Feminism

This document is regarded as the founding charter of feminism but it remained to be

little more than a curiosity according to historians. After popularly daring to oppose
Robespierre, she was the guillotined. Anne-Josephe Therouinge de Mericourt, the
Amazon of Liberty came to Paris from Liege, in Belgium, to advocate a more militant
brand of feminism. She held that women should fight for the revolution, to which she
organized a legion of female militia. News of these radical feminist pioneers evoked little
sympathy in leading Revolutionary circles. Women were also excluded from citizenship,
and were denied the right to vote.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville, together with his collaborator Beaumont published a report on the American
penal system for the French government. In his influential 2 volume work Democracy in
America written in English, he rejected the older argument endorsed by Rousseau in
his The Social Contract that associations were undesirable because they express
interests narrower than the general will. Tocqueville contended that a rich associational
life was essential to democracy with the existence of associations relatively independent
of one another and of the state. A Political analyst called this perspective Democratic
Pluralism.
Individualism and resistance to authority in the United States is fostered by the
predominant religious institutions such as Protestant sects. There was a multiplicity of
relatively autonomous sects or voluntary non-state related institutions. Youths are asked
to make a denominational choice in reaching the age of decision. The United States is
the 1st country in the world in which religious groups became voluntary associations. To
him, Americans are the most God-believing, Church-going and fundamentalist people in
the west. The United States furnished a setting usually supportive of democratic
pluralism in a pluralist interpretation, relatively decentralized political parties and the
multiplicity of groups and associations. Antipluralist critics such as Robert Dahl
contended that pluralist accounts neglected the defects of democratic pluralism.
American democracy, Tocqueville assured, fostered freedom and the strongest
guarantee of freedom was the spirit of its people. Freedom grew out of the habit of
associating to protect ones rights and to further ones interests. The voluntary
association of citizens can replace the individual authority of nobles and protect the
community from tyranny.
Religious devotion was another outstanding aspect of the American spirit in that it
served to preach self-restraint and motivation. Tocqueville shared the view of
Montesquieu and Rousseau that democracy could be free only if the citizens are
virtuous, meant love of the republic and the desire to serve it or patriotism. Education
must break the restrictive barrier of class and further the progress of development.
However American democracy is not without an illiberal aspect because he observed
that the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of
individuals who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

The masses still placed considerable pressure on individuals to conform to their

prevailing lifestyle.
His last work The Old Regime and the French Revolution centers on the democratic
notion of liberty seen as a natural right given to all individuals instead of a privilege
associated with certain classes or economic groups. Tocqueville was a prominent liberal
opponent of the Restoration in France.
After Napoleon fell and the monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII, Charles X
succeeds the French throne. His edicts restricted suffrage, favored the censorship of the
press and sparked a revolution which brought his reign to an end. Louis-Philippe, the
citizen king, succeeds the throne and his July monarchy begins on August 7, 1830. He
renounced titles such as Duke or Duc but assumed the surname Egalite. During his
reign political corruption, judicial malpractice and limited parliamentary franchise united
liberals and extremists to cry for reform. The dominant bourgeoisie, according to
Tocqueville had become a small aristocracy, corrupt and vulgar by which it seemed
shameful to be ruled under. His rule ended when after popular riots leading to a
revolution and he agreed to abdicate and escape to England as Mr. Smith with his wife
Amelie. He was the last king of France. In its place came the second republic wherein
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president of 2nd Republic. One of his
opponents was the poet Alphonse Lamartine. The first republic was proclaimed on
September 21, 1792 when the Jacobeans abolished the monarchy and established a
dictatorship supposed to promote public safety.

Liberalism
Liberalism is an ideology which developed along two parallel tracks: political and the
economic. Political Liberalism focuses on the essential concept government by
consent. It took its name from the Spanish Liberales but liberalism had roots further
back in the political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Liberalism drew heavily
from the experience of British parliamentarianism and on the constitutional phase of the
revolution in France. They embraced Republicanism and its advocacies include the
Rule of Law, Individual Liberty, Religious Toleration and the Rights of Man. They may
oppose in built prerogatives wherever they survive such as the Crown, the Church and
the Aristocracy.
Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade and on the associated
doctrine of laissez-faire which opposed the habit of governments to regulate economic
life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right of anyone with property to engage in
commercial and industrial activities without undue restraint. It aims to dismantle
economic barriers both within and between countries and combat all forms of collectivist
organizations from the guilds to the trade unions. Liberalism is often categorized as the
ideology of the new middle classes and the property-less industrial masses. It also
reached to a wide variety of groups and interests which were not necessarily social or
economic in their motivation. The ideas of liberalism are spread abroad in English
writing in economics by two Englishmen: Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo.

Malthus and Ricardo

Malthus felt obliged to direct his harshest criticism against the teachings of William
Godwin, the author of the Inquiry Concerning Political Justice who declared that one of
the consequences of the emergence of truth and justice was an egalitarian society. In
his essay on the principle of population, Malthus agreed that attempts to improve the
material condition of human life by redistributing wealth were doomed to failure. Only
the limiting of the size of the population was compatible with the fact that mass material
resources were limited. Increase in population up to a limit of sustenance may result to
starvation thus ensuring perpetual poverty and misery and vice would spread.
Reduction of human birth was the only hope which can be achieved by moral restraint
through chastity and late marriage. His essay prepared the doctrine of the survival of
the fittest.

Criticism of Adam Smith

David Ricardo did not agree with the theory of Smith that there is a natural order of
harmony in economic affairs. He saw landlord and factory-owners as natural foes. Rent
capitalism raised the price of food which raises wages which causes profits and
manufacturing to fall. Wage-worker is at war with the employer, since the latter must
force wages down in order to keep profit up. In his Principles of Political Economy, he
did a sketch of eventual stagnation of man as exploiter of labor and the depleter of
natural resources, and wastrel. Labor, like all other things, is purchased and sold and
has its market price. If some workers get more than their share, others will get less due
to competition.
Jean-Charles Sismondi attacked laissez-faire, urging the state to intervene, to regulate
the use of property for the well-being of community. Political economics based itself on
assumption of human selfishness and took human nature as it is. The main message of
political economics was individualism. Smith and the Physiocrats claimed that in
accordance with the laws of nature that the invisible hand caused individual and social
objectives to coincide. Competition and profit incentives suffice to secure the most
efficient production and distribution of wealth. Political economics is not a new field.
Smith and Ricardo used it to theorize about market economics and attacked mercantilist
practices. The discourse termed political economics examines the relation of the
individual to society and social institutions, economy, economic institutions of capitalism,
state society.

The Mills, Bentham

John Stewart Mill, a British philosopher defended laissez-faire economy but only if
power of the capitalist employers is matched by rights of workers and employees' trade
unions. Mill endorsed the idea of greatest happiness for the greatest number of people
as proclaimed by his philosopher father James Mill but only if happiness (long-lasting) is
not confused with pleasure (short-term).
James Mill worked closely with Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the British school of
utilitarian philosophy. Thomas Carlyle attacked the school of utilitarianism as piggish
because Bentham and Mill cared nothing for the arts and they dismissed poetry as

nonsense and cared nothing for society, seeing in it nothing more than a group of
individuals.
The major work of Bentham, "The Principles of Morals and Legislation", focused on the
principle of Utilitarianism - the belief that the value of a thing or action is determined by
its utility. The ethics of utility states that one ought to do that which makes the most
good for the whole or the sum of the units of happiness which could perhaps indicate
one's extinction. Criticism of utilitarian ethics is that it judges acts by consequences and
not inherent quality. Critics noted that if strictly followed, utilitarian rules of conduct might
lead to euthanasia, or to genocide. Bentham accepted economic inequality in which
everyone is entitled to just fruits of his own labor but since people have unequal talents
and energies, this will result to unequal rewards.
JS Mill
Bentham's most important follower JS Mill rebelled and turned to the lyrical ballads of
William Wordsworth and Coleridge. His best known work was his essay "On Liberty" to
which his wife contributed much, contains the classic argument on what is the maximum
of individual freedom. According to him, individual liberty should only be restricted where
it infringes on the rights of others. Liberalism, as conveyed to the minds of AngloAmericans in its larger meaning is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas. It is an
attitude of open-mindedness, dispassionate and skeptical consideration of all views,
and faith in a process or method, climate or opinion rather than a particular field. Mills
opinion is that democracy is the best form of government because it is conducive to
progress and development. However, it cannot be successfully established to people
not developed enough to point out when they are willing to accept it, or if they are
prepared to carry out the tasks which sustains it and if they are able to assist it to
achieve its objectives.
In another essay on the Subjection of Women, he argued that the legal subordination
of one sex to other was simply wrong and declared that sex differences are rooted in
social usage, not innate psychology. Women, having the same potential as men should
receive the same education. Mill wrote it again in collaboration with his wife and his
daughter by a previous marriage.
In his Principles of Political Economics, JS Mill rejected the iron law of wages in that it
was the cause of poverty. Something could be done to contend against poverty and
overpopulation by promoting emigration to the colonies and dominions of the British
Empire and by elevating habits of laboring people through education. He asserted that
workers should be allowed to organize trade unions, to form cooperatives and to obtain
higher wages through parliamentary struggle. These changes could best be secured by
private enterprise and government intervention if necessary. Mill read the reports of
Parliamentary investigatory committees and was shocked and scandalized by accounts
of human exploitation and degradation.

