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Eric Hobsbawm's magnificent treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 is a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism and the consolidation of bourgeois culture. In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. The extension of capitalist economy to four corners of the globe, the mounting concentration of wealth, the migration of men, the domination of Europe and European culture made the third quarter of the nineteenth century a watershed. This is a history not only of Europe but of the world. Eric Hobsbawm's intention is not to summarise facts, but to draw facts together into a historical synthesis, to 'make sense of' the period, and to trace the roots of the present world back to it. He integrates economics with political and intellectual developments in this objective yet original account of revolution and the failure of revolution, of the cycles of boom and slump that characterise capitalist economies, of the victims and victors of the bourgeois ethos.… (plus d'informations)
O autor demonstra um profundo conhecimento do período em análise e, sobretudo uma boa capacidade de organizar as ideias e facilidade em expô-las. O que mais se salienta nesta obra não é a vastidão dos conhecimentos do autor sob os vários parâmetros de análise (político, económico, social, cientifico, religioso, filosófico, artístico), mas sim a capacidade de conseguir analisar sob cada um destes parâmetros separadamente e, ao mesmo tempo mostrar as relações e implicações que há entre eles. A análise politico-social é particularmente interessante e fundamentada. ( )
Lost amid his other majestic histories of the long nineteenth century, Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital, covering the years 1848-1875, still makes a highly readable account of that quarter of a century between the wave of revolutions in 1848 to 1875. I head already read Hobsbawm's other entries on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and worried that a book about economics in the mid-nineteenth century would be dull. It was not. ( )
Only in recent years have I come to appreciate how significant 19th century history actually was. This book examines the years 1848-1875 primarily from an economic point of view but it also covers political and cultural history. It treats both European and Asian history as well. The one negative aspect of the book is its writing style with its overly long paragraphs and its tendency to hope around geographically and through time. If you already have a good grasp of this period that should be no problem. ( )
La era del capital de Eric Hobsbawm: La era del capital es la segunda parte de ese gran panorama. Hobsbawm nos muestra aquí los años triunfales del ascenso del capitalismo industrial y de la cultura burguesa que van de 1848 a 1875, cuando, apagados los rescoldos de la revolución, se inicia un tiempo de nuevos valores y nuevas perspectivas, de transformaciones sociales, que ve la formación de grandes fortunas y la migración de masas empobrecidas, mientras una Europa sometida al nuevo ritmo de los auges y las crisis extiende sus empresas económicas y su cultura al resto del planeta. Hobsbawm nos habla de los acontecimientos políticos, de la evolución económica y de los hechos culturales en una síntesis vigorosa y original.. ( )
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: ‘capitalism’. It therefore seems apposite to call the present volume The Age of Capital, a title which also reminds us that the major work of capitalism’s most formidable critic, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), was published in these years. For the global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rested on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling in the dearest. An economy so based, and therefore resting naturally on the sound foundations of a bourgeoisie composed of those whom energy, merit and intelligence had raised to their position and kept there, would – it was believed – not only create a world of suitably distributed material plenty, but of ever-growing enlightenment, reason and human opportunity, an advance of the sciences and the arts, in brief a world of continuous and accelerating material and moral progress. The few remaining obstacles in the way of the untrammelled development of private enterprise would be swept away. The institutions of the world, or rather of those parts of the world not still debarred by the tyranny of tradition and superstition or by the unfortunate fact of not having white skins (preferably originating in the central and north-western parts of Europe), would gradually approximate to the international model of a territorially defined ‘nation-state’ with a constitution guaranteeing property and civil rights, elected representative assemblies and governments responsible to them, and, where suitable, a participation in politics of the common people within such limits as would guarantee the bourgeois social order and avoid the risk of its overthrow.
