Talmon Jacob. Romanticism and Revolt: Europe 1815-1848

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967. — 220 p.A book should speak so clearly for itself that there should be no need for a Foreword to explain the author's intentions or to apologize for his failures. Yet so great is the fear of being misunderstood and so intense the anxiety to forestall criticism for not having done what one had not thought of doing that few authors can resist the temptation. It is not my intention to offer a record of what went on in the various European countries during the years 1815-48. My aim is to delineate those forces and trends which were at work everywhere, and whose interaction gave a distinct character and a unity to the age. Too general history is bad history. I have therefore tried to make the reader aware of the local and national versions of the universal currents. The beam of the projector is not focused on the leading nations as such, but is kept shifting from one significant development to another. These have been selected for their pioneering nature, their character as typical samples or test cases, the
effectiveness of their impact, or their focal role in the context of conflict and clash. There are few periods in history which bring into relief so
strikingly as the years between 181 5 and 1848 the fact that each period is no more than a station in the historical process. During the age of Romanticism and revolt the trauma of the French Revolution worked itself out in the texture of the developments stimulated by the Industrial Revolution, though the solutions formulated by contemporaries were put to the test at a later period and were realized, if at all, in a manner very different from the one originally envisaged. If the interaction of the old and the new, the permanent and the contingent, be our concern, still more so is the complex relationship (and by no means the simple and direct 'being and consciousness' model) between the nature of things and the image men formed thereof out of their divergent interests, convictions and wishes, and not least, as we have only too painfully learned in our
own time, out of their traumatic experiences and obsessive memories - the source of so much conflict and frustration. My natural penchant has led me to dwell more on patterns of mind and behaviour than on the substratum of social-economic realities. I have done this partly because of my reluctance simply to copy or paraphrase what others have already done on the basis of first-hand knowledge and with a competence much greater than I could aspire to. I am also convinced that the recent tendency to turn history into statistical survey and sociological analysis - one might call it social geology - has gone far enough, and that it is time for a corrective in the direction of human drama. All the same, the subject of this book may be considered as both geology and drama. All the problems, ideas and conflicts of the modem age are already there in statu nascendi. And few would deny that if 1789 released vast discordant forces, these reached a tragic denouement in the years 1848-9 - a drama with an almost classical unity.The theme
Being and becoming
The international order
Social foundations and changed self-awarenessThe Grand DebateSocial mobility
The divine order and the sovereign self-sufficient state
Authority versus liberty
The politics of plot and riot
The split
PropertySocialismOrigins
Romantic technocracy
Utopia
Ferment in France
The British wayThe German ingredient from Kant to MarxPhilosophical preparation
The young MarxNationalismSources of inspiration
Idee force
Identity and diversity
Greece
Italy
GermanyRomanticismA spirit astir
The I
The Universe
'Prometheus Unbound'
'A light, a glory...'1848: The Year of TrialA spectre becomes flesh
From general concord to class war: France
Conflict of nations: Mitteleuropa
Realism triumphantStatistics