Scientific, Social and Agricultural Progress in 19th Century Europe

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From the Scientific Revolution through to the Industrial Revolution changes in science, philosophy, political policy, individual rights, and economics helped shape 19th century Europe into a diverse, volatile, and intellectual community. Although the basis for these ideas were dependent on individual, societal, and state communities of thought, they demanded a marked divergence from feudal subsistence practices. In other words, the scientific and social development of European society was contingent upon agricultural and industrial improvement. Up until the 17th century, the population of Europe was relatively stagnant. However, from 1750 to 1850, the population of the continent had doubled from approximately 132 million individuals to 260 …show more content…

The movement was essentially a humanizing version of the enlightenment, refocusing much of the intellectual community away from the impersonal rationale and logical machinations of the 18th century towards the realm of art and literature; many writers no longer subscribed to the objective, big-picture perspective of society—it was the individual, under the histrionic weight of industrial society, whose personal frame of mind constituted Romanticism. Composers, writers, and poets essentially assembled “the humanities,” ascribing to the idea that, as Mason puts it, “the world could not be understood completely on the basis of reason and scientific …show more content…

Mason says that the “Industrial Revolution set in motion enormous social and economic forces, including the increasing assertiveness of the new middle class and the proletariat, both of which had interests at odds with those of the social and economic structures of the old regime.” Over the course of the 19th century, industrialization would inflate the power of the individual and the state into civil instability. The Concert of Europe would attempt to maintain the balance of power amongst the nation-states, but nationalism, The People’s Spring, continent-wide revolution, and socialist theory would come to re-assert the volatility of the middle class in an industrialized

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