Brad’s Reviews > The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 > Status Update

It is significant that the young Marx, trained in the German (i.e. primarily romantic) tradition, became a Marxist only when combined with the French socialist critique and the wholly non-romantic theory of English political economy. and it was political economy which provided the core of his mature thought.

I dunno, sounds like an epistemological break tied to a romantic/rational dialectic.

"Having no coherent theory of evolution, the anti-progressive thinkers found it hard to decide what had 'gone wrong'. Their favourite culprit was reason...The most serious intellectual effort of the anti-progressive ideology went into historical analysis and the rehabilitation of the past, the investigation of continuity as against revolution."

"What held this movement together was hunger, wretchedness, hatred and hope. And what defeated it, in Chartist Britain as on the revolutionary continent of 1848, was that the poor were hungry, numerous and desperate enough to rise, but lacked the organization and maturity which could have made their rebellion more than a momentary danger to the social order."

"It is no accident that the least skilled, least educated, least organized and therefore least hopeful of the poor, then as later, were the most apathetic."

Obviously Blanqui should've just voted harder!

The complex of economic, administrative, ideological and power-considerations which tended to impose a minimum size of territory and population on the modern unit of government, and make us vaguely uneasy at the thought of, say, UN membership for Liechtenstein, did not yet apply to any extent.

Then, the Napoleonic Wars brought "general rationalization of the European political map."

Enjoying it more than "The Age of Extremes". Solid work, considering how many books have covered this time in Europe before and since.

But for the solid middle class Frenchman who stood behind The Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country.

In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions [after the French] the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we increasingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.