Lesser sideshows in the swirls of human history happen. These are analogous to similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet. Species and subspecies of animals and plants meet, compete, mingle, and then thrive or die off. So do species of societies. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are long gone, and so it also goes in human history. New species of societies constantly keep emerging, by the process Hegel called synthesis, all the time. It is also worth stressing again that war is not the only path by which this process can work.

In a compromise, two opposing parties each give up a bit of what they want in order to get a bit more of what they need. But what happened during the Romantic upheaval was a synthesis, a melding between a thesis and its antithesis, but it was also something more than melding. As conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, the synthesis that arose was a new species of society: modern representative democracy. A new life form, vigorous and unique.

   

     Occupy Wall Street protesters, 2011 (credit: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons)

The idea of democracy evolved until real democratic states formed that were built around constitutions, not positions or traditions. These constitutions stated explicitly that protecting of the rights of every citizen is the most important reason for democracy’s existence. All of this came about from the synthesis of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of abstract thinking: thinking that questions all the forces that be, even those in the physical world.

Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the aim of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. A state that says it values human rights has to deliver them. Or die.