This Document Contains Brief Discussions of Major Influences on Politics, Social Organization

19th century information from Ask Jeeves L. Lebow Extension 1 20051

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS BRIEF DISCUSSIONS OF MAJOR INFLUENCES ON POLITICS, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, SCIENCE, RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, COMMERCE AND HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WHICH INFLUENCED THE THINKING OF THE TIMES.

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The Oxford Movement is the name given to the actions and endeavors of a group of clergymen at OxfordUniversity in the 1830s who sought to restore Catholic faith and practice within the Anglican Church. Its leaders were the professor of poetry, John Keble (1792-1866); the Regius Professor of Hebrew, Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1892); and the vicar of St. Mary’s and fellow of Oriel, John Henry Newman (1801-1890). Keble’s sermon on "National Apostasy" on July 14, 1833, is generally regarded as the movement’s beginning, and Newman’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church on October 9, 1845, as the end of its first phase. Taken from: Jesus Living in Mary: Handbook of the Spirituality of St. Louis de Montfort (Litchfield, CT: Montfort Publications, 1994).

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The Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the outworn neo-classical conventions of academic art by producing earnest quasi-religious works inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter and architect Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other members were his brother, William Michael Rossetti, John Everette Millais, Frederick George Stephens, James Collinson, and Thomas Woolner. Essentially Christian in outlook, the brotherhood deplored the imitative historical and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalize art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group eschewed the somber colors and formal structure preferred by the RoyalAcademy. They found their inspiration in the comparitively sincere and religious, and scrupulously detailed, art of the Middle Ages. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic , and materialistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other artists joined it, including Edward C Burne-Jones and William Morris. The eminent art critic John Ruskin was an ardent supporter of the movement. Gabriel Rossetti William Morris were among them.

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The term "Evangelicalism" is a wide-reaching definitional "canopy" that covers a diverse number of Protestant groups. The term originates in the Greek word evangelion, meaning "the good news," or, more commonly, the "gospel." During the Reformation, Martin Luther adapted the term, dubbing his breakaway movement the evangelische kirke, or "evangelical church"-a name still generally applied to the Lutheran Church in Germany.In the English-speaking world, however, the modern usage usually connotes the religious movements and denominations which sprung forth from a series of revivals that swept the North Atlantic Anglo-American world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Key figures associated with these revivals included the itinerant English evangelist George Whitefield (1715-1770); the founder of Methodism John Wesley (1703-1791), ; and, the American philosopher and theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). These revivals were particularly responsible for the rise of the Baptists and Methodists from obscure sects to their traditional position as America's two largest Protestant denominational families.

By the 1820s evangelical Protestantism was by far the dominant expression of Christianity in the United States. The concept of evangelism and the revival-codified, streamlined, and routinized by evangelists like Charles G. Finney (1792-1875)-became "revivalism" as evangelicals set out to convert the nation. By the decades prior to the War Between the States, a largely-evangelical "Benevolent Empire" (in historian Martin Marty's words) was actively attempting to reshape American society through such reforms as temperance, the early women's movement, various benevolent and betterment societies, and-most controversial of all-the abolition movement. After the war, the changes in American society wrought by such powerful forces as urbanization and industrialization, along with new intellectual and theological developments began to diminish the power of evangelicalism within American culture. Likewise, this evangelical superiority was diminished in pure numeric terms with the influx of millions of non-Protestant immigrants in the latter 19th and early 20th-centuries. Nonetheless, evangelical Protestantism remained a powerful presence within American culture (as evidenced by the success of evangelists like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday). Going into the 20th-century evangelicalism still held the status of an American "folk religion" in many sectors of the United States-particularly the South.

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Art for Art's Sake rejects the idea that the success of an art object can be measured by its accuracy as a representation or the effectiveness with which it tells a story or suggests a moral. Instead, it implies that an art object is best understood as an autonomous creation to be valued only for the success with which it organizes color and line into a formally satisfying and therefore beautiful whole.

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Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and political radical. Although he never practiced, he spent most of his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform. Bentham is largely associated with his moral philosophy, especially his principle of Utilitarianism which evaluates actions based upon the greatest happiness for all. He maintained that putting this principle into consistent practice would provide justification for social, political, and legal institutions. While Bentham's influence was minor during his life, his impact was greater in later years as his ideas were carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill and John Austin. Influenced by the 'philosophes' of the Enlightenment (such as Beccaria, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Voltaire) and also by Locke and Hume, Bentham's work combined an empiricist approach with a rationalism that emphasized conceptual clarity and deductive argument. Locke's influence was primarily as the author of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Bentham saw in him a model of one who emphasized the importance of reason over custom and tradition and who insisted on precision in the use of terms. Hume's influence was not so much on Bentham's method as on his account of the underlying principles of psychological associationism and on his articulation of the principle of utility, which was then still often annexed to theological views.

