Chapter 11.                   Part I          

         Lesser sideshows in the swirls of history happen. These are analogous to the similar sideshows that happen in the biological history of this planet. Species and sub-species meet, compete,  mingle, and then thrive or die off. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are gone. And so it also goes in human history. A viable new species of society keeps emerging in what must properly be called a "synthesis". In a compromise, two opposing parties each give a bit of what they like in order to get a bit more of what they want. But what happened at the end of the Romantic upheaval was what Hegel called a "synthesis", a melding between a thesis and its antithesis. And we can go beyond Hegel and say that it wasn't a synthesis that the contemporary attempts at a "science of history" - most notably those of Hegel and Marx - had foreseen. Rather, as conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, a new species of society arose: modern democracy, which can be both representative and participatory.

                  

                                               Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, 2011

            The very idea of democracy evolved till it saw the protecting of the human rights of every individual citizen as the most important reason for its own existence. All of this from the melding of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order, discipline, and results and Greek love of the abstract and the seer who can question the forces that be, even those of the material world. Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the logical goal of the Renaissance and Enlightenment worldviews being applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. And it goes on.   

In the meantime, what of the Enlightenment worldview? Inside its favorite realm, Science, it was still entirely in place and, in fact, was getting stronger. The Romantic Revolt left it untouched, even invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists and many in the public, as the best way to fix the ills of society. Science would give us progress and, eventually, even a social order that worked, i.e. one that progressed materially while staying stable socially. 

Under the scientific worldview, as both Newton and Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object came, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went right back to the starting up of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in a purely mechanical way, like a giant clock. 

While the Romantic Revolt ran its radical course, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of the other institutions in society were quietly being organized and equipped along the lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g. relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into the Enlightenment worldview as it kept gaining adherents and spreading until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the rest of the world.

    

                                           Crewe locomotive works; England; around 1890