The Industrial Society

The industrial revolution transformed people’s lives in western Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. Most historians agree that from the 1820s to the 1890s industrialization proceeded in four stages mechanization of the textile industry, metals, chemicals, and finally electricity. Each stage led to the next.

Britain held the lead in the early industrial revolution from the 1760s to the 1850s. It had developed an efficient agriculture system, accumulated capital from foreign and colonial trade, had extensive iron and coal deposits, and was favored by geographic compactness.

An age that had mastered the industrial arts so well produced monumental statues, of which the most famous was Liberty in New York harbor, the work of the French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi (1834-1904), a gift from the Third French Republic to the American republic.

In the nineteenth century the painter faced a formidable competitor in depicting the physical realities of nature and life—the photographer.

After Louis J. M. Daguerre (1789-1851) made the daguerreotype commercially possible, the science and art of photography developed until, through the work of the American George Eastman (1854-1932), roll film made it feasible for each person to be an artist.

In literature the last two thirds of the nineteenth century proved to be a great period for the novel of realism that depicted the problems and triumphs of the industrial society, drawing upon the stylistic canons of the romantics while pursuing starkly realistic themes.

The scientific and industrial revolutions and the debate over idealism and realism helped to stimulate an explosion of creativity and artistic experimentation that transformed the novel, drama, and the fine arts.

The gap between “genteel” writing and the cruder and more vigorous forms was widening because so much important work was produced and encouraged by men and women in conscious revolt against the tastes of the politically and economically dominant class of their time—that is, the middle class.

The German philosopher Nietzsche was representative of the elitist view. The central line of his thinking led to the concept of a new aristocracy—the “higher man” or Ubermensch.

The American philosopher William James (1842-1910) summed up the antithesis of idealism and realism by arguing that people are either “tender-minded” or “tough-minded.”

The tough-minded are convinced that the world of sense experience is the real world; the tender-minded are convinced that the world of sense experience is somehow an illusion, or at any rate a flawed copy of the real world, which exists perfectly only in God’s mind. This abstract argument was a modern formulation of the ancient debate between the Platonists and the Aristotelians.

It was Auguste Comte (1798-1857) who coined the term positivism. His recommendations for bettering the human conditions retained some of the utopian and messianic qualities of Saint-Simonian teachings.

Comte applied the term positivist to the third stage of humanity’s attitude toward the world. First, in the infant period of history, humanity was in the theological age, standing in awe and fear of nature and seeking to placate the gods that controlled it.

By far the commonest way out of the dilemma facing the Social Darwinists lay in the notion that the struggle for existence really goes on among human beings organized in groups—as tribes, races, or national states.

This theological conflict had pretty well run its course by the beginning of the twentieth century. More important in the long run was the use made of some of Darwin’s basic concepts in debates on matters moral, economic, and political.

The blanket term Social Darwinism covers these transfers of ideas from biology to the social sciences and human relations. The central idea that social and political thinkers took over from Darwin was that of competition among individuals and groups.

It was a revolutionary new theory in biology that most transformed thought, and thus action. In 1859 there was published in London Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. It rested in the study of natural history, the long record of the hundreds of thousands of years of organic life on earth.

The telegraph, the submarine cable, the telephone, the massive railroad bridges and tunnels, and the high-speed printing press not only improved communications but also demonstrated the practical utility of science.

Still other efforts to mitigate class antagonisms came from the Anglican and Catholic churches. In England the Christian Socialists urged the Church of England to put aside theological disputes and direct its efforts toward ending social abuses.

Other apostles of violence called themselves anarchists, believing that the best government was no government at all. For them it was not enough that the state should wither at some distant time, however; such an instrument of oppression should be annihilated at once.

The weapon of the anarchist terrorists was the assassination of heads of state, and by the turn of the century they had killed the French president Carnot in 1894, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, and the American president William McKinley in 1901.

The various forms of liberalism and socialism did not exhaust the range of responses to the economic and social problems created in industrial societies.

Nationalists reinvigorated old mercantilist ideas, not only advocating tariffs to protect agriculture and industry but also demanding empires abroad to provide new markets for surplus products, new fields for the investment of surplus capital, and new settlements for surplus citizens. Others advocated anarchy and violence, while nonviolent preachers of mutualism, goodwill, and good work sought to return to primitive Christianity.

From 1849 until his death in 1883, Marx lived in London, where, partly because of his own financial mismanagement, his family experienced the misery of a proletarian existence in the slums of Soho.

Meanwhile, Marx began his friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). In many ways, the two men made a striking contrast.

With Karl Marx (1818-1883) socialism moved to a far more intense form—revolutionary communism.

