Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

SCIENCESuch direct derivations explain some things about scientific developmentbetween 1789 and 1848, but not much. Clearly the indirecteffects of contemporary events were more important. No one couldfail to observe that the world was transformed more radically than everbefore in this era. No thinking person could fail to be awed, shaken,and mentally stimulated by these convulsions and transformations. Itis hardly surprising that patterns of thought derived from the rapidsocial changes, the profound revolutions, the systematic replacement ofcustomary or traditional institutions by radical rationalist innovations,should become acceptable. Is it possible to connect this visible emergenceof revolution with the readiness of the unworldly mathematiciansto break through hitherto operative thought barriers? We cannot tell,though we know that the adoption of revolutionary new lines ofthought is normally prevented not by their intrinsic difficulty, but bytheir conflict with tacit assumptions about what is or is not 'natural'.The very terms 'irrational' number (for numbers like -y/ 2 ) or 'imaginary'number (for numbers like V -1 ) indicate the nature of the difficulty.Once we decide that they are no more or less rational or realthan any others, all is plain sailing. But it may take an age of profoundtransformation to nerve thinkers to make such decisions; and indeedimaginary or complex variables in mathematics, treated with puzzledcaution in the eighteenth century, only came fully into their own afterthe Revolution.Leaving aside mathematics, it was only to be expected that patternsdrawn from the transformations of society would tempt scientists infields to which such analogies appeared applicable; for instance tointroduce dynamic evolutionary concepts into hitherto static ones.This could either happen directly, or through the intermediary of someother science. Thus the concept of the Industrial Revolution, which isfundamental to history and much of modern economics, was introducedin the 1820s frankly as an analogy to the French Revolution. CharlesDarwin derived the mechanism of 'natural selection' by analogy withthe model of capitalist competition, which he took from Malthus (the'struggle for existence'). The vogue for catastrophic theories in geology,1790-1830, may also owe something to the familiarity of this generationwith violent convulsions of society.Nevertheless, outside the most obviously social sciences, it is unwiseto put too much weight on such external influences. The world ofthought is to some extent autonomous: its movements are, as it were,on the same historical wave-length as those outside, but they are notmere echoes of them. Thus for instance, the catastrophist theories ofgeology also owed something to the Protestant, and especially the293