5 Steps to a 5TM AP European History

Cultural Responses to Revolution and Industrialization (^) ‹ 149
of humankind. In the non-unified lands of Germany and Italy, occupation by Napoleonic
France had helped to foster a spirit of nationalism. Under Napoleon’s rule, Germans and
Italians came to think of their own disunity as a weakness. The best early examples of this
kind of nationalism are the works of German writers Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose Addresses
to the German Nation (1808) urged the German people to unite in order to fulfill their
historical role in bringing about the ultimate progress of humanity, and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, who argued that every nation had a historical role to play in the unfolding
of the universe and that Germany’s time to take center stage in that drama had arrived.
Like the Romantics, early-nineteenth-century nationalists emphasized the role that
environment played in shaping the character of a nation and sentimentalized the past.
A good example of Romantic nationalism is the work of Ernst Moritz Arndt, who urged
Germans to unify through a shared heritage and through love of all things German. In a
similar vein, the Grimm brothers compiled traditional German folk stories to celebrate the
beliefs and traditions of ethnic Germans. Strains of Romanticism can also be seen in the
work of the great Italian nationalist of the early nineteenth century, Giuseppe Mazzini,
whose nationalist movement, Young Italy, made appeals to unity based on natural affinities
and a shared soul.
Social Darwinism
The socialist notion that competition was unnatural was countered by yet another
nineteenth-century ideology that came to be known as social Darwinism. In 1859, the
British naturalist Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, which argued that all
living things had descended from a few simple forms. In Origin of Species, Darwin described
a complex process in which biological inheritance, environment, and competition for
resources combined over millions of years to produce the amazing diversity in living forms
that exists in the world.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer argued that Darwin’s theory proved that competi-
tion was not only natural, but necessary, for the progress of a society. Spencer coined the
phrase “survival of the fittest” (a phrase adopted by Darwin in the sixth and final edition
of Origin of Species) and argued along liberal lines that government intervention in social
issues interfered with natural selection and, therefore, with progress. By the last decades
of the nineteenth century, social Darwinism was being used to argue that imperialism, the
competition between nations for control of the globe, was a natural and necessary step
in the evolution of the human species. Eugenics, the notion that a progressive, scientific
nation should plan and manage the biological reproduction of its population as carefully
as it planned and managed its economy, also flourished in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century.
Violent Resistance of the Laboring Classes
When the increased use of machines in industrial and agricultural production threatened
the livelihood of skilled laborers, workers responded with violent resistance. In Britain, tex-
tile workers resisted the introduction of stocking frames, spinning frames, and power looms
by destroying the machines, giving birth to what became known as the Luddite movement.
In the countryside, workers resisted the introduction of threshing machines by burning
hayricks in what became known as the Swing Riots.
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