The history of our period is therefore lopsided. It is primarily that of the massive advance of the world economy of industrial capitalism, of the social order it represented, of the ideas and beliefs which seemed to legitimatize and ratify it: in reason, science, progress and liberalism. It is the era of the triumphant bourgeois, though the European bourgeoisie still hesitated to commit itself to public political rule. To this – and perhaps only to this – extent the age of revolution was not dead. The middle classes of Europe were frightened and remained frightened of the people: ‘democracy’ was still believed to be the certain and rapid prelude to ‘socialism’. The men who officially presided over the affairs of the victorious bourgeois order in its moment of triumph were a deeply reactionary country nobleman from Prussia, an imitation emperor in France and a succession of aristocratic landowners in Britain. The fear of revolution was real, the basic insecurity it indicated, deep-seated. At the very end of our period the only example of revolution in an advanced country, an almost localized and short-lived insurrection in Paris, produced a greater bloodbath than anything in 1848 and a flurry of nervous diplomatic exchanges. Yet by this time the rulers of the advanced states of Europe, with more or less reluctance, were beginning to recognize not only that ‘democracy’, i.e. a parliamentary constitution based on a wide suffrage, was inevitable, but also that it would probably be a nuisance but politically harmless. This discovery had long since been made by the rulers of the United States.
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Here the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital and machinery uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public, whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods.
William Whewell, 1852
A people can achieve material well-being without subversive tactics if they are docile, hard-working and constantly apply themselves to their own self-improvement.
From the statutes of the Société contre l'Ignorance of Clermont-Ferrand, 1869
If nationalism was one historic force recognised by governments, “democracy”, or the growing role of the common man in the affairs of state, was the other. The two were the same, in so far as nationalist movements in this period became mass movements, and certainly at this point pretty well all radical nationalist leaders supposed them to be identical. However, as we have seen, in practice large bodies of common people, such as peasants, still remained unaffected by nationalism even in the countries in which their participation in politics were seriously considered, while others, notably the new working classes, were being urged to follow movements which, at least in theory, put a common international class interest above national affiliations. At all events, from the point of view of ruling classes the important thing was not what “the masses” believed, but that their beliefs now counted in politics. They were, by definition, numerous, ignorant and dangerous; most dangerous precisely by virtue of their ignorant tendency to believe their eyes, which told them that their rulers paid too little attention to their miseries, and the simple logic which suggested to them that, since they formed the bulk of the people, government should primarily serve their interests.
Yet it became increasingly clear in the developed and industrialised countries of the west that sooner or later the political systems would have to make room for them. Moreover, it also became clear that the liberalism which formed the basic ideology of the bourgeois world had no theoretical defences against this contingency. Its characteristic form of political organisation was representative government through elected assemblies, representing not (as in feudal states) social interests or collectivities, but aggregates of individuals, of legally equal status. Self-interest, caution, or even a certain common sense might well suggest to those on top that all men were not equally capable of deciding the great questions of government, the illiterate less than the university graduates, the superstitious less than the enlightened, the feckless poor less than those who had proved their capacity of rational behaviour by the accumulation of property. However, quite apart from the lack of conviction such arguments carried to those at the bottom, other than the most conservative, they had two major weaknesses. Legal equality could not make such distinctions in theory. What was considerably more important, they became increasingly hard to make in practice, as social mobility and educational progress, both essential to bourgeois society, blurred the division between the middle strata and their social inferiors. Where, in the great and increasing mass of the “respectable” workers and lower middle classes who adopted so much of the values and, in so far as their means allowed, the behaviour, of the bourgeoisie, was the line to be drawn? Wherever it was drawn, if it included any large number of them, it was likely to include a substantial body of citizens who did not support several of the ideas which bourgeois liberalism regarded as essential to the prospering of society, and who might well oppose them passionately. Furthermore, and most decisively, the 1848 revolutions had shown how the masses could irrupt into the closed circle of their rulers, and the progress of industrial society itself made their pressure constantly greater even in non-revolutionary periods.
