During the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalism altered its
character, transforming itself from an ideology of reform to one of conserva-
tism. This was partly the result of changes within progressive liberalism. Once
the belief in nationalism became widespread, liberalism adjusted its objectives.
Romanticism was replaced by realism, an ideology that paid attention to
detail, then description in the pursuit of authenticity (understood as the
reXection of the real, crude, daily experience) would come to the fore. The
most social-minded liberals now embraced the demands of the increasingly
powerful trade unionism movement, together with the ideas put forward by
Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95), the latter overtly hostile
to nationalism. In 1848 they jointly published theCommunist Manifesto
urging the workers to unite, regardless of their nationality, against the mon-
eyed classes. As a matter of fact, however, internationalism did not play against
nationalism, but was juxtaposed to it: representatives of each nation travelled
to meet others in the international meetings. In any case, there were several
attempts to unite the proletariat in the Wrst (1864–76) and second
(1889–1917) international working men’s associations. For Marx and Engels,
development could only be understood by analysing economic and social
class. Marx outlined the real social content of political struggles, framing
them in terms of diVerent social interests. As he explained in hisThe Eight-
eenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon(1852), the French Revolution had been a
war of the bourgeoisie, and not of the nation as a whole, against the king.
Marx never wrote much about the remote past, but he read a lot of
anthropology (Allen 2004: 85). Some of his notes onAncient Society(1877),
by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81), were found
after his death by Engels.Ancient Societydealt with the Iroquois of North
America. Engels used these notes for his subsequent bookThe Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State(1884). In it he followed Morgan’s
adoption of the enlightened analytical categories of savagery, barbarism, and
civilization, which served to describe the periods of human history. The
author hypothesized about the emergence of a class of society based on private
property from a previous primitive community.The Origin... soon had
several editions and was translated into most European languages. The direct
inXuence of this book on archaeologists was most probably minimal in this
period, given the bourgeois background of most professionals and amateurs.
Nevertheless, it no doubt popularized evolutionism and the idea of a white
‘man’s primitive past among many late nineteenth-century working-class
autodidacts, who until then had been oblivious to the developments occurring
in archaeology, especially those of the study of the prehistoric period.
One of the reformist ideologies that gained strength in the late nineteenth
century was feminism. As brieXy mentioned in Chapter 12, the battle for
Evolutionism and Positivism 371