Enemies of Liberalism

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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia

The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910

1384 notes

University of Virginia

The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910

1384 notes

This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.

À partir de la leçon

The Rise of National Industrial States (1830-1871)

To Build a Nation28:46

The Global and the Local32:05

The Zenith of Liberalism15:52

A Liberal Rainbow11:19

Enemies of Liberalism36:24

Rencontrer les enseignants

Philip Zelikow
White Burkett Miller Professor of History

Hi. Welcome back.

Make yourself comfortable.

I've spent a lot of time talking about liberalism, because it's such an

important set of political beliefs and carries

forward so much to the present day.

Now I want to talk about how liberalism generated its antibodies:

the kind of political ideas, social ideas that had

become really powerful in the later part of the 1800s

as a way of organizing all the reactions against liberalism.

Here's a portrait of Czar Alexander III,

who becomes the supreme ruler of the Russian Empire in 1881,

after the assassination of Alexander II by radical revolutionaries.

You can imagine that given the circumstances in which he

took power, he wasn't going to be much of a friend

to revolution.

But he really is kind of a symbol for Europe of the forces of reaction,

the forces of renewed tradition and conservatism.

There he is almost a physical symbol of the Russian bear, kind

of stands for the opponents of liberalism. But don't just see him as a reactionary,

see him as a representative of a broad set

of ideas that are gathering a lot of strength, especially in the 1880s.

To understand this, let's talk a little bit about ideas and ideologies.

Let's just take a moment to think about

what is the difference between these two words?

What's the difference between an idea and an ideology?

If I was to ask you to name an ideology,

just take a moment to think hmm, what would an ideology be?

Go ahead try it. I'll bet your answer right off the top

would have been a word that ended in ï¿½ism: communism,

socialism, capitalism, whatever. Liberalism.

The whole notion that an idea becomes an -ism tells you something.

You can have an idea, an idea about liberty,

an idea about tyranny, an idea about the nation.

You're turning it into an ideology,

you're attaching the word -ism to it, because something else is happening.

You're creating something that is a system of beliefs.

It's a whole cluster of beliefs, a whole cluster of ideas

that you're grouping together as liberalism, or communism, or socialism.

Just think a little bit about that; so that means it's

a system of beliefs, that means there's kind of a doctrine.

But why do ideas turn into ideologies?

Because this period we're looking at now, the

second half of the 19th century, is the formative

period for the production of the ideologies that

still dominate political discourse all over the world today.

You name it: socialism, communism, even advanced capitalism.

The conversion of these ideas into ideologies

is really happening between about, oh, 1870 and 1910.

So rather than

just saying well, this happened, let's ask ourselves, as we've

done all through this course, okay, why? Why does it happen?

Think about some of the circumstances, the conditions in modern society.

You have the rise of the popular press.

We've already seen how important the press is.

It's just finding ways of all of a sudden sharing information

in these greatly enlarged communities.

I showed you an illustration in a previous presentation

of a mass circulation newspaper, The Times of London, from early 1860.

It had a circulation of more than 50,000 people,

which back then was a lot.

But now we're moving into an era in which newspapers are much cheaper.

Here's a newspaper from the United States.

Do you remember that Times newspaper that I showed you,

how on the front page all the print was so small?

The front page was occupied just with sort of daily events and there was some

news items inside.

Now, let's look at this American newspaper from the end of

[INAUDIBLE]

1861.

This is just the beginnings of a truly popular press.

In the right hand corner, notice the price: two cents.

At the front of the page, notice the bold framing of a big headline.

Notice the use of illustrations, engravings

that can be converted into something

I can turn out in newspapers printed in the hundreds of thousands.

Notice that news items are at the very front.

The print, by the way, still quite a bit smaller than we're used to.

If you look at another illustration, this one from a newspaper much

later in the 1800s, you'll see how all these developments are enhanced.

Stronger headlines, stronger images, clearer messages, all in

a cheap newspaper designed to keep everybody informed.

And along with the rise of the popular

press, you have the rise of mass education.

We talked earlier about the rise of even public schooling.

