European Humanities

Mr. Spragins

Spring 2007

Final Exam Review

This semester we have studied the ideas that emerged from 19^th and 20^th century Europe in response to the Enlightenment belief that reason could lead civilization to a new, just and harmonious society. Liberal economists like Adam Smith argued that societies which possess the greatest freedom create the most productive economies. Political philosophers like Voltaire and John Locke proposed a new model of government, one which freed the individual from the constraints of aristocratic tyranny and the long domination of intellectual life by the Church. Locke’s conception of the human mind, tabula rasa, posited a model of learning which suggested that our brains are elaborate recording devices and our identities are shaped solely by our experiences. We are capable of using reason to shape our experiences, to educate ourselves, and to solve society’s problems: we are good. The English, American, and, eventually, the French Revolution brought into being the first great liberal societies, havens of the middle class, where governments protected individual rights and encouraged capitalist competition. Social thinkers believed that by engineering society we could eliminate poverty, injustice and war. The great liberal revolutions promised equal opportunity for each citizen to achieve success, to determine his own destiny.

In reaction against the philosophes' mechanical and scientific understanding of reality, the great German Idealist philosophers Kant and Hegel posed a wholly different conception of man’s relationship to the world: the human imagination shapes reality in ways determined by an individual’s or a culture’s unique soul. Massive political, economic and religious forces contend with each other and shape the culture of an age, driving civilization forward into new shapes. A new generation of poets, musicians, and artists celebrated the genius of the individual, blazed visions of truth shaped by passion, and sought the connection between man and the universe in the moral realm, not the mathematical. This celebration of the individual in many ways complemented the liberal’s conception of a society which offers people freedom and protects their natural rights.

In the late nineteenth century, though, Romanticism took a new and disturbing turn. The Industrial Revolution did not create a society which resembled the Crystal Palace envisioned by the great liberal thinkers of the 18^th century. Instead the late nineteenth century metropolises, London, Berlin, New York and Chicago, had become places of terrible contrasts: enormous wealth and power was juxtaposed with abject poverty. Unrestrained by government, liberal capitalism lurched from one economic crisis to another. Liberal governments engaged in cutthroat contests for imperial markets around the world. And in the factories, workers suffering inhumane conditions slowly began to sense the enormous power they might wield if they could unite.

Influenced by the ideas of Freud, Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche, a modern generation of writers and artists reacted against liberalism and its intellectual underpinnings: rationalism, capitalism, and the whole tradition of art which had grown out of the Renaissance celebration of the heroic individual. Freud suggested that human nature, even reason itself, was driven by dark desires in our instinct. Nietzsche argued that these same instincts needed to be liberated to save Europe from liberal timidity and moral stagnation. Marx too believed that forces much larger than our own reason or will drive human history, only he identified the class struggle as the driving force of history.  Darwin portrayed nature as a battlefield in which a struggle between species for survival in an ever-changing environment drives evolution.

During the late nineteenth century, the competition between the great capitalist nation states for imperial power took on ugly and racist overtones. Conflict between worker and factory owner threatened to explode in violence.  Fascism and Communism, political movements that grew from new forms of conservatism and socialism, rose up to oppose liberal governments. European Civilization slid into desperate convulsions of revolution and world war which continued over a thirty year period and only ended when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

Liberalism survived the great crisis of the Modern Era, but just barely.

Essay One: Why did liberalism fail in so many countries during the crisis years of the early 20th century? Consider the example of either Spain in 1936 or Germany  in  1932 to make your point.

a) Lorca's La Casa de Bernarda Alba

What is Lorca's political and psychological point in this allegorical play? In other words, what is the relationship between oppression and repression?

b)  The Intellectual Backgrounds of German Fascism:

Trace the development of German fascism from its origins in the German Idealist Response to the Enlightenment. How could a political movement so ugly grow out of such a beautiful source?

Essay Two: The Cosmic Salon: The Lessons of the Modern Era

What have we learned from the terrible ordeals of the twentieth century? What would the following thinkers say about the prospects of liberalism surviving the 21^st Century? How will liberals like you and me discover a path that can lead to a better, if not a perfect world?

You must use the writer whose name is in red. Choose at least three more writers from any of the groups to include in your conversation.

Invite your salon members to a Bunker Block at the Auschwitz prison camp in the winter of 1944, just after Primo Levi had arrived on the transport from Italy.

The French Revolution

Romanticism (notes)

Nineteenth Century Ideologies

Modernism

Imperialism

World War One

The Bolshevik Revolution

Fascism

Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba, (outline)

The Spanish Imagination: El Greco, Velazquex, Goya, Picasso, Dali, Miro

Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Notes) 

And from the first semester: