1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals

Description

As the revolution of 1848 swept across Europe, there emerged, at least in embryo, most of the ideas that were to shake Europe in the next hundred years. The losing battle of political liberalism with the reactionary governments that had ruled almost unchallenged for three decades is only part of the story, for liberal beliefs led logically, in the rapidly changing situation, to other ideas, unforeseen by most of the men of 1848, but none the less potent for that. Concentrating upon the prismatic relations of Germans, Poles, and Slavs, Sir Lewis Namier develops the thesis that the cause of the liberal collapse was neither class division nor the strength of the conservative forces, but nationalism, aroused by mutually contradictory demands for popular sovereignty. Had the revolution not been crushed, it might in the end have created a world just as hostile to human rights in its way as the order imposed by the reactionaries. Examining the complex interaction of these various groups, this remarkable book illuminates a number of little-known but important facets of the nineteenth century’s most turbulent year.