Ideologies of Change and Reform Movements

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe how and why new intellectual currents disrupted the prevailing political and social order from 1815 to 1914 (Skill 4.B; LO H).
• Account for KC-3.3.I.A: how liberals stressed popular sovereignty, individual rights, and enlightened self-interest while debating which groups should actively share in governance.
• Account for KC-3.3.I.B: how British radicals and continental republicans demanded universal male suffrage and full citizenship without property qualifications, with some extending the demand to women.
• Account for KC-3.3.I.D and KC-3.6.II.C: how socialist thinkers called for redistribution of resources and wealth, evolving from utopian visions to systematic critique of capitalism.
• Account for KC-3.3.I.E: how anarchist thinkers argued that all forms of governmental authority were unnecessary and ought to be replaced with voluntary cooperation.
• Place each ideology within its historical context (Skill 4.B): the conditions of post-1815 conservative restoration and post-1830 industrialization that made each tradition possible.

Topic 6.7 traces the four principal nineteenth-century European ideologies that challenged the post-1815 conservative order and the reform movements they produced. The four traditions developed in dialogue with each other and with the conservative ideology covered in Topic 6.5: liberalism (the ideology of the industrial bourgeoisie), radical republicanism (the ideology of the urban democratic and reformist movements), socialism (the ideology of the urban industrial working population), and anarchism (the more extreme refusal of all centralized authority). The combination shaped European political life from the Reform Act of 1832 through the founding of the European socialist parties in the 1870s and 1880s.

Liberalism. KC-3.3.I.A: liberals emphasized popular sovereignty, individual rights, and enlightened self-interest but debated the extent to which all groups in society should actively participate in governance. Three principal variants of nineteenth-century European liberalism developed.

British utilitarian and radical liberalism. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) developed utilitarianism in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) and other works. Utilitarianism treated the proper aim of government as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," measured through systematic empirical examination of policies and their consequences. Bentham's followers (the Philosophical Radicals, including James Mill, John Stuart Mill, John Bowring, and Francis Place) campaigned for parliamentary reform, the secret ballot, prison reform, education reform, and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (achieved in 1833). The Anti-Corn-Law League (1838-1846) under Richard Cobden and John Bright applied liberal free-trade doctrine to specific tariff policy and produced the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) provided the principal mid-Victorian synthesis. On Liberty (1859) argued that the only legitimate ground for government coercion of an individual was to prevent harm to others; that even unpopular and "wrong" opinions deserved protection from social as well as governmental suppression; and that "experiments of living" were necessary for human progress. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) defended representative parliamentary government with weighted voting and the gradual extension of the franchise. The Subjection of Women (1869) argued for full legal and political equality of women with men. Mill's combination of utilitarian foundation, free-speech absolutism, and gradual extension of the franchise became the template for late-Victorian and Edwardian British liberalism.

Continental constitutional liberalism. The continental liberal tradition focused more on constitutional structure and parliamentary representation than on the British utilitarian-philosophical foundations. Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), François Guizot (1787-1874), and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) in France; the Frankfurt Parliament's drafters (Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Heinrich von Gagern) in the German states; the Italian moderate liberals (Camillo di Cavour, who would later direct Piedmontese unification policy) all worked within the constitutional-monarchy framework. The continental liberals favored a property-based franchise (the so-called "juste milieu" of the French July Monarchy: rule by the educated and propertied middle class) rather than the universal suffrage that radical republicans demanded.

Radical republicanism. KC-3.3.I.B: radicals in Britain and republicans on the continent demanded universal male suffrage and full citizenship without regard to wealth and property ownership; some argued that such rights should be extended to women.

The British Chartists were the principal mass radical movement of the 1830s and 1840s. The 1838 People's Charter demanded six reforms: universal male suffrage; equal electoral districts; vote by secret ballot; payment of MPs (so working-class men could afford to serve); abolition of property qualifications for MPs; and annual elections. The Chartists organized three major petition campaigns (1839, 1842, 1848) gathering millions of signatures; the 1848 petition ran to roughly 1.9 million signatures (Chartist claims) or 1.6 million (after government auditing). All three petitions were rejected by Parliament. The Chartist movement faded after 1848, but five of the six points were eventually achieved: the secret ballot in 1872, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs in 1858, payment of MPs from 1911, the third Reform Act of 1884 producing near-universal male suffrage, and the Representation of the People Act of 1918 producing actual universal male suffrage and partial female suffrage.

Continental republican movements pursued similar demands. Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) in France pursued an insurrectionary republican strategy that influenced the 1848 February Revolution. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) in Italy founded Young Italy (1831) and pursued a republican-nationalist program for Italian unification. Flora Tristan (1803-1844) in France combined working-class organization (her Workers' Union of 1843 anticipated later socialist organizing) with the demand for women's rights as equal participation in citizenship.

