Timothy C.W. Blanning > Quotes

“Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better.”
― Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

“By its durability this settlement proved that conservative liberty is an oxymoron, not a contradiction in terms.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

“But the relationship between the between the two cultural paradigms has always been a dialectical, not cyclical. The romantics were not repeating their ancestors. On the contrary, they brought about a cultural revolution comparable in its radicalism and effects with the roughly contemporary American, French, and Industrial Revolutions.
By destroying natural law and by reorienting concern from the work to the artist they tore up the old regime's aesthetic rule book just as thoroughly as any Jacobin [a 18th century political French club] tore down social institutions. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch: "Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity." [Unquote Troeltsch]
As will be argued in the subsequent chapters, it was Hegel who captured the essence of this revolution in his pithy definition of romanticism as "absolute inwardness" [absloute Innerlichkeit - in German - אינערליכקייט]. It will also be argued that its prophet was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: if not the most consistent, then certainly the most influential of all the eighteenth-century thinkers.
Writing in 1907, Lytton Strachey caught Rousseau's special quality very well: "Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world -- to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart." Percy Bysshe Shelley, who derided the philosophes as "mere reasoners," regarded Rousseau as "a great poet.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution

“By the eighteenth century many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by events: dogged devotion to old techniques, suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

“A new kind of poverty emerged, not a sudden affliction by famine, plague, or war but a permanent state of malnutrition and underemployment. It was also a vicious circle, for the undernourished were not so wretched as to be unable to produce the children who perpetuated their misery. They were also increasingly at the mercy of market forces, as capitalism eroded the traditional society of orders and its values.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815

“For some time I have been idle and felt myself incapable of doing anything. Nothing would flow from inside; the spring had run dry, I was empty; nothing spoke to me from the outside, I was apathetic, and so I concluded that the best thing to do was to do nothing.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Romantic Revolution

“The Terror was over but its effects were as long-lasting as they were momentous. The experience divided the population so sharply that every subsequent political crisis was influenced profoundly. Right across Europe, the horrors of this terrible year made even mildly progressive reform more difficult and made the political and social establishment both more secure and more conservative. So the Revolution's political legacy was Janus-faced: on the one side benign libertarian ideology, on the other malignant state terrorism. It would be difficult to say which has proved the more influential.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

“Indeed, the manufacture of iron had come into common use in Britain as early as the eighth century BC. It was discovered that heating iron-bearing ore to a high temperature with the use of charcoal, fanned by a draught of air, creates a solid lump of metal (a 'bloom'). When re-heated, the metal can be hammered into a shape. This is 'wrought iron'. If additional carbon is added to the ore, the melting temperature is reduced, which allows liquid iron ore to be poured into a mould. This is 'cast iron'. In the course of the fifteenth century, a furnace was developed which used blasts of heated and compressed air to drive up the temperature. This is a 'blast furnace'. The molten iron is run off into moulds consisting of a main channel connected to a number of shorter channels at right angles. As this resembles a sow suckling her pigs, the cast iron which results is known as 'pig iron'.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

“So it might be speculated that the British exported their dissidents and so suffered their revolution three thousand miles away from home in the shape of the American War of Independence. The Spanish did the same in the shape of the liberation movements in Latin America in the 1820s. But the French Revolution was a revolution in France.”
― Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815