The desire of all these nation states to raise their levels of literacy.

Well as more and more people can read,

or they can read things just besides the Bible,

they're now reading and talking about

these newspapers, these new illustrated weeklies, pamphlets,

magazines of many kinds, novels printed into mass

circulation. So a more literate public, a more

educated public. And there are also people

debating, well, what should be taught in the schools?

What should the textbooks say?

So popular press, mass education.

What this means then is you need to equip people with mass

narratives that they can use in making their judgments about what's going on.

Very early on in this course, I talked a little

bit about the ingredients of making judgments in people's heads.

Just to summarize that again, think a little bit about what

newspapers do and what people want to use their literacy to accomplish.

First of all, they want to use this to make reality judgments.

They want to know what's going on.

And all this popular press, all this literature is going to tell them what's

going on, or at least give them one version of what's going on.

And you're going to arm people, you're going to tell them:

what should you care about?

What value judgments do you want them to make?

What urgent pressing problems do you want them to pay attention to? And about which

they'll then want to know more about what's

going on with respect to that murder trial.

Or that sewer disaster.

Or that terrible war going on over there in the Balkans.

And then, you'll want to tell them,

what should you do about it?

What kind of action judgments should you make?

What are the options? What can be done?

What should be done?

The information to inform all that complex of reality, value, and

action judgments have to come together into a narrative, a story.

And think. That's what ideologies do.

Ideologies supply you with easy ways to get into a story.

Ideologies focus your attention on what's going on.

Ideologies give you advice on what you should care about.

Ideologies arm you with a set of answers to the question: what should you do?

So as you get into mass participation in political

life, these mass narratives are essential and society is enabling you with

all these tools to make those judgments. That's where ideologies come from.

That's why ideologies become such an important part of this era.

And one thing people tend to focus on is

they tend to focus on the things they don't like.

Frankly, as a historian, I have to tell you what sociologists

also know, and other students of human behavior, is

that it's easier for people to unite around the

things they don't like than it is for them

to unite around the things that they do like.

Hatred is a pretty strong emotion.

So one of the things that press is doing, one of the things information is doing,

it's helping to identify enemies, concerns, problems

on which they can

rally a lot of different people.

So for the working class, the enemy might be the

greedy factor owner who's keeping people from earning a decent wage.

If you're the poor farmer, you might be angry about the

middle man who's not giving you a decent price for your

farm goods or for the financier who's loaning you money at

bad rates for you to buy the new farm equipment that

you need.

So as these ideologies are taking shape, liberalism itself begins to splinter.

That's what I mean when I use the phrase, sectarian liberalism.

That liberalism is separating into a sect.

A sect is defined by people who share a really clear

body of beliefs, beliefs in which there are doctrinal tests of loyalty.

If you want to convert being a liberal

into an ideology of liberalism, an ideology for political action, an

ideology that tells you what you're against and what you're for,

here are some of the ingredients in liberal ideology:

liberals, in general, on both sides of Atlantic Ocean tend to be in favor

of the private sector; they tend to be in favorite of business and business men,

most them small business

men, tradesmen; they're in favor of the nation and the nation state, though

there are differences among them about how powerful that state needs to be.

They tend to support the rise of larger Businesses,

larger business concerns, because in general theyï¿½re

suspicious of government regulation and so they're

interested in corporations maybe as a larger

way in which private interests can combine.

This will change later in the 1800s, as the liberals will begin to

think that corporations themselves are now the source of that tyranny they so detest.

But in the middle part of the

1800s, corporations seen like a positive liberal development.

Liberals in political life also tend to be against the rule of priests,

what the liberal politician in England, John Bright, called priestcraft.

They are also against protectionism, because they're in favor of free trade.

Protectionism may seem like a dry economic term to us today.

But if you were in favor of free trade in, say, England, oh, in the

1830s, you'd be against a protectionist measure like the Corn Law.

The British used the word corn where Americans might use the word wheat.

The Corn Law was trying

to prohibit imports of foreign wheat from places like

the United States, in order to protect British wheat growers.