Industrial Revolution
Reactions to the Industrial Revolution and the factory system range from celebration to
horror and repugnance. Andrew Ure, a Scottish professor of Chemistry, believed that
new machines such as cotton and textile mills would create a new society of wealth and

abundance and ultimately stability through useful regimentation of production,

systematization of products through the division of labor. Friedrich Engels criticized Ure
as shortsighted and complacent in his outlooks. He collaborated with Marx in the
communist manifesto of "Das Kapital"
His essay, "The Condition of the Working Class in England", provides a classic analysis
of industrialization. Industrial cities were overcrowded and unhealthy. He also discussed
the plight of women who were described as less problematic but were given less wages.
Middle-class moved away from disease and factory smoke leaving the poorest
members of society isolated. Diseases that ravaged the proletariat were cholera,
typhus, and TB due to inadequate sewer range and smoke from factories, railroads, and
domestic chimneys. For Engels, every improvement in machinery leads to
unemployment. The greater the technical improvement, the greater the unemployment
as machines supersede hand labors, which affect a number of workers at the same time
as community crisis leads to distress, crime, and social war rages unchecked and the
benefits derived are monopolized by few individuals. Men were displaced resulting to
decreasing employment among men. In any case, women and children will work for
lower wages and as observed, they are better skilled in this work than grown men.
Women and children are employed to do this. When women worked factories, the most
important result was the dissolution of family ties. If a women worked for 12-13 hours a
day in a factory and if their husband is also employed, children will lack parental care
and control. It is not difficult to imagine that they are left to run wild. Our understanding
of the responses to the Industrial Revolution would be incomplete without reference to
the industrial novels which show the vivid social life in Victorian era England.

Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens or Charles John Huffam "Boz", was well-aware of the inhumanities of
Victorian era industrialization. In his Oliver Twist and Hard Times, he wrote with
sympathy for the common people and he satirized the middle class in which he saw the
destructive and the dehumanizing power of money, the corrupting solvent of social life.
Money renders life miserable. What money makes of life is the theme of the novel "Our
Mutual Friend". Greed and demands of society kill the individual, the soul. These novels
will give impetus to much needed social reform. In Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities", the
French Revolution blurs into frightening picture of bloodthirsty crowd watching the
beheading on the guillotine. The autobiographical approach to the novel "David
Copperfield" where the opening chapters are personal reminiscence in which the father
of Dickens appears Micawber which gives a glimpse of Dickens' early years. Though
affectionate, his father neglected his education. His mother failed to open a school and
his father was imprisoned as a debtor. Dickens was forced to work as an odd-job boy in
a blacking factory. Much of his stories are inspired by his formative years: 1) unsettled
early life; 2) unjustly neglected and degraded from middle-class respectability; 3)
wanderings through the streets of London. Realism, in contrast with Romanticism, in the
early part of the 19th century, refers to the representation in art and literature, actions
and social conditions, as they actually are without idealization or presentation in
abstract form.
Romanticism was a broad and abstract intellectual movement that influenced the art,
music, and literature. A marked reaction against any values of the Enlightenment. The

Romantics considered intuition, emotion, and feelings as better guides to truth and
human happiness than reason and cold logic and talked about the language of the
heart. They were dissatisfied with the classical standard of reason. The Romantics
emphasized on emotion, imagination, and ideals. It valued both the individual and
nation emphasizing their uniqueness and subjective experience. Thomas Campbell
loved to write about the Scottish highlands but now chiefly remembered by his ballads
and patriotic appeal of his poems. Like an intellectual movement, it did not completely
break with its predecessors.

Rousseau and Romanticism

Enlightenment/Romanticism are term or periods that do overlap. Rousseau is often
seen as the first romantic rather than the last of the philosophes. The theme of Emile is
man in relation/conflict with nature, same as with Ernest Hemingway's "The old man and
the sea" and Melville's "Moby Dick". Simplicity and feeling run through logical ballads of
William Wordsworth and Coleridge. For instance "I wonder lonely in the cloud" is an
excellent preface of Wordsworth in his ballads that poetry takes emotions recollected in
tranquility. Later, he also wrote a poem in which the daffodils flash in the reader's
imagination. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth, also emphasized the ties of compassion and
feeling but binds all mankind regardless of social class and considered nature as
humanity's most trusted teacher and considered the experience of nature as the true
source of feeling. English Romantics, led by Wordsworth, experienced the horrors of
revolution and wars in Europe. Mankind seems to be irrational to the point of selfdestruction, destroying the permanent beauty of mankind and nature. The Romantics
asked, "Where is logic and reason in times of war and revolution?" Romanticism has
many conservative elements:
1.) Return to spirituality and the supernatural, the revival of religion which the
Enlightenment ignored.
2.) Most of the Romantic writings in Germany involve theories of historical and cultural
development and the distinctive individual development of nation insisting the
uniqueness of society and cultural traditions.
Herder introduced the idea of proto-nationalism where language groups recognized one
another as members of communities based on feelings on collective belonging. Hence
recognized others as strangers or foreigners. Language spoken by the volk, refers to
the common people of society or region considered as the original bearers of customs
and traditions that make up a distinctive culture, can become an element of protonational cohesion. Real civilization of the real human social community could not be
produced by the elite alone because the common people played a vital role. In his own
interpretation, his lifelong undertaking, lie on studying and collecting folklores and songs
both German and foreign. Herder was deeply affected by the translation of the Zend
avesta (sacred writing of Zoroastrianism), Bhagavad Gita and the work of Khalidasa
Shakuntala to German. To Herder, each culture had to express its own unique historical
character and the spirit and genius of the people.