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The Western Heritage, 8th edition, by Kagan, Ozment, and Turner
Chapter 25—The Birth of Modern European Thought
Introduction
 The Enlightenment provided late-nineteenth-century Europeans with a heritage of rationalism,
toleration, cosmopolitanism, and appreciation of science.
 Romanticism led them to value feelings, imagination, national identify, and the autonomy of
the artistic experience.
 During this time period, European intellectuals were more daring than ever before, but they
were also probably less certain and optimistic.
The New Reading Public
 For the first time in Europe, a mass reading public came into existence. In 1850, about half of
Western Europe and much more of Eastern Europe was illiterate. That changed by the end of
the century.
Advanced in Primary Education
 Literacy improved on the continent as government financed education. Hungary, Switzerland,
Italy, Britain, France, and Germany all created or extended free primary education.
 By 1900, 85% of Western Europeans were literate, though Eastern Europe still lagged behind.
 The new primary education in the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic reflected and
generated social change.
 Liberals thought that such minimal training was necessary for orderly political behavior among
new voters.
 Conservatives saw education as a way to increase productivity.
 Those people who learned to read soon discovered, however, that higher education was still
closed off to them. They also discovered that many opportunities were still denied them even
though they had the requisite education. This prompted calls for reform, especially by the
lower classes.
 By the time of WWI, countries were beginning to set up publicly financed secondary (high
school) education systems. By WWII, publicly financed universities were appearing on the
continent.
Reading Materials for the Mass Audience
 This new literate population created a new market for reading materials.
 Books, magazines, mail-order catalogs, and libraries grew rapidly.
 Cheap mass-circulation newspapers enjoyed their heyday. These newspapers cemented the
commercial revolution of the Industrial Revolution by selling ads to manufactures of consumer
goods.
 The new, mass produced literature was often of a low quality. Pornography was rampant,
newspapers were fiercely partisan, and Nancy Grace-style reporting was the norm.
 The new literacy was the intellectual parallel of the railroad and the steamship. People could
leave their original intellectual surroundings because literacy is not an end in itself, but leads to
other skills and knowledge.
Science Fiction
 Jules Verne – Father of today’s works of popular science fiction. Five Weeks in a Balloon,
tale of balloon trip across Africa, was very popular. He got contract to serialize his following
works. It was the serialization of science fiction in cheap magazines that made it popular with
the public. The US named first atomic sub Nautilus after the famous ship in Twenty Thousand
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Leagues under the Sea. Verne made his stories contemporary so that readers would feel more
involved. Most of his science depicted was real.
 H.G. Wells—The famous English author was one generation younger than Jules Verne. He
published the popular The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the
Worlds. Wells’ science was mostly fictional but his revolutionary new works shook up the
literary world.
Science at Mid-century
 Science at mid-century had changed little from the time of Newton. It was still based on the
idea of a mechanical, orderly, and rational world.
 However, the rise of the French and German research institutions/universities meant that
groundbreaking research was just around the corner.
Comte, Positivism, and the Prestige of Science
 Auguste Comte – A French philosopher who developed positivism, a philosophy of human
intellectual development that culminated in science. He wrote The Positive Philosophy, in
which he argued that human thought develops in 3 stages. Theological: physical nature
explained as action of divinities or spirits. Metaphysical: abstract principles regarded as
operative agencies of nature. Positive stage: nature explanations are exact description of
phenomena. He said physical science was in the positive stage. He established science as the
model of all human knowledge.
 Comte also believed that laws of social behavior could be discovered like physical, scientific
laws. He is thus regarded as the father of sociology.
 People in Europe generally believed Comte’s argument. Science was on the ascent in the
Continent, and the general public believed that science would eventually be able to answer all
questions.
Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection
 Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species explained life through a mechanical interpretation.
The concept of evolution had existed long before Darwin; he only formulated the principle of
natural selection by which evolution could occur. Darwin drew on Malthus and said more
organisms come into existence than can survive in environment. Only the best survived long
enough to reproduce, however. This was natural selection.
 The idea that physical/organic nature might be constantly changing allowed people to believe
that society, values, customs, and beliefs should change too. He cast doubt on Creation.
 In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that man and society had developed as it had
naturalistically, as our ancestors strove to survive their situation. The Church was hardly
pleased.
 Gregor Mendel – Austrian monk who studied separate generations of pea plants and bred
these plants. He figured out how there was variation between different plants, but he didn’t
discover genes, just the fact that there seemed to be a pattern between parent physical
characteristics and that of offspring.
 Mendel’s work led to modern genetics. Modern genetics has now essentially proven the theory
of natural selection.
Science and Ethics
 Philosophers applied the concept of the struggle for survival to human social relationships.
 The phrase “survival of the fittest” didn’t come from Darwin but instead from classical
economists. Its cross applicability convinced people that competition was present not just in
economics or natural selection but in all parts of life.
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 Herbert Spencer – Advocated improving women’s lot, but didn’t think women could achieve
equality with men. He also believed human society progresses through competition; if weak
receive too much protection, rest of humankind is a loser. Struggle against fellow humans
became kind of ethical imperative. This is usually termed social Darwinism. He is most
famous advocate of evolutionary ethics.
 Social Darwinism is a perversion of Darwin’s views that was used to restrict welfare and was
an excuse for slavery. It basically says that might is right.
 T.H. Huxley, however, attacked social Darwinism. He supported Darwin’s work, but he did
not support its application to humanity. Huxley declared that the physical process of evolution
was at odds with human ethical development. He said that people should avoid the
competition of evolution and that our competitive urges was just a harkening back to the state
of nature.
Christianity and the Church under Siege
 Though science was chipping away at Christianity, the Protestant and Catholic churches
remained popular.
Intellectual Skepticism
 The intellectual attack on Christianity challenged its historical credibility, its scientific
accuracy, and its morality.
History
 David Friedrich Strauss – Published The Life of Jesus in 1835, where he questioned whether
Bible provides any genuine historical evidence about Jesus. He said story of Jesus is a myth
made by first-century Palestinians and is the aspirations of the people of that time/place rather
than real events.
 Other people said that the Bible had been edited/updated/made-up to improve upon Judaic
society. People started to view the Bible as fallible. They said that, like Homeric epics, it was
written by real people.
 The questioning of the historic validity of the Bible hurt Christianity the most in Europe.
Science
 18th century writers had said that the pursuit of science would help uncover and prove basic
truths from the Bible. The biggest proponent of this was William Paley in his Natural
Theology.
 As science developed, however, this idea was found to be false.
 For example, Charles Lyell’s geology suggested the earth is much older than biblical records
contend. He used natural causes to explain floods, mountains, and valleys, and thus removed
God from physical development of earth.
Morality
 The morality of the Old Testament God, his cruelty and unpredictability, did not fit well with
the tolerant, rational values of liberals. That the New Testament God would allow Jesus to die
also haunted Europeans.
 Nietzsche also criticized Christianity for promoting weakness. It demanded a useless and
debilitating sacrifice of flesh and spirit, rather than promoting the Greek ideas of heroic living
and daring.
 Overall, many upper class and educated Europeans became secular. States stopped actively
supporting the Church, and the secularization of society led more and more people to abandon
the Church. Secularization moved especially quickly in the cities.
Conflict between the Church and State
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 States clashed with both Protestant and Catholic churches.
 States were especially suspicious of the supranational character of the Catholic Church.
 The primary area of contention was education, however. Church schools had long been the
education system of Europe. The church feared that as future generations were educated
outside the church system, they would emerge without a religious background and would be
more susceptible to secularism.
Great Britain
 The Education Act of 1870 provided for state schools, instead of just giving money to religious
schools. It also pushed for new, non-religious schools to be built in underserved areas.
 It also pushed for reforms in techniques and curriculums. Religious schools opposed such
reform because it meant higher costs of operation for them.
 The Education Act of 1902 gave money to religious schools again but forced them to meet
state standards.
France
 France had a dual system of both religious and public schools.
 Under the Falloux Law of 1850, the local priest provided the religious education in the public
schools.
 The Third Republic moved to sever these ties. A series of laws repealed the Falloux Law and
replaced religious education with civic education. More public schools were built and those of
religious orders could not teach in them.
