What did "liberalism" mean in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution?
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What did "liberalism" mean in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution?
We can look at the central principles of liberalism in the terms of their views on the individual, on society, and on history itself. The classical liberal tradition, which emerges in opposition to monarchies, believes that individuals are possessed of reason and they want to be free.
Therefore, and this leads to their vision of society, the best way to organize society is to set it up in such a way that individuals have the greatest realm of autonomy to use their reason and run their lives as they see fit. As a result of this tenet, liberals believed in smaller government that would not interfere in peoples' personal beliefs, in their right to practice religion, or in the way that they conducted their affairs. They also believed that the state should not interfere in the economy because people should be allowed to use their rationality to defend their own interests, enter into contracts, and conduct business as they saw fit.
Finally, of course, liberals believe that if you could set up a society under these terms, things would get better. Liberalism is, in essence, an optimistic worldview; it believes in progress. This was characteristic of many of the Enlightenment thinkers and of the revolutionaries who so optimistically set out to remake France at the end of the 18th century, who were imbued with these ideas.
Of course, the French Revolution didn't work out the way many people had planned. The terror, the violence, the civil conflict, and the terrible suffering that was inflicted upon Europe as a result of the French Revolution caused many liberals in Europe to back away from their enthusiastic support of these ideas. They began to seek more moderate goals. Instead of endorsing outright democratic reforms, they might insist upon high qualifications of property ownership for citizenship. They weren't going to let everybody vote, only those who had a stake in the nation.
In the first half of the 19th century we see a much more moderate version of liberalism taking place while, at the same time, liberalism was being outflanked on the left by the emergence of a new ideology, socialism, which was an even more radical and revolutionary critique both of the monarchies that still ruled much of Europe and of liberal plans for reform.
What was distinctive about Karl Marx's vision of a socialist revolution in the nineteenth century?
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What was distinctive about Karl Marx's vision of a socialist revolution in the nineteenth century?
The emergence of a socialist critique of the industrialized economy in Europe in the first half of the 19th century really changed the definition of the word, revolution, in fundamental ways. Prior to this period, revolution was largely associated with liberal plans to change the political order of society. Liberals in the French Revolution wanted to establish the order of the rule of law, to bring a constitution to the monarchy. More radical revolutionaries still within the liberal tradition wanted to establish more representative political institutions.
In the first half of the 19th century, socialists posited that these kinds of political changes - changing these institutions and establishing representative institutions - aren't going to remedy the real problem. The real problem is an economic order based on exploitation, on the expropriation of wealth from the laboring classes. The inequalities produced by industrialization were, for socialists, the primary injustice that needed a remedy. In their eyes, a revolution meant reorganizing society from the bottom-up, abolishing private property, which they saw as the essence of the world's injustice, and reorganizing in accordance with collective principles of ownership.
Karl Marx has a special place within this emergence of a socialist critique of the industrialized economy because he believed that this socialist revolution, this reorganization of society from the bottom-up, was going to happen naturally as a part of history itself. He called this theory Historical Materialism, which was in fact a theory of human history as a whole, based upon an analysis of the material base of society, the ways societies produce wealth and organize themselves on economic terms. What Mark decided and claimed in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was that every society in human history has as its central characteristic some form of economic organization based upon a division of labor. And this division of labor produces necessarily different social groups who have a different social relationship with the productive process. What's more, these social groups or, classes, as he called them, are in conflict with one another. Periodically, this conflict erupts into something much more threatening, producing a revolution, a transformation of society, and the development of a different kind of economic order.
What Marx thought he was observing in Europe in the 19th century was a conflict between what he called a bourgeoisie capitalist class and an industrial proletariat who were produced by the process of capitalistic development itself. This is what made Marx's vision of socialism different from other varieties of socialism that existed at the time: he identified the industrial proletariat as the agent of revolution and prophesized that it was inevitable, that it was a part of history itself.