Whereas the early socialists had anticipated a gradual and peaceful evolution toward Utopia, Marx forecast a sudden and violent proletarian uprising by which the workers would capture governments and make them the instruments for securing proletarian welfare. From Blanc he derived the summary of socialist goals: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Marx found three laws in the pattern of history.

Utopian socialists derived their inspiration from the Enlightenment.

If only people would apply reason to solving the problems of an industrial economy, if only they would wipe out artificial inequalities by letting the great natural law of brotherhood operate freely—then utopia would be within their grasp, and social and economic progress would come about almost automatically.

This was the common belief linking together the four chief Utopians of the early nineteenth century: Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Louis Blanc.

In his later years, Mill referred to himself as a socialist; by his standard, however, most voters today are socialists.

Universal suffrage for men and for women, universal free education, the curbing of laissez faire in the interests of the general welfare, the use of the taxing power to limit the unbridled accumulation of private property— all these major changes foreseen by Mill are now widely accepted.

John Stuart Mill grew up in an atmosphere dense with the teachings of utilitarianism and classical economics. From his father, he received an education almost without parallel for intensity and speed.

He began the study of Greek at three, was writing history at twelve, and at sixteen organized an active Utilitarian Society. At the age of twenty the overworked youth suffered a breakdown. He turned for renewal to music and to the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge; presently he fell in love with Mrs. Harriet Taylor, to whom he assigned the major credit for his later writings.

One path of retreat from stark laissez-faire doctrines originated with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an eccentric philosopher. Bentham founded his social teachings on the concept of utility: that the goal of action should be to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Educated for the ministry, Malthus became perhaps the first professional economist in history; he was hired by the East India Company to teach its employees at a training school in England. In 1798 he published his Essay on Population, a dramatic warning that the human species would breed itself into starvation. In the Essay, Malthus formulated a series of natural laws:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in earth to produce subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.”

Faced with the widening cleavage, both real and psychological, between rich and poor, nineteenth-century liberals at first held to the doctrine of laissez faire:

Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of and the impatient attempts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation . . . have always been productive of more evil than good.

In the Britain of the 1820s, the new industrialists had small opportunity to mold national policy. Booming industrial cities like Manchester and Birmingham sent not a single representative to the House of Commons.

A high proportion of business leaders belonged not to the Church of England but were nonconformists who still suffered discrimination when it came to holding public office or sending their sons (not to speak of their daughters) to Oxford or Cambridge. Even in France, despite the gains made since 1789, the bourgeoisie often enjoyed only second-class status.

When Britain abandoned any pretense of raising all the basic foods its people needed, its population was growing so rapidly that self-sufficiency was no longer possible. The number of inhabitants in England and Wales more than tripled during the nineteenth century, from about 9 million in 1800 to 32.5 million in 1900.

With industrialization there came a population explosion, a dramatic rise in the standard of living for many (and harsh, but different, conditions for others), and a desire to have greater control over birth and death rates.

This desire expressed itself through the state and also in a social demand for improved working conditions.

After 1850 Britain began to lose its advantage. Politically its leaders had positioned it well to the forefront. The Reform Act of 1832 had put Parliament into the hands of the propertied classes, which proceeded to pass legislation favorable to industry.

The exploitation of these new developments required a constant flow of fresh capital. From the first, the older commercial community supported the young industrial community. Bankers played such an important role that the Barings of London and the international house of Rothschild were among the great powers of Europe.

Steam, coal, and iron brought the railway age. Coal powered the railways and the railways carried coal. Though railways based on wooden rails were known from the sixteenth century, iron and steel rails made it possible to carry huge weights and mount giant locomotives to pull long trains.

The textile industry was the first to exploit the potentialities of power-driven machinery. Beginning with the spinning jenny in the 1760s, the use of machinery gradually spread to other processes.

The process of industrialization began in Britain. After the 1760s England enjoyed a long period of relative economic prosperity. Starting in the sixteenth century, a new group of landed proprietors—squires and townspeople— saw land as an investment; thus they were concerned with improved production and profit.

Economic change generally takes place gradually, and therefore some historians feel it is misleading to speak of an industrial revolution, since the process was clearly evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

When the Liverpool and Manchester Railway line opened in September of 1830, the railway train—drawn by the Rocket, then the fastest and strongest of the locomotives—ran down and killed William Huskisson, a leading British politician and an ardent advocate of improving transport and communication, who had under-estimated its speed. This, the first railway accident in history, was symbolic of the new age to come, which benefited many, brought destruction to some, and transformed society far more rapidly than anyone had predicted.