Industrial Revolution 4

1. The major fields of science that flourished during the 1800s were biology, the medical sciences, thermodynamics, chemistry, and electricity. Identifying the relationship between heat and mechanical energy, physicists had by 1850 discovered the law of conservation of energy, stating that different forms of energy could be converted but neither created nor destroyed. In 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev organized the rules of chemistry in the periodic law and the periodic table. Michael Faraday’s discoveries on electromagnet-ism in the 1830s and 1840s resulted in the first dynamo and led the way to the development of the telegraph, electric motors, electric lights, and electric streetcars. There were three results of this second scientific revolution. First, everyday experience and many popularizers stressed the importance of science on the popular mind. Second, the philosophical implications of science formulated in the Enlightenment spread to many sections of the population, but at the same time the new technical and scientific advances led to increased optimism in human progress. Third, the methods of science acquired great prestige after 1850. Many believed that the union of careful experiment and abstract theory was the only reliable route to truth and objective reality, leading to skepticism towards poets and reli-gion.

2. A social scientist is someone who tries to apply the objective methods of science to the study of society. These people had access to the huge sets of numerical data that govern-ments had begun to collect. The social scientists developed new statistical methods to ana-lyze these facts and test their theories. They were also more unified, broader, and dogmatic than the philosophes. French philosopher Auguste Comte was one social scientist. In his System of Positive Philosophy, he wrote that all intellectual knowledge went through three different stages: the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Scientific. Comte believed that the scientific, or positivist, method would allow for the discovery of the eternal laws of hu-man relations. This in turn would enable expert social scientists to impose a disciplined harmony and well-being on everyone. He became the ruler of the religion of science and rule by experts. Charles Lyell was also a social scientist. He discredited the belief that the earth’s surface had been formed by short-lived cataclysms. Instead, he theorized that the same processes that are at work today slowly formed the earth’s surface over the course of time.

3. Jean Baptiste Lamarck believed that all forms of life had arisen through a long process of continuous adjustment to the environment. However, he also believed that characteristics could be passed from parents to children. Charles Darwin was influenced in this. As a natu-ralists on a cruise of the South Pacific beginning in 1831, Darwin collected specimens of the different animal species he encountered. In England, with the support of fossil evidence and Lyell’s theories, Darwin doubted the belief in a special divine creation of each species of an-imal. Instead, he concluded that all life had gradually evolved from a common ancestral ori-gin in a struggle for survival. He published his ideas in On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection. Influenced by Thomas Malthus, Darwin argued that chance difference among the members of a given species help some survive while others die. The variations that prove useful in survival are selected naturally and gradually spread to the entire species through reproduction. His theories had a powerful and many-sided influence on European thought and the European middle classes. They reinforced the secular teachings of Comte and Marx. Herbert Spencer used Darwin’s theories in society to see the human race as driven forward to ever-greater specialization and progress by the brutal economic struggle. The poor were the ill-fated weak while the prosperous were the chosen strong. His and other Social Darwinists’ ideas were popular with the upper middle class.

4. The realist movement argued that literature should depict life exactly as it was. Poetry should be written in prose and the personal, emotional viewpoint of romantics should be changed to strict, scientific objectivity. In was a reaction against romanticism. Realist writers wrote about the typical and commonplace. They wrote about many neglected and unexplored parts of society, such as the urban working classes and taboo subjects. They reported that slums and factories were savage. As a result, many middle-class critics denounced realism as ugly sensationalism with pseudoscientific declarations and crude language. Realists believed that humans were part of the physical world and all human actions were caused by unalterable natural laws. Hereditary and environment determined human behavior. Honoré de Balzac wrote The Human Comedy, describing the more than thousand characters from all sectors of French society. Balzac depicted urban society as grasping, amoral, and brutal, characterized by a Darwinian struggle for wealth and power. In Le Père Goriot, the hero surrenders his idealistic integrity to ambition and society’s greed. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary tells the ordinary and banal story of a frustrated middle-class housewife who has an adulterous love affair and is betrayed by her lover. Flaubert portrays the provincial middle class as petty, smug, and hypocritical. Emile Zola wrote about the middle class in a seamy, animalistic view. He also wrote exciting, carefully researched stories about the stock exchange, the big department store, the army, urban slums, and bloody coal strikes. He sympathized with socialism in Germinal.


1. Malthus’s two postulates are that food is necessary to the existence of man and that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.

2. The power of population is greater than the power of the earth to produce substance be-cause population increases geometrically whereas subsistence increases arithmetically.

3. The population is checked by reason and nature to keep it in accordance to the food supply.

4. When the increase in population is greater than the food supply, there is not enough arable land. The number of laborers exceeds the available work, causing wages to fall and inflation to rise. As people become poorer, they die, leveling off the population to match the food supply.

5. Because of population growth, mankind is destined to live forever in misery and vice. Fa-mines are to occur more. Humans will continue to breed due to human nature. In the be-ginning of human life, everyone was equal. But as humans started to reproduce, food be-came scarce and the land was divided. This led to famines and will eventually be the future.

1. Individualism leads to order and progress by causing people to produce things that others are willing to buy in order to make money. The marketplace is the place where production and cooperation combine, resulting in enhanced social harmony.

2. Self-interest allows for voluntary cooperation. This in turn occurs when humans address their own self-love and advantages. Self-interest is the motivating force in a free market system, promoting the common interest as if by an invisible hand.

3. Natural liberty is when the price of free competition is exactly equal to the total costs of wages, profits, and rents. Supply and demand principles state that the market price in-creased when the quantity of a commodity brought to market fell short of demand and vice versa.

4. The distribution of income in a class structure depends on the appropriation of land, labor, and capital.

5. Governments should not be involved in a free market system to insure that decisions are made based on self-interest. Government should instead administer justice, protect indi-viduals and their private property, provide for the natural defense, supply public works, support education, and tax accordingly.

1. All of recorded history had been in a class struggle. The feudal system of guild-monopoly was replaced by a manufacturing system in which the middle classes employed workers. With the growth of markets in Europe and around the world, manufacturing became me-chanized and steam powered, leading to the replacement of the petit bourgeois by modern factory owners and laborers, and thus came about the Modern Industry.

2. When there is more machinery, work becomes more simply, monotonous, and unskilled, and workers are easily replaced and the work becomes less valuable. Working men are re-placed by women and children, who can do the work just as well and more cheaply.

3. Marx wants to abolish bourgeois property because it is won through exploiting workers and by taking the profits of their labor from them without fully compensating them for the value their labor added to the raw materials upon which they worked.

4. Communism will be accomplished by: the proletariat raising itself to the position of the rul-ing class, the proletariat taking all capital and all instruments of production from the bour-geoisie, balancing all the inequities in wealth and education, and then the proletariat will lose all political power and become equal to everyone else.