If you joined an Anti-Corn Law League like this man, now

you see he's a registered member of the Anti-Corn Law League.

And here is the certificate of that.

Let's study this certificate for a moment.

Let's first look at the inscription at the top.

He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him.

Well why would the people curse him?

Well let's look at this illustration here on the left, dear bread.

That means expensive bread.

Well if you have expensive bread, because you can

only buy bread from the wheat growers in England,

well here's what happens. You have expensive bread, why

then you have a hungry and desperate family. And

if you look over here on the right,

this is the family with cheap bread,

prosperous looking forward to a bright future.

Now these all seem like caricatures and they are caricatures.

But this one little certificate is embodying

the principles of an emerging ideology:

an ideology of free trade. It's telling you what both sides represent,

what you believe. Free trade is just a one aspect of liberalism

as a political ideology for the masses. But

liberalism, as I said, is splintering into different sects.

So a lot of people who are free thinkers, who believe in science and progress,

are actually deviating from classical liberalism because

they're supporting things like socialism or social democracy.

Let's understand some of their key tenets as an ideology.

Yes, they're free thinking. They are anti-clerical.

That is, they're opposed to a dogmatic power of an established church like the

Catholic Church, especially in places where the

Catholic Church is still very strong, like France

and Spain and Italy, where anti-clerical beliefs are one of

the badges of identity for someone who is a socialist.

But a socialist also

makes the strong argument that classical

liberals are too concerned with individual liberty

and not concerned enough with the welfare of the group. Like what sort of group?

Well, how about the working class?

All these factory workers who need to have some solidarity together,

not just for theoretical rights but to secure real, tangible benefits.

Higher wages, for example.

So another mark of the socialist is

we're not so much interested in metaphysical rights

if it doesn't translate into the real hard material conditions of everyday life.

This is a key principle in what will become known as Marxism,

a central strain in European socialism in the late 1800s.

Here's Karl Marx, born in Germany,

but does most of his productive intellectual

work as an exile living in England,

often working with Friedrich Engels and looking at the English

factory system as almost the embodiment of the world to come.

Yes, you had that ancient traditional world.

It's been supplanted by the capitalist world.

But the capitalist is dividing between the people who have all this property and

the people who were being subjugated by the propertied classes.

The propertied class and the bourgeoisie versus the working class.

And the working class will eventually struggle

and overthrow the power of the propertied class

to create a new communist world.

Now, in Marx's view, it was very important

to just study the material conditions of people.

He viewed history the way a scientist

would view history.

Just as a scientist would look at the objective data from the lab,

Marx believed in historical materialism,

that you just needed to look at the practical facts on the ground.

See where the money was and then you would

know more about the real politics of that society.

These are very powerful ideas.

But therefore, from Marx's point of view the group's solidarity and the emphasis

on material conditions marks them out

from the traditional liberals and their concerns

for the rights of individuals and for individual liberty, which

Marx derided as a kind of false consciousness of the bourgeoisie.

So that splintering of liberalism is one kind of enemy of liberalism.

But another

kind of enemy of liberalism is the way conservatism reboots

in the latter part of the 1800s.

In the 1700s, conservatism felt like just a reaction against threatening changes.

Look at the way, though, conservatism is evolving in the late 1800s.

Monarchs and nobles are now firmly aligning themselves

with the emblems of the new nation states. Monarchs and nobles strongly identified

themselves with the emblems of the state, of the church, of the army, and of empire.

Let's go back to that portrait of Czar Alexander

III that we looked at a few minutes ago.

Look at what he's wearing.

He's wearing a uniform of the Russian nation.

It's a military uniform.

He's showing his power and his exercise of power is

bound up with the new Russian state and its strength.

Here's a painting of the coronation of

Alexander III's successor, Czar Nicholas II in 1894.

The thing to notice about this painting is look at the rich panoply of

dignified ceremony surrounding it. You can just sense the

power of tradition, of one generation to the next that's

being conveyed in this immensely dignified ceremony.

Part of what this kind of conservatism is

reacting to is the materialism of the liberals.

So concerned with their businesses, with their money, with their companies,

or the working class, grasping about wages; it's all about money.

