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It might be a stretch, but perhaps only a slight one, to suggest that the century just past, so celebrated and reviled at the turn of the millennium, will ultimately be judged inconsequential by historians when compared to the "long century" that, as historians reckon, began with the strident cries of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in 1789 and ended with the bloodbath of 1914-18.
Consider, for example, the revolutions of 1989, the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe. That the events of that year signified the retreat of the long shadow cast by Karl Marx was almost universally acknowledged. But to grasp their full significance, Francis Fukuyama—who became one of the most influential interpreters of that year of revolutions—turned for inspiration to none other than Marx's own mentor, G. W. F. Hegel, proclaiming 1989 as a sign of the necessary global triumph of liberalism and "the end of history."
And this is but one instance out of many. In fact, much of the 20th century could be construed as the conflicted outworking of 19th-century thought. Nationalism, born in the experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests, proved a dominant factor in the origins of the Great War and, subsequently, in the rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The theories of Marx, refracted through Lenin, fueled the 1917 Russian Revolution, as well as other socialist experiments throughout the world. Western liberalism itself, though born in the Enlightenment, achieved coherence and direction only in the democratic developments of the early and mid-19th century and in the writings of liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill.
Indeed, wherever we look, the innovations and questions of 19th-century thinkers persist. Scientists today are still indebted to Charles Darwin as we embark upon the wonderful, horrible genetic future. Psychologists and psychiatrists remain preoccupied with exorcising the ghost of Freud, while some critics have hailed the notion of "the therapeutic" as the key to explaining contemporary culture. What are 20th-century existentialism and neo-orthodox theology if not evidence of the prescience and power of Søren Kierkegaard's melancholy mind? Contemporary feminism traces its roots to writings like Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). And aren't the myriad moods of postmodernism ultimately footnotes to the scribblings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose terrible originality seems slightly less so when one reads fellow 19th-century pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer and Jacob Burckhardt? What is more, the above catalogue does not even glance at the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Feodor Dostoevsky, August Comte, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leopold von Ranke, John Henry Newman, William James, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and many more. A century of dunderheads it was not.
The abiding significance of the 19th century's intellectual legacy was not lost on the brightest lights of the century just past. One thinks of Karl Löwith's From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought; Hayden White's Metahistory; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe; Karl Barth's Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century; and Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Forms of Moral Inquiry, one of the most provocative works of contemporary philosophy, amounts to an extended meditation on divergent 19th-century intellectual currents.
But if we draw attention to the enormous legacy of 19th-century thought, we are also bound to acknowledge the forbidding and difficult character of many of its master texts. Anyone courageous enough to sit down with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind for example, probably shares a special kinship with spelunkers overtaken by panic and fatigue in labyrinthine darkness. The best way to read Marx's Das Kapital, someone once quipped, is to tear Marx out and read the introductory material. Personal experience confirms such frustration. As a teacher of modern European history, I find that students regularly gravitate to the bloody drama and ostensible relevance of more contemporary events, despite my repeated suggestion that historical perspective might reveal the origins of 20th-century events in 19th-century ideas.
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