Social History Commons^™

Xvi. Developments In Socialism, (1848-1914), Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XVI: Developments in Socialism, 1848-1914

The era between the revolutionary upheavals in Europe in 1848 and the opening of World War I was one of immense changes. Encompassing such developments as nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, the growth of political and economic liberalism, and the rise of the social sciences, this period contributed some of the most significant ideas and institutions which characterize contemporary Western Civilization. Their impact. Indeed, now challenges virtually the entire world.

In the same age there arose the phenomenon of socialism, a family name for a group of ideas which received increasing attention in the latter half of the nineteenth century as …

2. Karl Marx, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XVI: Developments in Socialism, 1848-1914

With the 1840's the socialist heritage underwent profound changes. Most significantly, these may be attributed to the influence of Karl Marx, (1818-1883), in whose person were joined both the intellectual critic and the practical revolutionary. The import of his life, if any one meaning can be drawn from it, lay in the works to which he gave himself with single-minded devotion. All else was assigned lower priority: material comfort, personal welfare, respectability. Even the poverty and suffering of his family, though bitterly and painfully experienced, were not permitted to sway the concentration he felt compelled to bring to his study, …

1. Introduction, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXI: Meaning in the Social Sciences

Vastly increased research and a sounder technique in history in the nineteenth century had two influences on the social sciences. When an enthusiasm for the records of history was combined with the evolutionary perspective, it often resulted in the search for and the imposition of patterns of development on history in general or on the history of particular subject matters such as economics, politics, morals, or religion. Social scientists looked to history for explanations, in the hope of finding inevitable laws, stages of development, or the forces that moved human society. As historians worked out a critical method for their …

3. Sociology, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXI: Meaning in the Social Sciences

Sociology is one of the sciences of human behavior that has grown out of Enlightenment thought. In its present method and theory there is substantially nothing that was not anticipated by gifted seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century thinkers and their intellectual offspring in the Enlightenment tradition. From particular aspects of the grand theoretical syntheses that were characteristic of these centuries, a process of refinement and specialization has produced the sociology of the present day. [excerpt]

4. The Impact On Society (1919-1939), Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XVIII: The Western World in the Twentieth Century: The Historical Setting

Anything as revolutionary as World War I could not help but convulse the social order. Within each state the sense of community induced by the common war effort did not survive into the postwar world, with its tensions old and new. Demobilized soldiers, trained to fight, found it difficult to adjust themselves to civilian life. The uncertainties of war, revolution, and economic instability undermined confidence among individuals, classes, and states. Only in a very narrow sense did the armistice of 1918 bring peace. [excerpt]