The Dawn of Secular Ideologies

The period between 1789 and 1848 witnessed a profound transformation in human thought, where secular ideologies began challenging religious worldviews for intellectual dominance. While religious institutions still commanded numerical superiority in adherents, the most influential thinkers of this revolutionary era – regardless of their private beliefs – increasingly expressed themselves through secular frameworks. This ideological shift emerged directly from the dual revolutions – the French Revolution’s political upheaval and the Industrial Revolution’s economic transformation – which forced societies to fundamentally reconsider their nature and future trajectory.

At the heart of these intellectual currents stood two opposing perspectives: those who embraced the world’s current direction as progress, and those who rejected it. The dominant worldview stemmed from the Enlightenment’s rational, humanistic principles that had triumphed in the 18th century. Enlightenment thinkers maintained an unshakable belief in humanity’s upward historical trajectory, bolstered by visible advances in scientific knowledge and technological control over nature. Both bourgeois liberals and proletarian revolutionaries shared this fundamental progressive outlook, though they diverged sharply on its implementation and ultimate goals.

The Rise and Refinement of Classical Liberalism

By 1789, classical bourgeois liberalism stood as the most advanced articulation of this progressive consciousness. This sharp, clear philosophy had matured during the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France and Britain where it found its most perfect exponents. Classical liberalism embodied rigorous rationalism and secularism, convinced that human reason could comprehend all phenomena and solve every problem. It dismissed non-rational behaviors and institutions – including traditionalism and non-rational religion – as obscurantist rather than illuminating.

Philosophically, liberalism leaned toward materialism and empiricism, drawing strength and methodology from science, particularly the mathematical and physical sciences of the 17th century Scientific Revolution. Its worldview reflected profound individualism based on middle-class introspection rather than proclaimed transcendental principles. This manifested in psychological terms through “associationist” psychology, an heir to 17th century mechanism.

The liberal conception of humanity consisted of independent individuals driven by inherent passions, each seeking maximum satisfaction with minimal dissatisfaction. Every individual was presumed born with unlimited desires and resistance to interference – what the American Declaration of Independence would term “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In pursuing self-interest, these equal competitors inevitably formed relationships and complex arrangements (often described through the commercial metaphor of “contract”) that constituted society and political groups. Government’s role became minimizing interference with innate freedoms while maintaining social stability.

Pure utilitarianism – reducing all human relations to rational calculations of self-interest – remained confined to either imprudent philosophers like Hobbes or supremely confident middle-class defenders including Bentham, James Mill and the classical political economists. Two factors limited its appeal: first, conflicts between reasonable self-interest and “natural liberty” principles; second, the potential destabilization of moral foundations that kept the ignorant poor compliant. Thus utilitarianism never monopolized middle-class liberal ideology, though it provided radical tools to challenge traditional institutions with questions of rationality, usefulness and contribution to “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

Political Economy: Liberalism’s Intellectual Monument

In economic thought, classical liberalism faced fewer constraints, producing its most impressive intellectual monument through political economy. Its golden age slightly preceded our period, bookended by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy (1817), though vulgarized versions continued influencing industrialists throughout the early 19th century.

Smith’s elegant social argument posited that unfettered competition among self-interested individuals produced not just a “natural” social order (contrasted with artificial orders imposed by aristocratic privilege or ignorance) but maximized national wealth and general welfare. The foundation was labor division – just as Britain manufactured goods while Jamaica produced sugar, so too did capitalism’s class structure benefit all, including workers. Economic inequality represented nature’s inevitable outcome yet remained compatible with justice through market exchanges of equal value. Progress appeared as natural as capitalism itself – remove artificial barriers and advancement would follow automatically.

This optimism began faltering as Ricardo exposed contradictions Smith had overlooked and capitalism’s social consequences proved less benign than expected. Political economy became the “dismal science” as theorists like Malthus and Ricardo demonstrated how workers faced inevitable subsistence living or technological unemployment. The 1810s-1840s economic difficulties further dampened optimism, shifting focus from production to distribution problems. Ricardo’s brilliant system introduced discordant notes into earlier harmonies while his labor theory of value, slightly developed, could become a powerful anti-capitalist weapon.