Yet, whatever the ultimate prospects (and modern historians are less optimistic than the Marx of the 1850s), in the immediate present the most obvious result of western conquest was ‘the loss of (the) Old world with no gain of a new one’, which imparted ‘a peculiar kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu’ as of other peoples who were the victims of the west. The gains were hard to discern in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the losses only too evident. On the positive side there were steamships, railways and telegraphs, small knots of western-educated intellectuals, even smaller ones of local landlords and businessmen who amassed enormous fortunes out of their control of the sources of exports and the disposal of foreign loans, like the hacendados of Latin America, or their position as middlemen for foreign business, like the Parsi millionaires of Bombay. There was communication – material and cultural. There was a growth of exportable production in some suitable areas, though hardly as yet on a huge scale. There was, arguably, a substitution of order for public disorder, security for insecurity in some areas which came under direct colonial rule. But only the congenital optimist would argue that these outweighed the negative side of the balance-sheet at this period.
The most obvious contrast between developed and underdeveloped worlds was and still remains that between poverty and wealth. In the first, people still starved to death, but by now in what the nineteenth century regarded as small numbers: say an average of five hundred a year in the United Kingdom. In India they died in their millions – one in ten of the population of Orissa in the famine of 1865—6, anything between a quarter and a third of the population of Rajputana in 1868—70, 3½ million (or 15 per cent of the population) in Madras, one million (or 20 per cent of the population) in Mysore during the great hunger of 1876—8, the worst up to that date in the gloomy history of nineteenth-century India. In China it is not easy to separate famine from the numerous other catastrophes of the period, but that of 1849 is said to have cost nearly 14 million lives, while another 20 million are believed to have perished between 1854 and 1864. Parts of Java were ravaged by a terrible famine in 1848—50. The late 1860s and early 1870s saw an epidemic of hunger in the entire belt of countries stretching from India in the east to Spain in the west. The Moslem population of Algeria dropped by over 20 per cent between 1861 and 1872. Persia, whose total people were estimated to number between 6 and 7 million in the mid-1870s, was believed to have lost between and 1½ and 2 million in the great famine of 1871—3. It is difficult to say whether the situation was worse than in the first half of the century (though this was probably so in India and China), or merely unchanged. In any case the contrast with the developed countries during the same period was dramatic, even if we grant (as seems likely for the Islamic world) that the age of traditional and catastrophic demographic movements was already giving way to a new population pattern in the second half of the century.
In short, the bulk of the peoples in the Third World did not as yet appear to benefit significantly from the extraordinary, the unprecedented, progress of the west. If they were aware of it at all as something other than the mere disruption of their ancient ways of life, it was as a possible example rather than as a reality; as something done by and for red- and sallow-faced men in curious hard hats with cylindrical trousers who came from far countries or lived in big cities. It did not belong to their world, and most of them very much doubted whether they wanted it to. But those who resisted it in the name of their ancient ways were defeated. The day of those who resisted it with the weapons of progress itself had not yet arrived.
The ‘Wild West’ is so powerful a myth that it is difficult to analyse it with any realism. Very nearly the only historically accurate fact about it that has entered general knowledge is that it lasted only a short time, its heyday falling between the Civil War and the collapse of mining and cattle booms in the 1880s. Its ‘wildness’ was not due to the Indians, who were ready enough to live at peace with the whites, except perhaps in the extreme southwest, where tribes like the Apache (1871—86) and the (Mexican) Yaqui (1875—1926) fought the last of several centuries’ wars to maintain their independence from the white men. It was due to the institutions, or rather the absence of effective institutions, of government and law in the United States. (There was no ‘Wild West’ in Canada, where even gold-rushes were not anarchic, and the Sioux, who fought and beat Custer in the United States before being massacred, lived quietly there.) The anarchy (or, to use a more neutral term, the passion for armed self-help) was perhaps exaggerated by the dream of freedom as well as of gold which lured men to the west. Beyond the frontier of farm-settlement and city there were no families: in 1870 Virginia City had more than two men for every woman, and only 10 per cent children. It is true that the Western myth has degraded even this dream. Its heroes are more often than not desperadoes and barroom gunmen like Wild Bill Hickok who never had much to be said in their favour, rather than the unionized immigrant miners. Yet, even allowing for this, it should not be idealized. The dream of freedom did not apply to the Indians or the Chinese (who formed almost a third of the population of Idaho in 1870). In the racist southwest – Texas belonged to the Confederacy – it certainly did not apply to the Negroes. And though so much of what we regard as ‘Western’, from the cowboy’s costume to the Spanish-based ‘Californian custom’ which became the effective mining law in the American mountains, derived from the Mexicans, who probably also supplied more cowboys than any other single group, it did not apply to the Mexicans. It was a dream of poor whites, who hoped to replace the private enterprise of the bourgeois world by gambling, gold and guns.
