A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900
By Carlton J. H. Hayes.
Harper Collins, 1941.
Reviewed by John Rossi.
When I started teaching an introductory European History course over 60 years ago, I chose as my textbook Carlton Hayes’s two volume A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe, the best survey of the modern period since the Renaissance. I picked Hayes from among the many European history texts because I was an admirer of his approach to history, a highly readable blend of social, political, cultural, and economic history. I had been exposed to his text in college and was a convert after reading the first chapter assigned, the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which revealed his gift for analysis and lively style. I was also familiar with his other scholarly works, in particular his studies of nationalism, a field that he virtually created for scholars to understand the development of European civilization in the modern era. His last book, Nationalism: A Religion (1960), summed up his insight into how nationalism had become the dominant ideology of the modern world. It was a gem and, in today’s confused world of clashing ideologies, worth reading.
In the 1930s, Harper’s publisher launched a series entitled The Rise of Modern Europe, which offers narrow overviews of key periods in European history designed for students and general readers. Harpers enlisted some of the History profession’s best scholars, such as Crane Brinton and William Langer, for the series and asked Hayes in 1941 to write what was then the final volume in the series, A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900.
Hayes was writing against the background of the early years of the Second World War, with the forces of aggressive nationalism apparently triumphant everywhere. This aggressive nationalism was all too present in Europe, where Hitler had overrun Poland and France and threatened the land of liberal democracy in England. It was also present in Asia, where an extreme Japanese nationalist movement sought to dominate China and the Western Pacific. A Generation of Materialism found the root of these extreme nationalist movements in the events of the last third of the nineteenth century.
For Hayes, what he describes as the “ecumenical liberalism” of the middle decades of the nineteenth century—respect for individual rights, freedom of speech, free trade, and a growing prosperity—were threatened by the forces of materialism, militarism, and scientific racism which he dated as emerging in the 1870s.
Hayes traces the development of this new materialistic society through certain movements and individuals who rose to prominence in the 1870s. Otto von Bismarck’s invention of a new Germany on the ruins of the defeat of Napoleon III’s France, he argues, created the trend toward a harsher view of the state system. The balance of power system created by the Congress of Vienna (1815) gave way to a German-dominated Europe controlled masterfully by Bismarck. Hayes has a certain respect for Bismarck. Despite his adherence to Realpolitik and his cynical view of human nature, his alliance system gave Europe two generations of peace. It was only with his fall from power that his alliance system was rendered dangerous in the hands of lesser statesmen.
The subvention of ecumenical liberalism was further undermined, Hayes notes, by the impact of Karl Marx’s so-called “Scientific socialism.” The claim that Marx’s new vision of socialism “was evolutionary and materialistic,” Hayes argues, fitted nicely into the rising respect for Darwinism and the scientific realism of the age but hardened its view of human nature: man was not free but was a creation of inevitable forces. These views spread from the scientific elite to the ranks of the middle classes, with a devastating effect on traditional Christianity.
Another by-product of this perversion of Darwinism was the pseudoscience of racism with its various hierarchies, of which the white Anglo-Saxon, primarily German and English, represented the highest level. One aspect of this racist thinking was the emergence of a new kind of antisemitism. Different from the religious bigotry of the past, Jews were now seen as not only religiously suspect but racially inferior. All this happened against the background of the Jewish progress in business, educational, and even political areas: Jews were admitted to Parliament in Britain, and even Bismarck had important Jewish business advisers as did the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
One Jewish response to this vicious antisemitism: pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus case in France, etc., was the birth of a Jewish form of nationalism. Hayes regards Theodor Herzl’s Zionism as an expression of the aggressive nationalism that was the main political and cultural force in the last years of the century. Other oppressed minorities, Irish, Czech, Poles, Serbs, etc., similarly expressed their uniqueness in nationalist terms.
Hayes stressed that the so-called New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century was significantly different from that of the past decades. England had accepted free trade in its Empire in the 1840s—Disraeli talked of colonies as millstones around our necks—and France showed such little interest in its Empire that at the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian war, it offered all its colonies to Bismarck for the return of Alsace Lorraine.
This New Imperialism, Hayes believed, was essentially a nationalist, not an economic phenomenon. While admitting an economic motive for expansion, Hayes distinguished the new version as focused not on settlements but on exploitive and nationalist prestige purposes. This version of Imperialism emerged after the great nationalist wars of the 1860s and 1870s, Hayes argues, and “expressed a resulting psychological reaction, an ardent desire to maintain or recover national prestige.” Great nationalist figures, heroes of the movement like Cecil Rhodes or that “psalmist of the new dispensation, Rudyard Kipling” inspired the masses and the classes to a new respect for Empire.
What makes A Generation of Materialism reach beyond textbook quality is Hayes’s ability to sprinkle insights, often idiosyncratic, throughout the text. The late nineteenth century “specialized in minor poets.” “Without impressionism, there could be no modern painting.” There is “lingering doubt whether the Leaves of Grass were genuine poetry or hortatory prose that merely looked like poetry.” Henry James’s involved plots, shadowy characters, and difficult prose seemed designed “to track members of the leisured class, like ghosts, into the cupboards of their minds.”
A Generation of Materialism has few heroes. Hayes was kind to Bismarck, but the closest individual who drew Hayes’s deepest praise was Pope Leo XIII. Describing him as a humanist, scholar, and artist with a “sympathetic understanding of the intellectual problems of the modern age and a singular practicality in dealing with them,” he argues that Leo XIII saved the Catholic Church from the negativity of a century of Pontiffs which peaked during the rule of Pius IX. Hayes claims that Leo tried to “Christianize democracy and liberty” and largely succeeded. A new biography of Leo in English is needed.
In less than 400 pages, Hayes demonstrates how, by 1900, a prosperous but politically divided Europe had emerged but was rife with nationalist rivalries. It also was a continent made more dangerous by the second Industrial revolution based on steel, electricity, and oil. World War I would prove just as dangerous.
Eighty years after its first appearance, A Generation of Materialism remains readable and the best overview of those last dangerous decades of the Nineteenth Century. It is a testament to Hayes’s gifts as a scholar and author.
John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
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