Socialism. KC-3.3.I.D: socialists called for the redistribution of society's resources and wealth and evolved from utopian to systematic Marxist scientific critique of capitalism. The tradition developed across two principal phases.

Utopian socialism (1810s-1840s). The early socialists proposed model communities and cooperative production as alternatives to industrial capitalism. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) in France proposed a planned industrial society directed by scientists, engineers, and industrialists, with collective ownership of productive capital. His followers (Saint-Simonians) became important in mid-century French banking and railway development (the Pereire brothers' Credit Mobilier was a Saint-Simonian project). Charles Fourier (1772-1837) in France proposed model communities (phalansteries) of about 1,600 people each, with rotating work assignments and harmonious relations between the sexes. Robert Owen (1771-1858) in Britain founded the New Lanark cotton mill in Scotland (1800-1825) on cooperative principles and the New Harmony community in Indiana (1825-1827) before turning to British trade-union and cooperative organizing.

Marxist scientific socialism (1840s onward). Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) developed the systematic critique of capitalism that would dominate late-nineteenth-century socialist politics. The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaimed that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" and called for the urban industrial workforce of all countries to unite. Capital (volume 1 published 1867; volumes 2 and 3 published posthumously) provided the systematic economic critique: the labor theory of value (commodities exchange in proportion to the labor time required to produce them); the theory of surplus value (capitalist profit derives from the difference between the value workers produce and the value they receive in wages); and the theory of historical materialism (the economic structure of society determines its political and ideological superstructure, and the contradictions of each economic structure produce its eventual replacement).

KC-3.6.II.C: Marx's scientific socialism provided a systematic critique of capitalism and a deterministic analysis of society and historical evolution. Marx's claim to scientific status rested on the contrast with the earlier "utopian" socialists who had proposed model communities without explaining how the historical transformation to socialism would actually occur. Marx argued that capitalism's internal contradictions — especially the tendency toward concentration of capital in fewer hands and the corresponding growth of the urban industrial workforce — would produce the political conditions for socialist transformation. The First International (the International Working Men's Association, 1864-1876) attempted to organize the European labor movement around Marxist principles, though Marx's authority was repeatedly contested (most importantly by Bakunin's anarchist faction, leading to the 1872 split). The German Social Democratic Party (founded as the SAP in 1875, renamed SPD in 1890) was the principal successful Marxist mass party of the late nineteenth century, with its Erfurt Program (1891) codifying orthodox Marxism for a generation of European socialists.

Anarchism. KC-3.3.I.E: anarchists asserted that all forms of governmental authority were unnecessary and should be overthrown and replaced with a society based on voluntary cooperation. The anarchist tradition developed in dialogue with socialism but rejected the centralized state and the political-party form that orthodox Marxism endorsed.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), the most prominent early French anarchist, published What Is Property? in 1840 (its famous answer: "property is theft," distinguishing legitimate "possession" of what one uses from illegitimate "property" in what others' labor produces). His System of Economical Contradictions (1846) and General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851) developed a federalist anarchist program based on workers' associations and mutual credit. Proudhon's "mutualism" was less centrally focused on the state than later anarchist currents.

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), the principal Russian anarchist, joined the First International in 1868 and led the anarchist faction's contest with Marx. Bakunin argued that any centralized state — including a workers' state under Marxist direction — would reproduce the oppressive features of capitalist government. The 1872 Hague Congress expelled the Bakuninists; the International effectively split. Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), a Russian aristocratic anarchist, developed evolutionary biological arguments for cooperation in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Georges Sorel (1847-1922) in France developed revolutionary syndicalism (general-strike doctrine) in Reflections on Violence (1908). Anarchism had its strongest organized base in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain (the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region from 1881; the CNT from 1910), Italy (the followers of Bakunin and Errico Malatesta), and Russia (until the Bolshevik suppression after 1917). Smaller anarchist currents existed in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States.

Three sources framing the new ideologies: John Stuart Mill on liberty, Robert Owen on cooperative production, and a Saint-Simonian statement of early French socialism.

1. (Causation, Skill 4.B) Account for the development of the four principal nineteenth-century European ideologies (liberalism, radical republicanism, socialism, anarchism). How did each respond to the post-1815 political settlement and the conditions of industrialization?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.A: how did liberals stress popular sovereignty, individual rights, and enlightened self-interest while debating which groups should share in governance? Compare Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the continental constitutional liberals (Constant, Guizot).
3. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.B: how did British radicals and continental republicans demand universal male suffrage and full citizenship? Cite the six points of the People's Charter and the principal republican voices on the continent.
4. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.D and KC-3.6.II.C: how did socialism evolve from utopian visions (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) to the systematic Marxist critique of capitalism? Identify two principal Marxist concepts.
5. (Causation) Account for KC-3.3.I.E: how did anarchism develop as a separate ideology from socialism? Identify the principal disagreement between the followers of Marx and the followers of Bakunin in the First International.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.