If there is nothing very obscure about the ‘opening of the West’, the nature and origins of the American Civil War (1861—5) have led to endless dispute among historians. This centres on the nature of the slave society of the Southern states and its possible compatibility with the dynamically expanding capitalism of the North. Was it a slave society at all, given that Negroes were always in a minority even in the Deep South (apart from a few patches), and considering that the majority of slaves worked not on the classical large plantation but in small numbers on white farms or as domestics? It can hardly be denied that slavery was the central institution of Southern society, or that it was the major cause of friction and rupture between the Northern and Southern states. The real question is why it should have led to secession and civil war, rather than to some sort of formula of coexistence. After all, though no doubt most people in the North detested slavery, militant abolitionism alone was never strong enough to determine the Union’s policy. And Northern capitalism, whatever the private views of businessmen, might well have found it as possible and convenient to come to terms with and exploit a slave South as international business has with the ‘apartheid’ of South Africa.
The second distinguishing characteristic of this pioneer era of American big business, big money and big power was that most of its successful practitioners, unlike so many of the great entrepreneurs of the Old World, who often seemed obsessed with technological construction as such, seemed uncommitted to any special way of making money. All they wanted was to maximize profits, though it happens that most of them met in and through the great money-maker of the age, railroads. Cornelius Vanderbilt had a mere 10–20 million dollars before he got into railroads, which brought him an extra 80–90-odd millions in sixteen years. Small wonder, when men like the California crowd – Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900), Leland Stanford (1824–93), Charles Crocker (1822–88) and Mark Hopkins (1813–78) – could unblushingly charge three times the actual cost of building the Central Pacific Railroad, and racketeers like Fisk and Gould could scoop up millions by rigged dealing and looting without actually organizing the laying of a single sleeper or the departure of a single locomotive.
Few of the first-generation millionaires made their career in a single branch of activity. Huntington began by selling hardware to gold-rush miners in Sacramento. Perhaps his customers included the meat magnate Philip Armour (1832–1901 ) who tried his luck in the goldfields before turning to the grocery business in Milwaukee, which in turn enabled him to make a killing in pork during the Civil War. Jim Fisk was in turn circus hand, hotel waiter, pedlar and dry-goods salesman, before discovering the possibilities of war contracts and thereafter the stock exchange. Jay Gould was in turn cartographer and leather merchant, before discovering what could be done with railway stock. Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) did not concentrate his energies on steel until he was almost forty. He began as a telegraphist, continued as a railway executive – his income already made from investments whose value was rapidly increasing – dabbled in oil (which was the chosen field of John D. Rockefeller, who began life as a clerk and book-keeper in Ohio), while gradually moving into the industry he was to dominate. All these men were speculators and ready to move towards the big money wherever it was. None had noticeable scruples or could afford to have in an economy and an age where fraud, bribery, slander and if necessary guns were normal aspects of competition. All were hard men, and most would have regarded the question whether they were honest as considerably less relevant to their affairs than the question whether they were smart. Not for nothing did ‘Social Darwinism’, the dogma that those who climbed to the top of the heap were the best, because the fittest to survive in the human jungle, become something like a national theology in the late-nineteenth-century United States.