 In 1905, the Napoleonic Concordat was terminated. The church and state were separated.
Germany and the Kulturkampf
 Germany had the most extreme conflict.
 In 1870, Bismarck removed the clergy from overseeing local education in Prussia and set
education under state direction.
 This secularization of education represented the beginning of a concerted attack on the
Catholic Church in Germany.
 The May Laws of 1873 required the clergy to be educated in state schools and pass state
exams. Moreover, control over the Church in Prussia was legislated away from the pope and
given to the government. The government could also veto church appointments.
 Bismarck had to expel all current clergy from Prussia because they did not accept the May
Laws. Eventually, as Catholics in Prussia got angry, Bismarck had to give in on many Church
demands. In the end, the slight gain in state power that Bismarck got from his Kulturkampf
was not enough for the price he paid in the support of his Catholic citizens.
Areas of Religious Revival
 In Great Britain, churches generally expanded. They fundraised money and built new churches
and schools.
 There was a Catholic revival in Ireland in the 1870s.
 The defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War was blamed by many on the country’s sins.
This also sparked a Catholic revival.
 By paying more attention to the poor, many churches did some good and increased their
number of members.
The Roman Catholic Church and the Modern World
 The most striking feature of religion in Europe was the resilience of the papacy.
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 Pius IX – In 1860s, he launched counteroffensive against liberalism. He issued Syllabus of
Errors, which set Catholic Church squarely against contemporary science, philosophy, and
politics. He summoned First Vatican Council in 1869, which promulgated dogma of papal
infallibility when speaking officially on matters of faith and morals. Pius centralized authority
within church, which no one earlier had done to such degree. He believed church could only
sustain itself w/ large electorates by centering authority of church in papacy.
 It was in 1870 that the Church lost its Papal States and was limited to just the Vatican.
 Pius was succeeded by Leo XIII in 1878. Leo sought to make accommodations to the modern
age and to address its great social questions. He looked to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
for inspiration.
 Leo’s most important work was Rerum Novarum. In it, he laid down a modern, political
philosophy of Catholicism. He defended private property and religious schools and attacked
socialism and Marxism. He said that workers ought to be protected inside the capitalist
system, however, and should be paid proper wages and allowed to form unions.
 This work is the central focus of modern Christian/Catholic parties in European politics today.
 Leo’s successor, Pius X, moved the church more towards his namesake. He forced all his
clergy to take an anti-Modernist oath.
Toward a Twentieth-Century Frame of Mind
Science: The Revolution in Physics
 By the late 1870s, discontent existed over the excessive realism of mid-century science.
 Ernst Mach – In 1883, published The Science of Mechanics, where he urged scientists to
consider their concepts as descriptive not of physical world, but of sensations experienced by
scientific observer. Scientists describe sensations, not physical world that underlie these.
 Henri Poincaré – Urged theories of scientists to be regarded as hypothetical constructs of the
human mind and not as true descriptions of nature.
 Hans Vaihinger – said concepts of science should be considered “as if” descriptions of
physical world, instead of absolute truths.
X-Rays and Radiation
 Wilhelm Roentgen – He published his paper on his discovery of X-rays, a form of energy that
penetrated various opaque materials, in 1895. His work led to a flurry of research on X-rays
and radiation.
 Henri Becquerel – In 1896, he discovered that uranium emitted similar form of energy as X
rays (form of energy that penetrated various opaque materials) that Roentgen discovered.
 Ernest Rutherford – In 1898 he reported the existence of alpha and beta rays in uranium
radiation and indicated some of their properties. In 1902, he explained the cause of radiation
thru disintegration of the atoms of radioactive materials. He speculated on huge store of
energy in atom.
 Marie and Pierre Curie – Marie is credited w/ discovery of radium, for which she was
awarded Nobel Prize in Chem in 1911. They are two of the most important figures in the
advance of physics and chemistry at the turn of the century.