Bentham's analytical and empirical method is especially obvious when one looks at some of his main criticisms of the law and of moral and political discourse in general. His principal target was the presence of 'fictions'--in particular, legal fictions. On his view, to consider any part or aspect of a thing in abstraction from that thing is to run the risk of confusion or to cause positive deceit. While, in some cases, such 'fictional' terms as 'relation,' 'right,' 'power,' and 'possession' were of some use, in many cases their original warrant had been forgotten, so that they survived as the product of either prejudice or inattention. In those cases where the terms could be 'cashed out' in terms of the properties of real things, they could continue to be used, but otherwise they were to be abandoned. Still, Bentham hoped to eliminate legal fictions as far as possible from the law, including the legal fiction that there was some original contract that explained why there was any law at all. He thought that, at the very least, clarifications and justifications could be given that avoided the use of such terms.

Bentham believed that the nature of the human person can be adequately described without mention of social relationships. To begin with, the idea of "relation" is but a "fictitious entity," though necessary for "convenience of discourse." And, more specifically, he remarks that "the community is a fictitious body," and it is but "the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it." Thus, the extension of the term 'individual' is, in the main, no greater and no less than the biological entity. Bentham's view, then, is that the individual--the basic unit of the social sphere--is an "atom" and there is no 'self' or 'individual' greater than the human individual. A person's relations with others--even if important--are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to its being what it is.

Finally, the picture of the human person presented by Bentham is based on a psychological associationism indebted to David Hartley and David Hume; Bentham's analysis of 'habit' (which is essential to his understanding of society and especially political society) particularly reflects associationist presuppositions. On this view, pleasure and pain are objective states and can be measured in terms of their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity and purity. This allows then both for an objective determination of an activity or state and for a comparison with others.

Bentham's understanding of human nature reveals, in short, a psychological, ontological, and also moral individualism where, to extend the critique of utilitarianism made by Graeme Duncan and John Gray ("The Left Against Mill," in New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, Eds. Wesley E. Cooper, Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten, 1979), "the individual human being is conceived as the source of values and as himself the supreme value." Finally, Bentham held that there are advantages to a moral philosophy based on a principle of utility. To begin with, the principle of utility is clear (compared to other moral principles), allows for objective and disinterested public discussion, and enables decisions to be made where there seem to be conflicts of (prima facie) legitimate interests. Moreover, in calculating the pleasures and pains involved in carrying out a course of action (the 'hedonic calculus'), there is a fundamental commitment to human equality. The principle of utility presupposes that 'one man is worth just the same as another man' and so there is a guarantee that in calculating the greatest happiness "each person is to count for one and no one for more than one."

For Bentham, then, there was no inconsistency between the greatest happiness principle and his psychological hedonism and egoism. Thus, moral philosophy or ethics can be simply described as "the art of directing men's action to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness, on the part of those whose interest is in view."

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John Stuart Mill was a key figure in the movement known as utilitarianism, and a proponent of the liberal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Mill was educated at home by his father, philosopher and economist James Mill, who had been a champion of Bentham's movement. After a... Not quite an Atheist, Mill said he believed in a "probable God," or a "limited liability God" — that is, one that is not all-powerful. After his death, on 8 May 1873, Mill's stepdaughter published his Three Essays on Religion (1874), in which Mill claimed he disbelieved in miracles and immortality. [

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Unification of Italy

During the 18th century, intellectual changes began to dismantle traditional values and institutions. Liberal ideas from France and Britain spread rapidly, and from 1789 the French Revolution became the genesis of "liberal Italians". A series of political and military events resulted in a unified kingdom of Italy in 1861. The settlements reached in 1815 at the Vienna Congress had restored Austrian domination over the Italian peninsula but had left Italy completely fragmented . The Congress had divided the territory among a number of European nations and the victors of the Napoleonic Wars. The Kingdom of Sardinia recovered Piedmont (Piemonte), Nice, and Savoy and acquired Genoa.

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Unification of Germany

Bismarck had to fight three wars to unify Germany. The 1864 Danish War helped Bismarck consolidate his internal position in Prussia. The War of 1866 ousted Austria from leadership in Germany for good. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 brought the South under the aegis of the Prussian eagle. That was the unification process in a nutshell.

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Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883)The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature. Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.