But the conservatives know the world is more than a merely materialistic world.

We stand for higher principles.

A really interesting figure in understanding

all of this is the great composer, Richard Wagner.

People who look today at Richard Wagner and try to understand his

political beliefs would associate him with the right wing, with German conservatism.

Indeed, even with roots of German Nazism, later in the 20th century.

He seen as anti-Semitic, seen as exalting

all these warrior ideals in German folklore.

All that's true.

But Wagner is kind of an interesting figure to examine.

I mean who is Wagner?

Wagner is a German liberal, Wagner was a

participant in the revolutions in 1848 and 1849.

He's against the status quo.

Wagner still sees himself as a rebel into the 1860s.

Only the status quo, the

new establishment, is the liberal establishment.

Wagner is a rebel against all of that. He's a rebel against established churches.

He's a rebel against the established materialist ideals of Germany.

Instead he's writing operas, he's writing music that are conveying romantic

feeling. Exalting heroes, the importance of good

and evil, these tragic conflicts. He's trying to appeal to

deeper wellsprings of German tradition that he thinks are

being trampled on in this material age of factories

and businessmen, and he sees himself as a dissident

in doing all of this, pushing against the establishment.

Now, rebels like Wagner are not alone in trying to adapt to the new age.

The Catholic Church's reactions are very interesting

especially at the end of the 1800s.

The Catholic

Church, in part, tries to adapt itself

to the significance of the Industrial Revolution.

Their Pope, Leo XIII, embarks on bold initiatives to spotlight the dilemmas of

the working class, including their spiritual welfare,

as something the Church cares deeply about.

He wants this to be a Church of the working class.

He wants to train groups of priests who

care about working in the slums. Who care about a social Catholicism.

Indeed, the significance of social Christianity in European

politics is enormous all through the 20th century.

If you look in German politics today and

you see a political party in Bavaria, a Catholic

part of Germany, that's called the Christian Social Union,

or CSU, you might ask yourself where does that phrase

Christian Social Union come from? It comes from this social Catholicism.

This counter attack by Pope Leo XIII.

This way of restoring the relevance of Catholicism to the issues of the day.

Another family of attack against the now conventional liberalism

are arguments about well, who makes up this nation?

Who are the true members of the national community?

Who's a true Frenchman? Who's a true German?

Who's a real American?

Those kinds of debates become really important.

They become debates about immigration, about who should be allowed in.

They become debates about who among the people

who are already here really represent the nation's traditions.

This issue really explodes in France,

which is caught up in a fervor of

nationalism and a desire for revenge against the Germans.

The great episode that test these beliefs for

Frenchmen of the late 1890s is the Dreyfus Affair.

What was this about?

A French army officer, a Jew is accused of espionage.

He is accused of working for the Germans. In fact Dreyfus was framed.

Dreyfus was set up actually by a right wing

army officer.

But it took awhile for all these facts to come out.

And at first, the nation divided up into the people who

supported a re-examination of the Dreyfus case to find out the truth,

and the people who stood up against the conviction of Dreyfus

saying this is now a test of the honor of the nation.

Some pretty talented artists put themselves

at the service of this vicious anti-Semitism.

Here's some work from the artist Forain in one of these new penny

press weeklies that are coming out,

serving the ideologies of the new conservatives.

In this one, Forain has portrayed what he regards as the true civil power.

That's the figure of the Jew.

The figure of the Jew who's also the figure of the financier,

the banker, the rootless capitalist with no deep ties to the French nation.

It's that figure of the Jew holding the sword with his boot on the

back of prostrate France, that's that word

you see in the bottom right hand corner.

Or to give you another example, here's

another Forain illustration, this one from 1898.

What's the Dreyfus

affair all about? In this illustration,

the great liberal spokesman for re-examining

the Dreyfus case was Emile Zola.

That's the image of Emile Zola.

But behind the mask of Emile Zola, we see again the figure of the Jew.

And behind the Jew, who do we find? Well of course, that mask is all

being manipulated by the figure of the German soldier, spiked helmet and sword.

