enabled and speeded these transitions, particularly in transportation and communications.
Societies also changed. Not only did the aristocracy lose its privileged position, but work arrangements became contractual rather than the involuntary “stations” that one was given or born into in the previous century. This opened up the “meritocracy” to talent, particularly for the newly rich, who entered government and other elite positions long denied them. Manual laborers were also given a smattering of rights. An array of new jobs and careers grew out of this. Education became a national priority, encouraging the rise of research universities and huge new academies for military and other administrative functions. In the bourgeois home, status and ownership of things became the new norm, with cultivation of the individual as a new kind of goal. Much of this worked against traditional religion – secularism grew alongside political consciousness. Of course, many in the proletariat and the colonies were excluded and exploited, but their concerns and activism would emerge soon on their own terms.
Hobsbawn also covers (in a much more superficial manner) developments in science and the arts in this period. The sciences saw the rise of historicism in the theories of evolution by Charles Darwin, also displacing traditional religion in some quarters. In art, not only did ownership become important to the bourgeois household, engendering an explosive demand for lithographs and print etchings, but the traditional boundaries were beginning to be questioned, e.g. impressionism in France was replacing neo-classical realism around 1870.
This period abruptly ended as the world fell into the first global depression, one of the greatest economic downturns that mankind had yet known. Not only did this threaten the fragile status of the new elites, but it saw the rise of true working class revolutionary forces. The liberal-bourgeois ascendancy was effectively over.
The concluding volume (The Age of Empire, 1875-1914) covers the rise of more inclusive institutions and politics – the regimes of Western Europe and even statesmen as powerful as Bismarck realized there was no turning back. This opened the political scene to an astonishing array of new ideas and possibilities. From the business-dominated conservatism and complacency of the previous 30 years, socialism, colonialism, the welfare state and a plethora of other movements emerged and were taken seriously by leaders who wanted to gain or maintain their power. Not only did this create new socio-political arrangements, but in the effort to “control the masses”, it also spawned a new kind of political cynicism: populist nationalism.
A big part of this was the ascendency of the notion of nationalism. The old certainties went into precipitous decline: religion, permanent rural “stations” in life as opposed to proletariat work in cities, and fealty to traditional elites. The emerging “masses” required new means of control, new values and certainties. To a great extent, this gap was filled by loyalty to the “nation”, defined by language, ethnicity, history and place. The nation become a kind of new God. It required consolidation and solidarity, sometimes even the creation of a language (often by wiping out regional dialects, as in the case of Hochdeutsch) and schools that proffered ideology as well as a ladder for advancement into bureaucracy and other new jobs. It represented a new kind of allegiance, which became very powerful in the coming decades, easily eclipsing the supra-national ideologies, such as communism, that were emerging yet still poorly organized.
As the economic depression lifted, optimism returned with great, ultimately naive, force: many of the elite and even the common people thought that progress would be endless, an attitude that in many quarters survives to this day. However, in contrast to the liberal regime that championed openness and laissez faire, the handful of developed nations adopted a more mercantilist policy, combining protectionism and industrial policy. Part and parcel of this was the colonial carve-up of the world by the industrial powers. This created a subordinate relationship, whereby the colonies represented protected markets for industrial goods and provided raw materials to enable their production in the empire's imperial seat. There was a rhetorical “civilizing mission” to all of it, but it only affected extremely limited local elites.
Finally, the global trade system culminated in the heavy-industrial phase of modern capitalism, when resources came to be mobilized on a national scale as well as dependent on international networks. This was the Gilded Age, when a handful of individuals emerged who could manipulate the system, enriching themselves on unimaginable scales. This was the time of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Rothschild, and Krupp.
A major theme of the book is the lead up to World War I. While mentioning the bourgeois ennui with the long period of peace (the Belle Epoque), Hobsbawm settles on the attitude of Great Britain as a principal cause. The continent had had a number of alliances, a kind of balance of forces that ensured an equilibrium of relatively minor wars that never became too destructive. However, as the German Navy began to encroach on British prerogative, the basis of its far flung Empire, it began to compete directly for mastery of the seas. So, Britain uncharacteristically allied itself with France and Russia, upsetting the old balance. Add to that a technological arms race, and a major conflict became inevitable, though its form was hard to predict and certainly would have taken a less horrific course.
There are many other interesting details, such as the evolution of science, which because less rigidly deterministic – relying on statistics rather than direct causation – and also more abstract, i.e. less commonsensical, less intuitive, more theoretical, particularly with new branches of mathematics and the new physics that Einstein pioneered. In the arts, there was also a decline of realism, emphasizing the subjective and individual perceptions in the modernist movement. In the meantime, the electorate continued to expand to the poor and even to the suffragettes in some cases. This is all covered too quickly, but it would represent a book in itself for a less superficial treatment.
This is one of those wonderful works about a subject I know well, but that pushes in new directions while serving as a review of things I have struggled to comprehend. It is very rare for me to find such a work, one that makes me feel awestruck all over again, renewing my hunger to dig deeper. I finished the trilogy, then read it all the way through again, underlining like I used to do as an undergraduate.
It felt very fresh to me, even though it is about 50 years old and supposedly "Marxist". The only thing I could identify as Marxist was an emphasis on class relations, but it fits what was going rather than forcing different kinds of factors into such an analysis. I ended by not being sure what Marxist even meant.
This is a valuable analysis of historical forces, but there wasn't enough for me about the diplomacy of the time. I wanted a better explanation of Metternich's system and the Congress of Vienna; the agreements related to colonization; the customs and arrangements that enabled the balance of power to last for so long. There is also too little on the abolition of slavery, which was the major economic and moral struggle of the time.
Of course, it is easy to dismiss the book as elementary, like a Will Durant treatment. I found the quality of it very high, a great, very fun read. Hobsbawm successfully analyses the configuration of forces then emerging better than any other historian of the 19th century that I know. The book is beautifully written, It was a period that brought change as significant as that of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years before. Hobsbawm is the best introductory guide with a global perspective.
A complementary and more abstract review:
