The New Reading Public

• The ideas associated with modern European thought for much of the twentieth century took shape during the same period that the modern nation-state developed, and the Second Industrial Revolution laid the foundations for modern life.

The New Reading Public

• A mass reading public came into existence in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century as more people than ever became drawn into the world of print culture.
• Literacy improved steadily from the 1860s onward because governments financed education.
• By 1900, approximately 85% or more of the people in Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia could read.
• New primary education in the basic skills of reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic reflected and generated social change.
• Such learning was regarded by conservatives and liberals as vital both for the new voters' orderly political behavior and for creating a more productive labor force.
• Cheap mass-circulation newspapers, such as Le Petit Journal of Paris and the Daily Mail of London, enjoyed their first heyday, carrying advertising for new consumer products.

Science at Midcentury

• Learned people circa 1850 regarded the physical world as rational, mechanical, and dependable, with laws revealed objectively through experiment and observation.
• The word "scientist" was invented in the early 1830s by William Whewell of Cambridge University, and it was in common use by the end of the century.
• Auguste Comte developed positivism, that human intellectual development culminated in science.
• In his The Positive Philosophy (1830–1842), Comte proposed that human thought evolved through stages: explanations of nature based on divinities or spirits (theological), abstract principles (metaphysical), and exact descriptions of phenomena (positive).
• Comte believed that laws of social behavior could be discovered like laws of physical nature, and he is regarded as the father of sociology.
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was the first modern European thinker to develop a wide-ranging theory of evolutionary change.
• Lamarck supposed that geological formations evolved over time and living organisms evolved to match their environments, also denying the possibility of extinction.
• Charles Lyell (1797–1875) published Principles of Geology in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, formulating uniformitarianism.
• Uniformitarianism holds that the same natural laws that govern the universe in the present have always governed the universe across time and space and that change is gradual and uniform.
• In his On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin carried the mechanical interpretation of physical nature into the world of living things.
• Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently formulated variations of the principle of natural selection to explain how species change or evolve over time.
• Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was contentious from the moment On the Origin of Species appeared, and it encountered criticism from religious and scientific communities alike.

Science and Ethics: Social Darwinism

• Philosophers applied the concept of the struggle for survival to social relationships.
• British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), considered human society progresses through competition, and if the weak receive too much protection, the rest of humankind is the loser.
• Evolutionary ethics and similar concepts described as Social Darwinism often promoted the idea that "might makes right."
• According to Thomas Henry Huxley, the physical process of evolution was at odds with the human ethical development.

Christianity and the Church Under Siege

• The nineteenth was one of the most difficult periods in the history of organized Christian churches, as secular nation-states attacked their influence and many intellectuals left the faith.
• German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) questioned core Christian beliefs in The Life of Jesus (1835).
• During the second half of the century, scholars such as Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), Ernst Renan (1823–1892) and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) claimed that human authors had composed and amended the books of the Bible with the problems of Jewish society and politics in mind.
• Writers after Nietzsche portrayed Christianity as a religion that glorified weakness more than the strength that life required.
• The secular states of late-nineteenth-century Europe clashed with both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic churches, especially over education.
• Kulturkampf refers to the conflict that occurred in Germany during the 1870s between Bismarck and German liberals against the Catholic Church.
• Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–1878) launched a counteroffensive against liberalism in 1864 by issuing the Syllabus of Errors, denouncing the idea that the Roman Pontiff "can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization".
• In 1869, the Pope summoned the First Vatican Council, which in 1870 promulgated papal infallibility.
• In 1891, Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which he defended private property, religious education, and religious control of the marriage laws, also declaring that employers should treat their employees justly.

Islam and Late-Nineteenth-Century European Thought

• The few European thinkers who wrote about Islam in the late nineteenth century discussed it using the scientific scholarly methods they applied to Judaism and Christianity.
• Christian missionaries blamed Islam for Arab backwardness, for mistreating women, and for accepting slavery, but when they came to live for long periods of time among Arabs, they became sympathetic to Arab political aspirations.
• Some, known as the Salafi or the salafiyya movement, sought to combine modernity with Islam and believed there was no inherent contradiction between science and Islam.

Toward a Twentieth-Century Frame of Mind

• During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and artists began to portray physical reality.
• In 1883, Ernst Mach (1838–1916) published The Science of Mechanics, which scientists should consider their concepts descriptive not of the physical world, but of the sensations of the observer.
• Discoveries such as Wilhelm Roentgen's X-rays (1895) and Henri Becquerel's 1896 report that uranium emitted a form of energy led to new exploration.

Theories of Quantum Energy, Relativity, and Uncertainty

• In 1900, Max Planck pioneered the quantum theory of energy, according to which energy is a series of discrete quantities or packets.
• Albert Einstein contended (1905) that time and space exist not separately but as a combined continuum that measurement depends on the observer.
• In 1927, Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) set forth the uncertainty principle, asserting that the behavior of subatomic particles is a matter of statistical probability.

Literature: Realism and Naturalism

• Between 1850 and 1914, concepts of the physical universe and the moral certainties of middle-class Europeans changed no less radically.
• By the midcentury cult of science, realist writers confronted readers with the harsh realities of life and rejected romantic idealization of nature.
• Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is considered the first realistic novel, portraying life without heroism, purpose or civility.
• Émile Zola (1840-1902) turned realism into a movement, arguing that he could write an experimental novel, reporting the characters and their actions as a laboratory experiment.

Modernism in Literature

• From the 1870s onward, it touched all the arts, and like realism, it was critical of middle-class society and morality, but it was driven by a concern for the aesthetic.

The Coming of Modern Art

• The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw new departures in Western art that transformed painting and later, sculpture.
• Impressionism arose primarily in Paris, marked by painting of modern life and a focus on light, color, and momentary visual experience.
• At Folies-Bergère, impressionist painter Édouard Manet painted a young barmaid standing behind a table in front of a large mirror that reflects activity in front of her.
• Around the 1880s, artists were followed by such Postimpressionists as Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
• Cubism, a new departure in early-twentieth-century Western art, was first used to describe paintings made by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Revolt Against Reason

• During the second half of the century, philosophers question rational thinking to address the human situation.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) sought less to change values ​​than to probe their sources in the human character and was at odds with the values ​​of the age, attacking rationality, Christianity, democratization and progress.
• In his first important work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), suggested that nonrational aspects of human nature are as noble as the rational characteristics.
• Nietzsche argued against Christianity because those values prevented people from achieving life on a heroic level.

The Birth of Psychoanalysis

• No intellectual development exemplified this trend more than psychoanalysis through the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Id consists of irrational, amoral, driving instincts for sexual gratification, aggression, and general physical/sensual pleasure.
• Superego embodies the external moral imperatives and expectations imposed by culture and society.
• Ego mediates between the two and allows the personality to cope with the inner and external demands of its existence.

Retreat from Rationalism in Politics

• Political scientists and sociologists portrayed politics as frequently irrational, and racial theorists questioned the effects of rationality and education on human society.
• Max Weber (1864–1920) regarded the expansion of rationalism throughout society as the major development of human history, with bureaucratization a basic feature of modern social life.
• Georges Sorel (1847–1922) argued that people are not rationally determined for action but are guided by collectively shared ideals rather than rationally perceived goals.

Racism

• Tendencies to question the constructive activity of reason and sacrifice the individual manifested themselves in theories of race.
• Arthur de Gobineau stated troubles with Western civilization resulted from the original white Aryan race deteriorating.
• Chamberlain (1855–1927) championed biological determinism but thought genetics-improved human race & develop superior ones.

Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Zionism

• In Vienna, Mayor Karl Lueger (1844–1910) used anti-Semitism as an attraction for his Christian Socialist Party.
• In 1894, Captain Dreyfus was found guilty of passing secret information to the German army, causing the Dreyfus affair.
• There was launching of Zionism in 1896 to found to have a Jewish separate state. Its founder was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904).

Women and Modern Thought

• Ideas that shook Europe produced mixed results for women, having often unchanged views of women's roles.
• The emphasis on biology, evolution, and reproduction led intellectuals to concentrate on women's mothering role, while an interest in nonrational led them to reassert feeling.
• Medical thought also sustained these views, giving no domestic issues or connection w/ home to any science changes.
• Contagious Diseases Acts, English prostitutes were subject between 1864 and 1886 laws that angered middle-class women, denying freedoms from poor women-male authorities.
• Ellen Key (1849–1926) maintained motherhood in key to be critical; with soceity and governments must support women-mother.
• In 1929, Virginia wolf made this A Room of One's Own be on fundamental feminist literature.
• Concluded women wishes to write needs a room with no male institutions and adequate income for them.