Introspection naturally implies an inner life worth looking into, and most Romantic artists brought forth extraordinary findings. They form the groundwork of modern thought. One cannot easily imagine Freud or Joyce, much less the degree of self-consciousness shared by Westerners today, without the deliverances of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Leopardi, Stendhal, Constant, Sainte-Beuve, Heine, and innumerable other writers of the early 19th century. And towering above them as the creator of the prototype of Romantic introspection is Goethe with his Faust.
Faust was the figure in which a whole age recognized its mind and soul; and the adjective Faustian, as Spengler’s use of it makes clear, still describes tendencies at work in culture today. The principal one, already mentioned, self-consciousness—the identity crisis—remains. The belief, moreover, that movement, activity, is better than repose and that striving is better than achieving is clearly the great postulate of contemporary civilization. Faust himself ends by giving his life to practical works in behalf of his fellow man; however, he sets himself on that path only after a slow and deep analysis of his divided soul, which has been ruled in turn by despair, lust, superstition and the forces of the unconscious, the love of innocence, the conviction of sin and crime, the horrors of hypocrisy and conventional life, the temptations of wealth and power, the disgust with pedantry and established religion, and the yearning for infinite knowledge, in the hopes of attaining by it wisdom and peace. Faust, in short, traverses the whole cosmos, made up of the inner and outer worlds, to find in the act of self-dedication to humanity the justification of his existence. Early 19th-century social and political thought
The Romantics who studied society through the novel or discoursed about it in essays and pamphlets were no less devoted to this “cause of humanity,” but they arrived at politically different conclusions from Goethe’s and from one another’s. Scott and Disraeli were forerunners of Tory democracy as Burke was of liberal conservatism. Dickens, a passionate humanitarian, stirred the masses with his examples of the law’s stupid cruelty, but he proposed no agency of betterment, content to despise Parliament, the law courts, and the complacency of the wealthy. Balzac wrote his huge array of novels as a “social zoology” that was to show what a bloody jungle society becomes without the church and the monarchy to restrain human passions.
Stendhal noted the same reality but was more concerned with the free play of individual genius; he resigned himself to the social struggle, provided not too many stupid individuals ran the inevitably heavy-handed regimes. Freedom might be found by the happy few through the loopholes of a mixed government such as England’s, whereas in the ostensibly free United States there was no protection against social pressure and no likelihood of genius in art or in politics.
The great authority on American democracy was Tocqueville, whose astonishing survey in two volumes contained many true predictions and is still packed with useful lessons. Tocqueville confirmed Stendhal’s low estimate of freedom of thought in America, but he foresaw in the United States the first example of a type of democracy that would surely overtake the Western world. He found in such a future many good things and many defects; he predicted a day when slavery would threaten disaster to America; he foretold what kind of poetry a democracy would produce and delineated the art of Walt Whitman; he apprehended the complication of laws and the declining quality of justice; but he was reconciled to what must be. Postrevolutionary thinking
What lay behind all 19th-century writings on politics and society was the shadow of the French Revolution. In the 1790s the revolution had aroused Burke to write his famous Reflections and Joseph de Maistre his Considérations sur la France. They differed on many points, but what both saw, like their successors, was that revolution was self-perpetuating. There is no way to stop it because liberty and equality can be endlessly claimed by group after group that feels deprived or degraded. And the idea that these principles are universally applicable removes any braking power that national tradition or circumstance might afford.
Proof that the revolution marched on, slow or fast, could be read (as it still can be) in every issue of the daily paper since 1789. In the early 19th century the greatest pressure came from the liberals, whether students, bankers, manufacturers, or workmen enlisted in their cause. They wanted written constitutions, an extension of the suffrage, civil rights, a free-market economy, and from time to time wars of national liberation or aggrandizement in the name of cultural and linguistic unity. For example, all the intellect of western Europe sided with Greece in the 1820s when it began its war of emancipation from Turkey. Byron himself died at Missolonghi while helping the Greeks. Poets wrote odes that musicians set to music, and painters painted scenes of war. Between this liberalism and the nationalism that sought freedom from foreign rule the line could not be clearly drawn. In Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and South America, revolt in the name of liberty was endemic until the middle of the century. Only England escaped by a timely reform of Parliament in 1832, but it averted revolution only by a hair’s breadth, after protracted threats of civil war and many violent incidents expressing the same animus as elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the first disturbances resulting from machine industry—sabotage, strikes, and conspiracies (for trade unions were generally held illegal)—reinforced the revolutionary momentum, not only in fact but also in theory. As early as 1810 the business cycle, the doctrine of the exploitation of the worker, and the degradation of life in industrial societies had been noted and discussed. By 1825 the writings of the count de Saint-Simon, which proposed a reorganization of society to cure these evils, had won adherents; by 1830 the Saint-Simonians were an acknowledged party with sympathizers abroad, and by 1832 the words socialism and socialist were in use.
The Saint-Simonian doctrine proposed a benevolent dictatorship of industrialists and scientists to remove the inequities of the free-for-all liberal system. Other reformers, such as the practical Robert Owen, who organized successful communities in Scotland and the United States, depended on a strong leader using ad hoc methods. Still others, such as Leroux and Cabet, were communists of divergent kinds seeking to carry out elaborate blueprints of the perfect state. Proudhon denounced the state, as such, and all private property. As a philosophical anarchist, he wished to substitute free association and contract for all legal compulsions. In England, the school of Bentham and Mill—utilitarians or philosophical radicals—attacked existing institutions in the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, and by their arguments they succeeded in reforming the top-heavy legal system. Without doctrine but moved by a similar sense of wrong, Thomas Carlyle fought the utilitarians for their materialistic expediency and himself sought light on the common problem by pondering the lessons of the French Revolution and publishing in 1837 what is still the greatest account of its catastrophic course. Later, Carlyle gave in Past and Present a suggestive picture of what he deemed a true community: quasi-medieval, based on the Faustian joy of work, and relying for its cohesion on its leader’s genius and strength of soul.
In the Germanies, repeated outbreaks changed little the system imposed from Vienna by Metternich—censorship, spying on students and intellectuals, repression of group activities at the first sign of political or social advocacy. This drove original thought underground or abroad in the persons of refugees such as the poet Heine and later Karl Marx. At home, the prevailing mood was despair. Max Stirner in his book The Ego and His Own (1845) recommended, instead of social reform, a ruthless individualism that should seek satisfaction by any means and at whatever risk. A small group of other individualists, Die Freien (“The Free”), found that satisfaction of the ego through total disillusion and radical repudiation: nothing is true or good—the state is a monster, society sheer hypocrisy, religion a fraud, for God is dead (1840).