Perhaps this led to a greater emphasis on the other economic incentive. If any single factor dominated the lives of nineteenth-century workers it was insecurity. They did not know at the beginning of the week how much they would bring home at the end. They did not know how long their present work would last or, if they lost it, when they would get another job or under what conditions. They did not know when accident or sickness would hit them, and though they knew that some time in middle age – perhaps in the forties for unskilled labourers, perhaps in the fifties for the more skilled – they would become incapable of doing a full measure of adult physical labour, they did not know what would happen to them between then and death. Theirs was not the insecurity of peasants, at the mercy of periodic – and to be honest, often more murderous – catastrophes such as drought and famine, but capable of predicting with some accuracy how a poor man or woman would spend most days of their lives from birth to the graveyard. It was a more profound unpredictability, in spite of the fact that probably a good proportion of workers were employed for long periods of their lives by a single employer. There was no certainty of work even for the most skilled: during the slump of 1857–8 the number of workers in the Berlin engineering industry fell by almost a third. There was nothing that corresponds to modern social security, except charity and relief from actual destitution, and sometimes little of either.
For the world of liberalism insecurity was the price paid for both progress and freedom, not to mention wealth, and was made tolerable by continuous economic expansion. Security was to be bought – at least sometimes – but not for free men and women but, as the English terminology put it clearly, for ‘servants’ – whose liberty was strictly constrained: domestic servants, ‘railway servants’, even ‘civil servants’ (or public officials). In fact, the greatest body even of these, the urban domestic servants, did not enjoy the security of the favoured family retainers of the traditional nobility and gentry, but constantly faced insecurity in its most terrible form: instant dismissal ‘without a character’, i.e. a recommendation to future employers from the former master, or more likely mistress. For the world of the established bourgeois was also considered to be basically insecure, a state of war in which they might at any moment become the casualties of competition, fraud or economic slump, though in practice the businessmen who were thus vulnerable probably formed only a minority of the middle classes, and the penalty of failure was rarely manual labour, let alone the workhouse. The most serious risk which faced them was that to their involuntarily parasitic women-folk – the unexpected death of the male breadwinner.
Neither economic incentives nor insecurity therefore provided a really effective general mechanism for keeping labour hard at work; the former, because their scope was limited, the latter because much of it was or seemed as unavoidable as the weather. The middle class found this hard to understand. Why should the best, soberest and ablest workers be the ones most likely to form trade unions, since they were the very ones who were worth the highest wages and the most regular employment? But unions were in fact composed of and certainly led by such men, though the bourgeois mythology saw them as mobs of the stupid and misled, instigated by agitators who could not otherwise have earned a comfortable living. There was of course no mystery. The workers for whom employers competed were not merely the ones with the bargaining strength to make unions practicable, but also those most aware that ‘the market’ alone guaranteed them neither security nor what they thought they had a right to.
Dominance implies inferiority. But the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was divided on the nature of that inferiority of the lower classes about which there was no substantial disagreement, though attempts had to be made to distinguish, within the subaltern mass, between those who might be expected to rise into, at least, the respectable lower middle class and those who were beyond redemption, since success was due to personal merit, failure was clearly due to personal lack of merit. The traditional bourgeois ethic, puritan or secular, had ascribed this to moral or spiritual feebleness rather than to lack of intellect, for it was evident that not much in the way of brains was needed for success in business, and conversely that mere brains did not guarantee wealth and still less ‘sound’ views. This did not necessarily imply anti-intellectualism, though in Britain and the United States it was pervasive, because the triumphs of business were pre-eminently those of poorly educated men using empiricism and common sense. Even Ruskin reflected the common view when he argued that ‘busy metaphysicians are always entangling good and active people, and weaving cobwebs among the finest wheels of the world’s business’. Samuel Smiles put the matter more simply:
‘The experience to be gathered from books, though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom; and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than a stock of the former.’