The Liberal Dilemma: Between Radicalism and Whiggism

Politically, liberal ideology proved less coherent. Theoretically divided between utilitarianism and natural rights adherents (the latter dominant), its practical program vacillated between belief in popular government and propertied elite control – between radicalism and Whiggism in British terms. The French Revolution’s radical phases had revealed the dangers of majority rule by the “most numerous and poorest class,” prompting many liberals to prefer propertied constitutional monarchy or even enlightened despotism.

Post-Napoleonic social unrest and socialist ideologies exacerbated this dilemma, sharpened by the 1830 revolutions. Liberalism and democracy increasingly appeared as enemies rather than allies, with the revolutionary triad of liberty, equality and fraternity seeming contradictory rather than complementary. Tocqueville’s brilliant analysis of American democracy (1835) epitomized moderate liberal democratic criticism, capturing tensions that would preoccupy Western thought for generations. His observation that “since the eighteenth century, two rivers have flowed from a common source – one leading to free institutions, the other to absolute power” perfectly encapsulated liberalism’s crisis of confidence.

The Socialist Response: Reclaiming Enlightenment Ideals

As liberal ideology lost its initial confident momentum, socialism emerged to reclaim 18th century truths about reason, science and progress. Unlike earlier utopian communitarians, early socialists enthusiastically embraced industrialism’s potential. Saint-Simon (traditionally classified as a “utopian socialist” pioneer) coined the terms “industrialism” and “industrialist,” while Robert Owen built his vision for a better society upon his own successful cotton manufacturing experience. Even Fourier, least optimistic about industrialism among socialist founders, sought solutions beyond rather than behind industrial development.

Classical liberalism paradoxically provided the sharpest tools for attacking capitalist society. The glaring absence of “the greatest happiness” for laboring majorities was obvious, as was the ease of separating happiness-seeking from selfish individualism. More remarkably, Ricardian political economy could be transformed into anti-capitalist theory – a fact that horrified later bourgeois economists. If labor produced all value, why did workers remain impoverished? Ricardo had shown (though avoided drawing conclusions) that capitalists appropriated workers’ surplus value as profit. Eliminate capitalists, and exploitation would end. British “labor economists” quickly developed this analysis into moral critique.

Economic difficulties between Owen’s New View of Society (1813-1814) and the Communist Manifesto (1848) – falling wages, technological unemployment, economic stagnation – made these criticisms resonate. Critics could now identify not just economic injustice but systemic flaws and “inner contradictions,” including periodic crises (noted by Sismondi, Wade and Engels) that Say’s Law denied. The visible trend toward unequal distribution (“the rich growing richer, the poor poorer”) appeared inherent rather than accidental. Capitalism could thus be shown as both unjust and dysfunctional, producing results opposite to its defenders’ promises.

Socialism’s Divergence: Beyond Liberal Individualism

Early socialist arguments initially extended classical liberalism’s logic beyond bourgeois comfort zones. Their envisioned society maintained classical humanist and liberal ideals – one where all could achieve happiness and self-realization, with free development replacing authoritarian government. The ideological family descending from Enlightenment humanism – liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists – differed not in their ultimate stateless utopia but in achieving it.

Socialism’s decisive break came in rejecting liberalism’s atomistic social model. Reverting to humanity’s oldest ideology – that people naturally live collectively – socialists viewed society not as limiting innate rights but as the medium for life, happiness and personality. Market exchange guaranteeing social justice struck them as incomprehensible and immoral. While some critics condemned civilization, rationalism and technology wholesale, socialists carefully avoided this, instead incorporating both traditional concepts of society as humanity’s “home” and pre-class harmony myths. Fourier declared: “Genius must rediscover the road to primitive happiness and adapt it to modern industrial conditions,” with primitive communism providing future models.