Forain calls that an allegory. What this illustration powerfully

captures for you is the debate over who is the French nation?

Who are legitimate members of that nation?

The more you say that the community is a national community

and its future will be decided by its citizen,

the more you get into the argument like the argument of a hundred years earlier.

Well who should be the citizens?

And now let's go back again to the issue of how Darwinsm feeds into all of this.

This sense that nations and societies are really locked in a struggle for survival.

Survival of the fittest, in which only a few will prevail.

Dwell on that metaphor for a little while.

That's an awfully powerful set of beliefs, if you buy into that.

Because if you're in a struggle for survival among these nations,

contrast that with the image I talked about a few presentations ago.

That was the image of nationalism as the new brotherhood of man.

We get rid of the rivalry of princes because nations could all work together.

No, this Darwinian notion, and again, Charles

Darwin himself didn't sponsor any of these ideas,

but this Darwinian notion is one in which no, we nations now are in

a fight to the death as to which of us will prevail and survive.

The 1880s is an especially important period

in which nationalism takes on this new fervor.

A pretty representative philosopher of the 1880s is the German, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche exalts the will to power, for instance

in a tract he wrote in 1883. He's also picking up on some older ideas.

The English historian Thomas Carlyle had

emphasized in his wonderful historical romances,

the lesson of rule by the hero, the man of action who must not hesitate to use force.

More seriously, the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill is

being contested by the English jurist James Fitzjames Stephen.

Stephen's argument is that government needs to be strong, because

it needs to use its coercive power to maintain public order.

That the only way in which you can have your liberal

beliefs is with strong public order and coercive force to maintain civilization.

This new nationalism then is also really felt in political economy.

Remember when I was talking about how liberalism equals free trade?

Well, during the 1870s and 1880s, a lot of

the major powers, these new nations, are rejecting free trade.

They're adopting trade barriers because their

nation has to protect their industries, so

that their industries can be powerful enough to win the battle for survival.

So for instance, Germany begins to reject free trade.

The United States of America is rejecting free trade.

Indeed the Federal government gets most of its money from tariff duties.

It's protecting its infant industries.

And so on to the point that by the end of the century, Britain is the last really

major power that's still standing up four square for the principles of free trade.

The argument from the opponents being, well,

sure you British like free trade, because you're the supreme beneficiaries of it.

But as the doctrines of free trade fail,

remember free trade is not just an economic principle,

it's a political principle, because if you need national control to protect

your industries, it means I need national control over the raw materials

that my industries need. I need national control over

the key markets that my industries need. And you can see very quickly, ah, then I

need national control over large domains. I need really large national empires.

So you can begin to see a throwback

to those kind of mercantile monopolies that were fighting during the 1700s.

In the late 1800s, we're now back there again.

National industrial empires that see themselves

in a struggle for global survival,

and we'll see how that story plays out next week.

So having gone though some of these enemies of liberalism,

let's look at some of the circumstances that create

such fertile soil for all these ideas to sprout.

Anyone looking back at recent history would

see, gee it looks like military power

was absolutely essential for which nation states were going to thrive. 1859, 1860:

battles to secure the unification of Italy.

Then there's the American Civil War.

In 1877 and 1878, the Russian Empire fights a war against the Ottoman Empire,

and the Russians prevail.

It requires an international conference held

in Berlin

to try to get a balance between the Russian gains and ensure the survival

of the Ottoman Empire in order to preserve a balance of power in Europe.

Above all you looked at the example of

the German Empire: war after war against Denmark,

against Austria, against France, establishes what seems to

be the rising industrial power of the world,

symbolized by its iron chancellor, Otto von

Bismarck, who would sometimes be photographed

in this sort of military garb.

Bismarck, by the way, usually dressed in civilian clothes.

He saw the need, from time to time, to don this sort of ostentatious military garb.

And the slogan they're associating with that German

Empire is: the triumph of blood and iron.

Nationalism itself becomes one of the mass ideologies.