The Atom
 J.J. Thompson – Formulated theory of electron at Cambridge. (using cathode ray tube, he
figured out the electric charge/mass ratio of an electron)
 Rutherford also made contributions to the structure of the atom. In 1910, his investigations
into the scattering of alpha rays and the nature of the inner structure of the atom which caused
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such scattering led to the postulation of his concept of the "nucleus", his greatest contribution
to physics. According to him practically the whole mass of the atom and at the same time all
positive charge of the atom is concentrated in a minute space at the center.
Theories of Quantum Energy, Relativity, and Uncertainty
 Max Planck – In 1900, he pioneered articulation of the quantum theory of energy; energy is a
series of discrete quantities, or packets, rather than continuous stream. (Preceded relativity of
Einstein)
 Albert Einstein – In 1905, he published his papers on relativity that stated time and space exist
as a combined continuum. Also, the measurement of time and space depends on the observer
as well as on the entities being measured. This set the fundamental theory of physics in a new
direction and challenged previous Western thought of science, literature, politics, and
philosophy.
 Werner Heisenberg – In 1927, he made uncertainty principle, the idea that the behavior of
subatomic particles is a matter of statistical probability rather than exactly determinable cause
and effect. You cannot know the exact location and speed at the same time.
Science and Society
 The complexity of the new science meant that it lost some of its luster with the public.
 However, it gained many new applications in industry. Industry started to become a central
source of research.
 Governments also began supporting research. Scientists related science to economic progress,
military security, and the health of their nations.
Literature: Realism and Naturalism
 The realist movement portrayed the hypocrisy, brutality, and the dullness that underlay
bourgeois life.
 Realist and naturalist writers brought scientific objectivity and observation to their work.
 Realism rejected the romantic idealization of nature. It portrayed the dark side of life instead.
 Early realist writers included Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac, and George Eliot. They
portrayed the cruelty of industrial life and of a society based on money. They also constructed
detailed characters.
 Their works, however, included imagination and artistry. They described a better morality
possible though Christian or humane values.
 The major figures of later realism examined the dark side of life without being certain that a
better life was possible. They showed humans as overly passionate and materialistically
deterministic. They saw society as perpetuating evil itself.
 Gustave Flaubert – Wrote Madame Bovary, a story of colorless life and woman’s search for
love in and out of marriage. Regarded as the first genuinely realistic novel. It portrayed life
without heroism, purpose, or civility.
 Emile Zola – He turned realism into a movement. He argued he could write an experimental
novel that reported characters like a science experiment. He believed absolute physical and
psychological determinism ruled human events like in the physical world. Between 1871 and
1893, he explored topics of alcoholism, prostitution, and labor strife; he didn’t try to get away
from reality. Zola also took a leading role in the defense of Dreyfus.
 Henrik Ibsen – Norwegian playwright who carried the realistic portrayal of domestic life onto
the stage. He sought to strip away illusory mask of middle-class morality. A Doll’s House:
Nora has husband who can’t tolerate independence of character or thought on her part. She
finally leaves him. In Ghosts, a respectable woman must deal w/ son suffering from syphilis
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inherited from husband. In The Master Builder, aging architect kills himself while trying to
impress a young woman. Ibsen attacked sentimentality, ideal of female “angel of the house,”
and cloak of respectability.
 George Bernard Shaw – Supported Ibsen, and made his own realistic onslaught against
romanticism and false respectability. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, he dealt w/ prostitution; in
Arms and the Man and Man and Superman he heaped scorn on romantic ideals of love/war; in
Androcles and the Lion, he denounced Christianity.
 Realists hoped to destroy the illusions of society and compel the public to face reality. They
wanted to remove the veneer of hypocrisy that had forbidden the discussion of pressing
contemporary issues.
 Realists, however, rarely offered solutions and left people depressed and without hope.
Modernism
 From 1870 onwards, modernism touched all the arts. Like realism, modernism was critical of
middle class society and morality. Modernism, however, was not deeply concerned with social
issues. What drove the modernists was s concert for the aesthetic or beautiful. They wanted to
make all art more fluid like music.
 Modernists tried to create new forms of art. They combined previous sources into new
amalgams, like Igor Stravinsky did in his ballet The Rite of Spring.
Cubism
 Pablo Picasso and other artists associated with cubism constructed paintings that involved
viewing objects from a variety of angles at the same time.