Secondly, socialism adopted evolutionary historical arguments that classical liberalism had largely ignored. For early socialists, their plans seemed naturally reasonable compared to artificial societies imposed by ignorance and tyranny. “Utopian” socialists like Owen and Fourier believed truth’s announcement would persuade reasonable people, focusing on worker education and experimental communities (many in America’s open spaces like Owen’s New Harmony). Saint-Simonians sought enlightened autocrats like Egypt’s Muhammad Ali to implement their plans.

Marx transformed socialist theory by shifting focus from desirability to historical inevitability. Combining British political economy, French socialism and German philosophy, Marx argued human societies inevitably progressed from primitive communism through successive class societies, each “progressive” despite injustices until their contradictions impeded further development. Capitalism, the last class society, created its own gravediggers – the proletariat – whose inevitable revolution would establish socialism. This wasn’t because socialism was morally preferable but because history’s logic made it capitalism’s necessary successor. As capitalism had triumphed through bourgeois social power rather than abstract rationality, so too would socialism through working-class victory. Socialist ideas couldn’t have emerged meaningfully before capitalism created appropriate conditions, but once mature, victory was certain because “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve.”

Conservative Reactions: Defending the Old Order

Compared to these systematic progressive ideologies, anti-progressivism lacked coherent systems, comprising instead insights into capitalist society’s disruptions and beliefs drawn from life rather than liberalism. Their central critique held that liberalism destroyed social order and community, replacing them with competitive anarchy and market dehumanization. Conservatives and revolutionary anti-progressives converged here, particularly among Romantics, producing hybrid doctrines like “conservative democracy” or “feudal socialism.”

Conservatives idealized social orders threatened by dual revolutions, especially medieval feudalism, emphasizing hierarchy’s “order” protecting elites. Revolutionaries recalled more distant golden ages of mutual aid and solidarity. Both agreed old regimes surpassed new ones in crucial aspects – divinely ordained hierarchy (pleasing conservatives) imposing duties on elites, unequal but non-commodified human worth, and dense webs of customary social relations. Even Engels, staunch progress believer, nostalgically described pre-industrial society’s destruction.

Lacking evolutionary theory, anti-progressives struggled to explain what went wrong, typically blaming 18th century rationalism for interfering with society’s organic complexity through artificial planning. Burke advised “better to forget the Encyclopédie and all the economists, returning to those rules and principles that have made princes great and nations happy.” Intuition, tradition, religion, “human nature” or “true” reason countered systematic rationalism, with history becoming conservatism’s most important intellectual conquest.

Conservative thinkers keenly distinguished societies evolving naturally over time from those “artificially” constructed suddenly. While unable to explain history’s fabric, they excelled at showing how long wear made its garments comfortable. Serious conservative intellect devoted itself to historical analysis and restoration, studying continuity versus revolution. Thus its ablest exponents weren’t French émigrés like de Bonald or de Maistre trying to resurrect the past through irrational rationalism, but Burke and the German historical school of jurisprudence justifying existing old regimes through historical continuity.

Between Progress and Reaction: The Radical Middle Ground

Some ideologies occupied ambiguous positions between progressives (industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat) and reactionaries (aristocracy, merchant classes, feudal groups). These attracted Western petty bourgeois radicals and Central/Southern Europe’s modest middle classes, comfortably but incompletely integrated into aristocratic-monarchical structures. Both believed partially in progress but rejected liberal or socialist conclusions – the former because these doomed small producers, shopkeepers and peasants to become capitalists or workers; the latter because they were too weak, frightened by Jacobin excesses, to challenge princely power (many being princely officials themselves). This contradictory position granted deeper social insight than either liberal progressives or reactionaries achieved, forcing dialectical approaches.

