The Twilight of Certainty: Rationalism Under Siege

The late 19th century witnessed a profound intellectual paradox. While scientific rationalism appeared triumphant through technological progress and mass education, the foundations of Enlightenment certainty were quietly eroding. As Romain Roland observed in 1915, faith in reason had become almost religious in nature – a dogma rather than demonstrated truth. This period (1875-1914) saw simultaneous explosions in scientific knowledge and existential doubt, creating fertile ground for what Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world.”

The crisis manifested in three interconnected realms: the natural sciences where new discoveries challenged Newtonian certainties; the social sciences struggling to explain mass politics and irrational behavior; and popular culture where mystical movements flourished alongside socialist rationalism. This was an age when Darwinian evolution coexisted with spiritualism, when Marxist materialism competed with Freud’s unconscious drives, when electric lighting illuminated séance rooms.

The Two Faces of Progress: Mass Education and Its Discontents

The decades before World War I saw unprecedented expansion of education systems across Europe. Elementary school teachers increased by 7-13 times in previously underserved areas like Britain and Finland, while secondary education grew fivefold in nations like Italy. This educational revolution carried the banner of scientific rationalism to the masses, particularly through socialist and labor movements that embraced “scientific socialism” as their guiding light.

Yet this very democratization of knowledge produced unexpected consequences. As Weber noted in 1904, while economic analysis provided powerful tools for understanding society, cultural phenomena couldn’t be reduced to material factors alone. The working-class autodidacts who devoured Darwin and Marx by candlelight often embraced science with quasi-religious fervor, creating what Alfred Adler would identify in 1909 as a paradoxical fusion of “repressed aggressive instincts” and heightened class consciousness.

Simultaneously, the educated elites who championed rational progress found their certainties undermined from within. Physics discovered radioactive decay and quantum theory, psychology revealed the unconscious mind, and anthropology demonstrated the social construction of “natural” institutions. The comfortable evolutionary paradigms of mid-century liberalism could no longer contain these disruptive ideas.

The Great Retreat: Religion’s Changing Landscapes

In Europe’s urban centers, traditional religion underwent what historians have called “the great retreat.” Marseille’s church attendance plummeted from 50% in 1840 to 16% by 1901. In France’s Limoges region, unchristened babies rose from 2.5% in 1899 to 34% by 1904 during peak anti-clerical campaigns. Italian migrants to Lorraine’s steel mills arrived largely secularized, while Barcelona’s baptism rates halved between 1900-1910.

This secularization followed distinct patterns:
– Urban areas secularized faster than rural ones
– Catholic nations (France, Italy, Spain) secularized more dramatically than Protestant regions
– Male disaffection outpaced women’s continued religiosity
– Anti-clericalism became central to left-wing politics, particularly in France where the 1905 separation of church and state capped decades of conflict

Yet globally, religion remained potent. In colonial India, nationalist movements blended Hindu revivalism with anti-imperialism through figures like Swami Vivekananda, whose reinterpreted Vedanta philosophy inspired both terrorists and reformers. As Weber would emphasize, religion continued providing the “switchmen” determining the tracks along which social action proceeded, even in increasingly secular societies.

The Birth Pangs of Modern Social Science

The crisis of rationality forced a fundamental rethinking of how societies functioned. The late 19th century saw social sciences diverge from natural sciences as evolutionary models gave way to new paradigms:

1. Economics retreated from historical analysis into mathematical equilibrium models under figures like Carl Menger, marginalizing questions of development and crisis.

2. Psychology split between laboratory behaviorists and Freud’s exploration of the irrational unconscious. The latter proved more influential culturally, with Freudian terms entering everyday speech by 1918.

3. Linguistics abandoned evolutionary studies for Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural analysis of language as a static system.

4. Sociology emerged as the most creative response, with Émile Durkheim studying social cohesion and Max Weber analyzing capitalism’s cultural foundations. Both grappled with Marx’s legacy while rejecting historical materialism.

This disciplinary fragmentation reflected broader tensions between scientific objectivity and the inherently political nature of studying human societies. As Adler noted, the same intellectuals who dismissed religion often transferred devotional impulses to political ideologies or scientific progress narratives.

The Freudian Frontier: Sex, Science and the Unconscious

No development better encapsulated the era’s contradictions than psychoanalysis. Freud’s theories achieved remarkable cultural penetration despite academic skepticism because they:

– Legitimized discussion of sexuality during an era of changing morals
– Provided secular explanations for irrational behavior
– Offered individuals psychological frameworks to replace religious confession
– Appealed to avant-garde artists and intellectuals exploring subjectivity

The simultaneous emergence of sexology (Hirschfeld, Ellis) and crowd psychology (Le Bon) demonstrated how fin-de-siècle thought increasingly privileged irrational drives over rational calculation. Advertising pioneers quickly realized, as one 1909 manual noted, that soap couldn’t be sold through logical argument alone.

The Gathering Storm: 1914 and the Crisis of European Reason

By 1914, three competing visions of society had emerged from this intellectual ferment:

1. Marxist historical materialism, which maintained faith in scientific laws of social development
2. Weberian interpretive sociology, emphasizing cultural meanings behind social action
3. Elite theory (Pareto, Mosca), viewing mass politics as irrational mob rule

The war’s outbreak would brutally test all these frameworks. As the lights went out across Europe in August 1914, they illuminated one final paradox: the continent’s most scientifically advanced civilization had produced history’s most destructive conflict. The crisis of reason had become a crisis of civilization itself.

In retrospect, 1875-1914 appears as the last act of Enlightenment confidence and the first scene of modern anxiety – an interregnum when Darwin and Marx still shared the stage with Freud and Nietzsche, when science and mysticism competed for souls, when the masses entered politics bearing both socialist manifestos and religious icons. Our contemporary debates about post-truth politics, the limits of rationality, and the social role of science all trace their lineage to this seminal period of intellectual upheaval.