Editing Socialism (section)

== The Dual Revolution and the Social Question ==
[[File:George-grosz-explosion.jpg|thumb|George Grosz, "Explosion"]]
England's enclosure movement and industrial revolution destroyed the familiar, stable and traditional way of life that peasants had been accustomed to for centuries. Peasants without land faced unprecedented social and economic insecurity. They were crowded into cities, where the same state that had driven them off their land refused to provide for them, leading to controversy over the Elizabethan Poor Laws.

The French revolution overturned the stable hierarchy of Feudalism, tearing apart the Great Chain of Being which had long allowed commoners to identify themselves in a meaningful social reality. What hatched in Paris soon spread wings, as Napoleon carried world-history across the continent, smashing the Holy Roman Empire and laying the groundwork for German unification through a legal and political leveling process. Aside from formal changes, the wars upended the unspoken traditional hierarchies of old Europe; as a German footsoldier in the ''Grande Armee'' recorded in his diary upon taking Moscow:<blockquote>Everyone was disguised in furs, rags, and pieces of cloth; they wore round hats and peasant caps on their heads, and many had priest’s robes from the churches. ''It was like a world turned upside down.''<ref>''Diary of Napoleonic Footsoldier,'' p.71 [https://annas-archive.org/md5/5ffefc15b99be3aecd066bcd04d2e881 link]</ref></blockquote>Taken together, the dual revolution ushered in Modernity. For common people, this was more or less a biblical apocalypse. In Marx's immortal words:<blockquote>Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.<ref name=":0">[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Marx, "Communist Manifesto"]</ref></blockquote>It is in this context that the '''Social Question''', long an object of contemplation for humanist philosophers, first acquired real-world relevance. European humanists such as '''Hobbes''' and '''Rousseau''' had inquired as to the real premises of man, but before the eruption of modernity and its attendant restlessness, these realities were ultimately ''unwritten'', and could safely remain so. It was taken for granted that societies had a way of relating to the ineffable, sacred and sublime thing that made them whole. That sociality had to be reflexively, explicitly named implies a devastating loss of the ability to relate to it implicitly. By 1848, this crisis and its attendant question had become apparent to all. ''Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies'' - none could ignore it.