DRAFT: Consequences of the Revolutions of 1848: Élite Recognition that "If Everything Is Going to Stay the Same, Everything Has to Change..."
A meditation on the 1848 chapter of Harold James’s Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization. I really wish he had written Seven Crashes before I published Slouching Towards Utopia, because this below would, I think, have fit perfectly into the book as a motivation for and tied together all of my references to the Pseudo-Classical Semi-Liberal Belle Époque Order…
Harold James, in Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization, identifies the 1840s agricultural crisis and the political Revolutions of 1848 as the initial push into something like modern globalization. It was a moment of conjoined shocks: famine, epidemic disease, financial collapse, and political upheaval. These events, James argues, formed a polycrisis, one aspect of which was a supply crisis of a particularly disruptive sort, one that destroyed traditional subsistence structures and rendered evident the insufficiency of the ancien régime’s political economy. In Ireland, for example, the confluence of potato blight, doctrinaire laissez-faire policies, and an underdeveloped fiscal and relief apparatus led to what Amartya Sen would later call a man-made famine. In Germany and France, grain and bread riots cascaded into deeper confrontations with sclerotic state authority.
But the 1840s crisis and the 1848 revolutions in Europe failed. Old Régimes did regain control. But the response was not, as it had been after the 1815 final defeat of Napoleon, the attempted clock rollback of reaction.
No, the Revolutions of 1848 did not produce the descent from Heaven of an New Jerusalem.
However, there was, after 1848:
a Europe-wide questioning of how policy could be more effective, and how the poor might be helped…. Better, more competent institutions were needed…. Governments needed to reinvent themselves so as to see their relationship with commercial prosperity in a new way….. The events of the 1840s laid the foundation for a wave of productive institutional adaptation…. Reaction is [not] really the best way of describing the… governance that emerged in the 1850s and 1860s… ambiguous figures like Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) and Bismarck: modernizers who built a world in conformity with a new logic…
They did, however lead “governments… to reinvent themselves… [and] their relationship with commercial prosperity in a new way…. a wave of productive institutional adaptation…” That is Harold James’s summing-up of one of the true gems in his treasure that is his book Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises that Shaped Globalization.