 Cubism emerged in the heady turn-of-the century cultural climate that fostered changes in
science, literature, etc.
 For hundreds of years, Western painting had sought to portray reality. Even Impressionism
and post-Impressionism was essentially realistic in nature.
 This age also marked a new sensitivity in regard to non-Western peoples and their art.
 Beginning in 1907, Picasso rejected the idea of a painting as constituting a window looking
onto the real world. Instead, he saw painting as an autonomous realm of art itself with no
purpose beyond itself.
 Echoing the art of Egypt, Picasso represented only two dimensions in his painting.
 They saw “reality” as the construction of multiple perceptions, and thus including many
different perspectives in their paintings.
 In cubism, “The true picture will constitute an individual object, which will possess an
existence of its own apart from the subject that has inspired it.”
Bloomsbury Group
 The chief proponents of modernism in England were the members of the Bloomsbury Group.
These authors challenged the values of their Victorian forebears.
 In both personal practice and theory, the Bloomsbury Group rejected what they regarded as the
repressive sexual morality of their parents’ generation.
 Virginia Woolf – She took a unique stance with feminist literature with her publication of A
Room of One’s Own. Here, she told of the difficulties that women of brilliance and social
standing encountered in being taken seriously. She said woman must have a room of her own
(not dominated by men), and an independent income. She also wondered whether women
should imitate men or bring their own experiences (intellectual and psychological) into their
writing. She said they should do the latter, and thus challenged literary conventions of the
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traditional novel. Her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse portrayed
individuals seeking to make their way in a world with most of the nineteenth-century social
and moral certainties removed.
Other Modernist Literature
 Marcel Proust adopted a stream of consciousness format that allowed him to explore his
memories. In his seven-part novel In Search of Time Past, he would concentrate on a single
experience or object and then allow his mind to wander through all the thoughts it provoked.
 Thomas Mann, in his Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, explored both the social
experience of middle-class Germans and how they dealt with the intellectual heritage of the
nineteenth century.
 James Joyce, of Irish heritage, changed not only the novel but also the structure of the
paragraph in the epic modernist work Ulysses.
 Modernism in literature arose before WWI but flourished on the turmoil and social dislocation
that the war caused.
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Revolt against Reason
 After 1850, philosophers began to question the adequacy of rational thinking to address the
human situation.
 Friedrich Nietzsche –He attacked Christianity, democracy, nationalism, rationality, science,
and progress. He wanted to probe the source of human thought and values.
 The Birth of Tragedy: said the nonrational aspects of human nature are as important as the
rational. He insisted that instinct and ecstasy had positive functions. He denounced Socrates
who believed solely in rationality. Nietzsche thought that the nonrational aspects are what
really characterized human life; the nonrational was where heroism came from.
 Wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra that criticized democracy and Christianity. He thought that
they only led to the mediocrity of society.
 He announced the death of God and coming of the Overman in Overman. The Overman
embodied heroism like in Greek life in the Homeric age. He also criticized anti-Semitism in
the work.
 He wrote Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals to try to find social and
psychological sources of our perception of what is good and evil. These books questioned
morality itself. He said that since morality was a human construction, we could throw away
Christianity and our other morals and re-emphasize pride, assertiveness, and strength.
 He said that the world was always in flux and never permanent.
 His appeal to feelings and emotions and his questioning of rationalism draws on the Romantic
tradition.
The Birth of Psychoanalysis
 A determination to probe beneath public appearance united the major figures of late-nineteenth
century science, art, and philosophy.
 Sigmund Freud – He was an Austrian Jew who lived in Vienna. He had his medical practice
there until driven out by the Nazis. He applied the new analytic methods to psychology.
 Freud published Studies in Hysteria in 1895 that examined hypnosis to treat hysteria.
 Later, Freud found that patients always linked their neurotic problems with earlier experiences,
many times to childhood. Sexual matters were also significant in patient’s problems. Freud
thought for time that this accounted for their illnesses.
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 In 1897, he developed the theory of infantile sexuality. He said that sexual drives and energy
already existed in infants and thus questioned the idea of childhood innocence. He said that
humans are at the most basic level sexual creatures.