From master to master-race was thus only a short step. Yet the right to dominate, the unquestioned superiority of the bourgeois as a species, implied not only inferiority but ideally an accepted, willing inferiority, as in the relation between man and woman (which once again symbolizes much about the bourgeois world view). The workers, like women, ought to be loyal and contented. If they were not, it must be due to that crucial figure in the social universe of the bourgeoisie, the ‘outside agitator’. Though nothing was more obvious to the naked eye than that the members of craft unions were likely to be the best, the most intelligent, the most skilled workers, the myth of the work-shy outsider exploiting simple-minded but basically sturdy operatives was indestructible. ‘The conduct of the workers is deplorable,’ wrote a French mining manager in 1869, in the process of ferociously repressing the sort of strike of which Zola’s Germinal has given us a vivid picture, ‘but one must recognize that they have been merely the savage instruments of agitators’. To be more precise: the active working-class militant or potential leader must be by definition an ‘agitator’, since he could not be fitted into the stereotype of obedience, dullness and stupidity. When in 1859 nine of the most upright miners from Seaton Delaval – ‘every man a teetotaller, six of them Primitive Methodists, and two of the six local preachers’ – were sent to jail for two months after a strike which they had opposed, the mine manager was quite clear on this point. ‘I know they are respectable men, and that is why I put them in prison. It is no use sending to jail those who cannot feel.’
Racism played a distinctly central role in another rapidly developing social science, anthropology, a merger of two originally quite distinct disciplines, ‘physical anthropology’ (chiefly deriving from anatomical and similar interests) and ‘ethnography’ or the description of various – communities. Both inevitably generally backward or primitive – confronted, and were indeed dominated by, the problem of the differences between different human groups and (as they were drawn into the evolutionist model), the problem of the descent of man and of different types of society, of which the bourgeois world appeared unquestionably the highest. Physical anthropology automatically led to the concept of ‘race’, since the physical differences between white, yellow or black peoples, Negroes, Mongols, Caucasians (or whatever other classifications might be used) were undeniable. This did not in itself imply any belief in racial inequality, superiority or inferiority, though when married to the study of the evolution of man on the basis of the pre-historic fossil record, it did. For man’s earliest identifiable ancestors – notably Neanderthal man – were clearly both more ape-like and culturally inferior to their discoverers. But if some existing races could be shown to be closer to the apes than others, would this not prove their inferiority?
The argument is feeble, but made a natural appeal to those who wanted to prove racial inferiority, e.g. of blacks to whites – or for that matter of anyone to whites. (The shape of the monkey could be discerned by the eye of prejudice even in the Chinese and Japanese, as witness many a modern cartoon.) But if Darwinian biological evolution suggested a hierarchy of races, so did the comparative method as applied in ‘cultural anthropology’, Of which E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) was the leading landmark. For E. B. Tylor (1832–1917), as for so many believers in ‘progress’ who observed communities and cultures which, unlike fossil man, had not died out these were not so much inferior by nature as representatives of an earlier stage of evolution on the road to modern civilization. They were analogous to infancy or childhood in the life of individual man. This implied a theory of stages – Tylor was influenced by Comte’s – which he applied (with the usual caution of respectable men touching on this still explosive subject) to religion. From the primitive ‘animism’ (a word invented by him) the road led to the higher monotheistic religions, and eventually the triumph of science which, capable of explaining increasingly large areas of experience without reference to spirit, would ‘in one department after another substitute for independent voluntary action the working out of systematic law’. Meanwhile, however, historically modified ‘survivals’ of earlier stages of civilization could be discerned everywhere, even in the evidently ‘backward’ parts of civilized nations, e.g. in the superstitions and customs of the countryside. Thus the peasant became a link between savage man and civilized society. Tylor, who thought of anthropology as ‘essentially a reformer’s science’, did not, of course, believe that this indicated any incapacity of peasants to become fully paid-up members of civilized society. But what was easier than to assume that those who represented the stage of childhood or adolescence in the development of civilization were themselves ‘child-like’ and had to be treated like children by their mature ‘parents’?
