Human Nature and the Unfolding
of Modern European History
Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that the Human Mind contains a pattern that has proven
to be the foundation for the Unfolding of History:-
" There is one mind common to all individual men....
....Of the works of this mind history is the record...."
and again:-
" man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world. "
The modern european history specialists tend to concern themselves particularly with the course of European history
after the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and continue into nineteenth century European History until circa 1914.
Thus those interested in this epoch in the history of europe have a great deal to consider.
There was an Age of Revolutions. The initial French Revolutionary turmoils, (which were themselves somewhat related to
the slightly earlier American Revolutionary precedent), were succeeded by Napoleonic Wars. A
peace established in 1815 was followed by a limited spate of "liberalist" revolution in 1830 and a more dramatic upsurge
of liberalist-nationalist-socialist Revolution across most of continental Europe in 1848.
Politically fragmented territories such as the
Italian Peninsula and the German Confederation were both integrated by 1871. These integrations resulted in
the establishment of a Kingdom of Italy and of a German Empire.
There was an Age of Liberalism after circa 1830 that continued throughout the nineteenth century where "liberal" policies seemed to gain sway
in the form of
the awardance of Constitutions or through Parliamentary or other reforms.
Governments of "liberal" states,
often under popular pressure, tended
to interest themselves in public education, public health and sanitation, regulation of the conditions of
employment, economic development and in extensions
of the franchise.
Prior to the nineteenth century Emperors, Kings, Churchmen and Aristocrats tended to exert decisive influence over European society.
The "mold breaking" political and social populisms unleashed after 1789 - Liberalism, Constitutionalism, Democratisation, Socialism and
Nationalism - transformed old-style monarchical Europe providing new populist
orderings of society both in Europe and more widely in the world.
It may be that in the Ancient World - before the rise to influence of Emperors, Kings, Churchmen and Aristocrats - Human Nature also greatly influenced
society.
Plato, one of the most famous philosophers of Ancient Greece, relating one of his teacher and friend
Socrates' illuminating conversations, wrote:-
"Must we not acknowledge, I said, that in each of us there are the
same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that
from the individual they pass into the State? --how else can they
come there?
Take the quality of passion or spirit; --it would be ridiculous
to imagine that this quality, when found in States, is not derived
from the individuals who are supposed to possess it, e.g. the Thracians,
Scythians, and in general the northern nations; and the same may be
said of the love of knowledge, which is the special characteristic
of our part of the world, or of the love of money, which may, with
equal truth, be attributed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians."
We would maintain that it was after populist political aspirations again, after the American and French Revolutions, found scope
for decisive expression that Human Nature, as a wellspring of such populist political aspiration, began to
influence social and political developments quite directly.
To quote Emerson again - (from his famous Essay - History ):-
"Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody
every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the
facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to
but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome,
Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the
application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world."
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history of europe, nineteenth century, history, human nature