 He also believed that irrational dream content has scientific explanation. He thought that
dreams allow unconscious wishes, desires, and drives that were excluded in conscious life to
enjoy free play in the mind. In fact, Freud argued, unconscious drives and desires contribute to
conscious behavior. He published his most important book on infantile sexuality and dreams,
The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1900.
 Later, Freud developed a new model of the mind as an area of struggle of 3 entities: id –
amoral, irrational, driving instincts for pleasure; superego – external moral
imperatives/expectations of society placed on someone; and ego – balances id and superego.
Personality is determined by physical/mental forces in a finite world. He believes suppression
of id causes disorders, but that some degree of suppression is necessary for civilization to
function.
 Freud was hostile to religion and spoke of it as an illusion.
 Freud was generally pessimistic about the future of civilization in the West.
Divisions in the Psychoanalytic Movement
 By 1910, Freud had several devoted students.
 Jung was the most promising of these, but before WWI Freud and Jung split.
 Carl Jung – Jung thought human subconscious contains inherited memories from previous
generations. These and personal experience constitute the soul. In Modern Man in Search of a
Soul and other works, Jung tended toward mysticism and saw positive values in religion. He
thought 1900s people were alienated from collective memories. Jung questioned the primacy
of sexual drives in forming personality and contributing mental disorder. He put less faith in
reason.
 Psychoanalysis involved sociology, anthropology, religion, and literature. Whether it is
eventually proven true or not, psychoanalysis deeply influenced the intellectual life of the
twentieth century.
Weber attacks Islam and Marx
 Max Weber – He was a sociologist that dismissed Islam as a religion and culture incapable of
developing science and closed to new ideas. He regarded emergence of rationalism throughout
society as major development of human history. He, unlike many other modernists, supported
rationalism. His seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism attacked
many of Marx’s views. Weber saw bureaucratization as basic feature of modern social life, not
capitalism as Marx thought. Bureaucratization involved division of labor in large
organizations. He also said noneconomic factors might account for developments in human
history. In his work, he traced the emergence of capitalism to the Puritan work ethic.
Retreat from Rationalism in Politics
 The ideas that people vote for their rational political self-interest and that education improved
the human condition were attacked.
 Political scientists and sociologists painted politics as frequently irrational. People questioned
whether rationality and education could affect human society at all.
 Many psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists were studying the idea of collective
behavior. In general, they said that people in crowds tend to behave irrationally. Instinct,
habit, and affection, instead of reason, drive human behavior.
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 Collective behavior also applies to situations without crowds. People make decisions based on
their values, but their values are set by society. Thus, they make decisions to conform to
society (like a mental “mob” mentality). This is not true, independent, rational thought.
Racism and Nationalism
 Racism had long existed in Europe (documented since before the Renaissance). Since the
1700s, scientists had classified people as different races based on skin color and language.
 Sensing the similarities between the Indo-European languages, Europeans hypothesized that
they were the direct descendents of a master “Aryan” race. Other peoples were outcasts of this
great Aryan society.
 What transformed racial thinking at the end of the century was its association with the
biological sciences. Europeans claimed that racial science supported a hierarchy of superior
and inferior races.
 Arthur de Gobineau – He was a French reactionary diplomat who said that you could
understand human history by understanding the human races. In his Essay on the Inequality of
the Human Races, he says that the troubles of the West are due to the degeneration of the
original white Aryan race by marrying into other races over centuries.
 Houston Stewart Chamberlain – An Englishman who settled in Germany, he wrote the
influential racist tome, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Chamberlain believed that
most people in the world are racially mixed and that this mixture weakens the purity of human
characteristics. He believed that people who were assured of their racial purity could act with
the most extreme self-confidence and arrogance. He believed that human race could be
improved and a superior race developed through genetics and eugenics. He was anti-Semitic—
Jews were enemy of Euro racial regeneration.
 Racism was just a new manifestation of nationalism. Nationalism had been a good thing in
Europe, used to redraw the borders of countries.
 From the 1870s onwards, however, national became a movement with mass support, spawning
many organizations and political parties. Nationalists often redefined nationalism in terms of
race and blood. The new nationalism opposed internationalism, liberalism, and socialism. For
many people, it became almost a second religion.
