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

"The progress of science is not simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems. It also proceeds by the discovery of new problems, of new ways of looking at old ones, of new ways of tackling or solving old ones, of entirely new fields of enquiry, or new theoretical and practical tools of enquiry."

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.