There are mass movements being formed in a

number of leading countries, with cards of membership,

badges that you would wear to show that you were a part of it. In England,

the Primrose League, dedicated to the preservation of the estates of the realm

and the dignity of the British empire. A League of Patriots, a Colonial Society.

You see

these in several countries. In Germany, a Pan-German League.

Also in Germany and elsewhere, a Navy League, dedicated

to building up the power of the German Navy.

In political parties, liberal parties would

call themselves, we're the National Liberals,

because we're the liberals who believe in a

really strong national state and a strong empire.

Or in Britain the liberal party begins to split,

with the nationalist wing calling itself the Liberal Unionists.

Union in this case referring to the continued preservation

of Ireland as core part of the United Kingdom.

Another thing that makes these ideas so powerful in the late

1800s is the growing popularity of all sorts of racial beliefs.

And the racial beliefs are actually being supported by what people

think science is teaching back in the 1800s.

They think again, building off the sort of pseudo-Darwinism, that they're learning

a whole lot more about the biology of these different families of man.

Here's an example of an illustration from the middle of the 1800s.

You see the statue from the classical age. The Greek skull.

Oh, but here's the Negro who has a different kind of skull.

And then there's the young chimpanzee and their skull,

and you can just see that there's biological differentiation.

This is all garbage.

This sort of thing was used as part

of the ideology of the Southern Confederacy during

the American Civil War, but versions of this

become very popular all through the Western world.

By the way, the way they thought about race

back then is very different from the way we think

about race now.

We tend to talk about race in terms like white or black.

Back then if you were talking about races, you would

use terms which we would now think of as ethnic terms.

For instance, if you read the literature of

the age, you'd see references to the Anglo-Saxon race.

And you'd see them contrasted with oh say the Latin race,

people from Italy, for example, seen as racially different than

people from Britain or Germany, and so on and on.

You could see another contrast with the Irish race.

Just to understand this, these were ideas being

put forward in some cases by prominent scientists.

Because genetics are only beginning to be understood.

They're still trying to figure out what it is people

inherit and how do they inherit it.

There's even speculation that gee, if I'm really well educated, maybe I pass

some of these improved educated character traits on to my children, and so on.

People think they can examine the shapes of other people's skulls to figure

out whether they're going to be law-abiding

or form part of the criminal class.

But think about the significance of this for politics.

If you

happen to believe that your nation's strength is bound up in, say, the

role of one or another race, the

Anglo-Saxon race, or in Japan, the Japanese

race, and you get very concerned with purity of blood and other sorts

of vicious racial ideas as bound up with the basic issue of national survival.

Therefore as people began to identify

themselves in these sort of national/racial

ways, they began to see different kinds of communities.

We begin to see the rise of pan movements.

For instance, talking about the solidarity of say, Slavs.

Their distinctive traditions, Greek Orthodox church,

a pan-Slav movement championed by Russia.

You can see in Asia the rise of a pan-Asian movement,

in which the Japanese will see themselves as standing up for the solidarity

of the Oriental race against its potential oppressors and so on and on.

You can also see how some of these beliefs play out in the American case.

The United Statesï¿½ tests with issues of race was not nearly over.

And as the Americans come into the 1880s, they have

some basic decisions to make about which is more important,

national unity or the treatment of Negroes?

Americans in the 1880s and 1890s increasingly prioritize national unity.

Reunion in a strong United States.

And if that means that the Southern states that have rejoined the union

want to oppress their Negro citizens, the

Federal government is going to overlook that,

as part of the price of patriotism.

And so those Southern states begin Enacting,

especially in the 1890s and the first decades

of the 20th century, what are called Jim

Crow laws that will effectively re-enslave parts of

their African American community with all kinds

of restrictions designed to rigidly subordinate them and

keep them down, partly through formal government repression

and partly through private acts of terror in

organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings.

The point of that ugly story though is to emphasize that

the Jim Crow story in the American South is just one

facet of a worldwide phenomenon in which people are seeing these

racial issues as bound up with choices they're making about national identity.

We'll see how that plays out in an age of imperialism that will sweep

the world in the last decades of the 1800s.

We'll talk about that age of imperialism next week.

See you then.

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