 Nationalism of this aggressive, racist variety became the most powerful ideology of the early
1900s and would reemerge after the collapse of communism in the 1990s.
Zionism and Anti-Semitism
 Anti-Semitism had dated back through the Middle Ages, but now it was mainly due to
economics and not really religion. Whenever people had money problems, it was popular to
blame the Jews.
 Mayor Karl Leuger of Vienna used anti-Semitism to attract support for his Christian Socialist
Party. The ultraconservative Lutheran Adolf Stoecker spread anti-Semitism in Germany. It
spread in France through the Dreyfus affair.
 Anti-Semitism now took on parts of this “biological” racism debate. Jews were impure not
because of their religion, but because of their blood. This certainly makes anti-Semitism more
powerful than ever before.
 The Zionist movement rose in response to this anti-Semitism. It wanted to create a separate
state for the Jews.
 Theodor Herzl – Austro-Hungarian who founded the Zionist movement to found a separate
Jewish state. Dreyfus hearing, election of Lueger as mayor of Vienna, and personal experience
led him to think that liberal politics/institutions couldn’t protect Jews. He published The
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Jewish State, calling for separate state for Jews to obtain equal rights. He directed appeal
towards poor Jews to add in desire of ideals of liberalism and socialism to rejection of antiSemitism.
Women and Modern Thought
Antifeminism in Late-Century Thought
 The emphasis on biology, evolution, and reproduction led many people to stereotype women
into a mothering role. Many late-century thinkers also often displayed real fear and hostility
towards women, portraying them as creature susceptible to destructive feelings and instincts.
 Darwin himself believed that women were weaker and less able than men. Huxley wrote
articles and pamphlets explaining how women were servile to men.
 Women were excluded from many prominent scientific and other organizations because such
amateurs were unfit to participate among the masters. This explains to a large party why
women had so much trouble getting into higher education until well into the 1900s.
 Freud saw the natural destiny of women as motherhood and the rearing of sons.
 Comte, basing his thoughts on Rousseau, portrayed women as biologically and intellectually
inferior to men.
 HS Spencer thought that women could never achieve equality with men.
New Directions in Feminism
 The close of the century witnessed a revival of feminist thought in Europe that would grow in
the twentieth century.
Sex and Marriage Roles
 Middle-class women began to challenge the double standard of sexual morality and the
traditional male-dominated family. Many times this involved changing laws and attitudes
towards prostitution.
 Between 1864 and 1886, English prostitutes were subject to the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Any women suspected of being a prostitute could be examined for STDs. If she was infected,
she would be locked up for months in a women’s hospital, where she would supposedly
“undergo” treatment. Men who solicited prostitutes were, of course, not affected by the law.
 The act treated women as less than rational human beings. It literally put women’s bodies
under the control of male customers, male physicians, and male law-enforcement personnel.
 Many English women saw this as a punishment of young, poor women, who could find no
other job in the male-dominated society. They compared the plight of these women to those
who were denied entrance to higher education or professional school.
 The act was finally repealed after decades of feminist opposition.
 The tenets of marriage were also challenged by feminists. In their view, marriage should be a
free union of equals with men and women sharing responsibility for their children.
 Virtually all late-century feminists supported changes in sexual morality. They wanted wider
sexual freedom, which they claimed would improve women’s lives.
 Women at this time also began pushing for contraception. They believed that a woman should
be able to control when she got pregnant.
Role in Society
 Overall, feminists also wanted to give women more of a say, not only in her own life, but also
in society as well.
 Many pushed for the vote. Of course, suffrage was probably the major feminist cause of the
period.
Mohit Agrawal (12.12)
 Increasingly, feminists would concentrate on freeing and developing women’s personalities
through better education and gov support.
 Feminists also became active in socialists circles. By the close of the century, socialist
writings began to include calls for improvement in the economic situation of women.
 Remember, many socialists had traditionally believed in free sex. Thus, the two groups were
natural allies.
 Feminism became associated with liberal politics. Thus, extremely conservative political
movements often emphasized traditional roles for women.