As the type of the Negro [wrote the Anthropological Review] is foetal, so that of the Mongol is infantile. And in strict accordance with this, we find that their government, literature and art are infantile also. They are beardless children whose life is a task and whose chief virtue consists in unquestioning obedience.
Or, as a Captain Osborn put it in a bluff naval way in 1860: ‘Treat them as children. Make them do what we know is for their benefit as well as our own, and all difficulties in China are at an end.’
Other races were therefore ‘inferior’, either because they represented an earlier stage of biological evolution or of socio-cultural evolution, or both. And their inferiority was proved because in fact the ‘superior race’ was superior by the criteria of its own society: technologically more advanced, militarily more powerful, richer and more ‘successful’. The argument was both flattering and convenient – so convenient that the middle classes were inclined to take it over from the aristocrats (who had long fancied themselves a superior race) for internal as well as international purposes: the poor were poor because they were biologically inferior and conversely, if citizens belonged to ‘lower races’, it was no wonder that they stayed poor and backward. The argument was not yet clothed in the garments of modern genetics, which had virtually not yet been invented: the now celebrated experiments of the monk Gregor Mendel (1822–84) on the sweet peas in his Moravian monastery garden (1865) passed completely unnoticed until they were rediscovered about 1900. But in a primitive way the view that the upper classes were a higher type of humanity, developing its superiority by endogamy, and threatened by mixture with the lower orders and even more by the more rapid increase of the inferior, was widely held. Conversely, as the (mainly Italian) school of ‘criminal anthropology’ purported to prove, the criminal, the anti-social, the socially underprivileged, belonged to a different and inferior human strain from the ‘respectable’, and could be recognized as such by measuring the skull or in other simple ways.
Racism pervades the thought of our period to an extent hard to appreciate today, and not always easy to understand. (Why, for instance, the widespread horror of miscegenation and the almost universal belief among whiles that ‘half-breeds’ inherited precisely the worst features of their parents’ races?) Apart from its convenience as a legitimation of the rule of white over coloured, rich over poor, it is perhaps best explained as a mechanism by means of which a fundamentally inegalitarian society based upon a fundamentally egalitarian ideology rationalized its inequalities, and attempted to justify and defend those privileges which the democracy implicit in its institutions must inevitably challenge. Liberalism had no logical defence against equality and democracy, so the illogical barrier of race was created: science itself, liberalism’s trump card, could prove that men were not equal.
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Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Eric Hobsbawm's magnificent treatment of the crucial years 1848-1875 is a penetrating analysis of the rise of capitalism and the consolidation of bourgeois culture. In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. The extension of capitalist economy to four corners of the globe, the mounting concentration of wealth, the migration of men, the domination of Europe and European culture made the third quarter of the nineteenth century a watershed. This is a history not only of Europe but of the world. Eric Hobsbawm's intention is not to summarise facts, but to draw facts together into a historical synthesis, to 'make sense of' the period, and to trace the roots of the present world back to it. He integrates economics with political and intellectual developments in this objective yet original account of revolution and the failure of revolution, of the cycles of boom and slump that characterise capitalist economies, of the victims and victors of the bourgeois ethos.
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▾Description selon les utilisateurs de LibraryThing
O que mais se salienta nesta obra não é a vastidão dos conhecimentos do autor sob os vários parâmetros de análise (político, económico, social, cientifico, religioso, filosófico, artístico), mas sim a capacidade de conseguir analisar sob cada um destes parâmetros separadamente e, ao mesmo tempo mostrar as relações e implicações que há entre eles.
A análise politico-social é particularmente interessante e fundamentada. ( )