Petty bourgeois radicals’ most important intuitive genius, Rousseau, had died before 1789. Oscillating between individualism and communal identity, rational state ideals and anti-rational “sentiment,” acknowledging progress while lamenting its destruction of primitive harmony, Rousseau expressed his class’s dilemma – unable to accept either industrialists’ liberal certainty or proletarians’ socialist conviction. Though no Rousseauist school existed (except briefly among Robespierre’s Jacobins), his influence permeated widely, especially among German Romantics and popular radicals, often blending with Jeffersonian or Paineite rationalism. Later misinterpretations notwithstanding, early 19th century readers saw him advocating equality, freedom against tyranny, democracy against oligarchy, and “natural” simplicity against corrupt sophistication.

The German philosophical group proved more complex. Unable to overthrow their society or launch industrial revolutions, they constructed elaborate universal systems. Classical liberals were rare in Germany; middle-class intellectuals typically combined progress, science and economic development beliefs with enlightened paternalistic bureaucracy – suitable for a society with many officials and state-employed professors. Goethe epitomized this outlook as a minor state minister.

German thought’s general atmosphere differed markedly from Western 18th century traditions, maintaining older patterns during Germany’s relative decline from Reformation-era prominence. This preserved 16th century intellectual styles alongside 16th century townscapes, giving German thought certain advantages as 18th century classicism waned, explaining its growing 19th century influence.

German classical philosophy (1760-1830), closely related to classical literature, constituted this tradition’s most enduring expression. Kant and Hegel stood as giants, followed by the “Young Hegelians” and eventually Marx after 1830. Thoroughly bourgeois despite abstract appearances, all major figures (Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling) initially welcomed the French Revolution (Hegel supported Napoleon as late as 1806). Enlightenment frameworks shaped Kant’s thought and Hegel’s starting point, both philosophies saturated with progress concepts – Kant’s early achievement being a solar system origin theory, Hegel’s entire philosophy emphasizing evolution and necessary progress. Though Hegel grew conservative, he never doubted capitalism’s historical necessity.

German philosophy diverged from classical liberalism significantly. First, it was idealist rather than materialist/empiricist. Second, while Kant’s basic unit remained the individual, Hegel began with the collective (community), observing its historical dissolution into individuals. His famous dialectic – progress through endless contradiction-resolution – may have originated from this individual/collective tension. Marginalized from mainstream bourgeois progress, German thinkers more easily recognized its limits and contradictions. Didn’t great gains entail great losses requiring future supersession?

Thus classical philosophy, especially Hegel’s, strangely resembled Rousseau’s dilemmas while attempting systematic coherence (unlike Rousseau). Kant reportedly broke his rigid routine only twice – for the Bastille’s fall and while reading Émile. Practically, these frustrated philosophical revolutionaries faced “reconciling” with reality – Hegel ultimately idealizing Prussian government after years of hesitation. Theoretically, their philosophies incorporated society’s historical transience. No absolute truths existed; historical process proceeded through dialectical contradictions, as the 1830s Young Hegelians concluded. When they returned to revolution (which Goethe had avoided), they pushed Hegel’s logic beyond where he stopped (illogically ending history with absolute knowledge). But post-1830 revolutions involved more than bourgeois liberty, producing from German philosophy’s dissolution not Girondins or Philosophical Radicals but Marx.

Conclusion: Ideologies in Transition

The dual revolution period thus witnessed both bourgeois liberalism’s and petty bourgeois radicalism’s triumphant elaboration and their subsequent disintegration under the very regimes they helped create. 1830 marked both revolutionary revival after post-Waterloo quiescence and liberal/radical crisis onset. Surviving in diminished forms, no later classical liberal economists matched Smith or Ricardo’s profundity (except perhaps J.S. Mill), no German philosophers approached Kant or Hegel’s breadth, and post-1830 French Girondins/Jacobins dwarfed their 1789-1794 predecessors. Mazzini paled beside Rousseau. Yet this great tradition (Western thought’s mainstream since Renaissance) didn’t die – it became its opposite. In depth and method, Marx was classical economists’ and philosophers’ heir, though the society he prophesied and sought to build differed profoundly from theirs.