Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

IDEOLOGY: SECULARserious intellectual effort of the anti-progressive ideology went intohistorical analysis and the rehabilitation of the past, the investigationof continuity as against revolution. Its most important exponents weretherefore not the freakish French emigres like De Bonald (i 753-1840)and Joseph De Maistre (1753-1821) who sought to rehabilitate a deadpast, often by rationalist arguments verging on the lunatic, even if theirobject was to establish the virtues of irrationalism, but men likeEdmund Burke in England and the German 'historical school' ofjurists who legitimized a still existing old regime in terms of its historiccontinuities.IVIt remains to consider a group of ideologies poised oddly between theprogressive and the anti-progressive, or in social terms, between theindustrial bourgeois and proletarian on one side, the aristocratic,mercantile classes and the feudal masses on the other. Their mostimportant bearers were the radical 'little men' of Western Europe andthe United States and the modest middle classes of Central and SouthernEurope, comfortably but not wholly satisfactorily ensconced in theframework of an aristocratic and monarchical society. Both in someways believed in progress. Neither was prepared to follow it to itslogical liberal or socialist conclusions; the former because these wouldhave doomed the small craftsmen, shopkeepers, farmers and businessmento be transformed either into capitalists or labourers, the latterbecause they were too weak and after the experience of the Jacobindictatorship too frightened, to challenge the power of their princes;whose officials in many cases they were. The views of both these groupstherefore combine liberal (and in the first case implicitly socialist)components with anti-liberal, progressive with anti-progressive ones.Moreover, this essential complexity and contradictoriness allowed themto see more deeply into the nature of society than either liberal progressivesor anti-progressives. It forced them into dialectics.The most important thinker (or rather intuitive genius) of this firstgroup of petty-bourgeois radicals was already dead in 1789: JeanJacques Rousseau. Poised between pure individualism and the convictionthat man is only himself in a community, between the ideal ofthe state based on reason and the suspicion of reason as against 'feeling',between the recognition that progress was inevitable and the certaintythat it destroyed the harmony of 'natural' primitive man, he expressedhis own personal dilemma as well as that of classes which could neitheraccept the liberal certainties of factory-owners nor the socialist ones of247