E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, New York: Mentor, 1962.

E.J. Hobsbawm argues that the French Revolution and the British Industrial
Revolution transformed the world in unprecedented ways. This “Dual Revolution,”
argues Hobsbawm, established the parameters for European capitalist hegemony. The
socio-economic structure of Europe in 1848 looked completely different from that of
1789. Although they followed different trajectories, bourgeois liberalism lay at the heart
of both.
To begin, Britain was the first country in the world to industrialize, in part
because its political system was already geared to the ideals of economic expansion and
private profit. Britain’s economy changed in fundamental ways as it gradually moved
away from peasant agrarianism: this entailed the abolition of lands held in common
(notably through Enclosure Acts), the rise of a non-agrarian and non-skilled workforce,
and explosive urbanization. By the time Britain’s economy achieved “self-sustained
growth” (45) at some point during the 1780s, its economy was already fully committed
to the world-market. This marks the first time in world history that a nation’s export
market triumphed over its domestic market. (53) The explosion of capital, made possible
by the monumental growth of the cotton industry, in turn allowed for the astronomic
expansion of iron, steal, coal, and railways. The transition to industrial capitalism was
exceptionally hard on “the labouring poor,” inasmuch as it completely transformed their
traditional cosmology.
For its part, the French Revolution provided the world with a vocabulary of
bourgeois liberalism. Hobsbawm understands the Revolution as a class struggle between
--and among-- aristocrats, the middle classes, and the peasants. It would be
anachronistic, perhaps, given the absence of class consciousness, to speak of a
bourgeoisie and proletariat in 1789. It is clear, however, that the different phases of the
French Revolution reflect the impending struggle between liberalism and socialism.
What began as an aristocratic attempt to recapture the state quickly evolved into the
attempt by the middle classes to create “a secular state with civil liberties and guarantees
for private enterprise, and [a] government by tax-payers and property-owners.” (81) The
most radical years of the Revolution (1792-94), conducted by the sans-culottes and
Jacobins, scared the bourgeoisie and helped solidify middle-class interests. From
Thermidor forward we can understand French history in terms of maintaining a balance
between the dangers of radicalism and returning to the extremes of the old regime.
Napoleon’s military projects contributed to the institutionalization of bourgeois ideals --
in Marxist terms, he created a bourgeois superstructure, the political geography of the
“characteristic modern state” (113) with its concomitants international financing and
long-term investment in the capital goods industries.
Hobsbawm also surveys the effects the Dual Revolution had on: the rise of
nationalism; the commodification of land; the abolition of social privileges; the rise the
proletariat as a political entity; religious and secular ideologies; science; and the arts.
Tying all these things together, it seems, is the dialectical idea that the triumph of
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bourgeois liberalism created the antithetical seeds of its subversion. The rationalism of
the enlightenment, and its belief in the progress of civilization, did not find its ultimate
expression in the theories of Adam Smith, who believed that “the exchange of equivalents
in the market somehow assured social justice.” (287) Recognizing the fundamental
flaws within capitalism, utopian socialists offered alternative visions. Owen, Saint
Simon, and Engels all embraced the idea that man is a communal being, not a commodity
whose utility can be measured in the market place. The social experiments of Owen and
Fourier reflect not so much the repudiation of industrial development, as they do a
commitment to a more humanitarian form of economic development. Thus “the period of
the dual revolution saw both the triumph and the most elaborate formulation of the
middle-class liberal and petty bourgeois radical ideologies, and their disintegration under
the impact of the states and societies they had themselves set out to create . . .” (298)
The Age of Revolution is an impressive work. It is what one might expect from a
Marxist: a reliance upon a dialectical framework of class-struggle. The book is also rich
in details, and works well as a survey of the period. It is, at times, too unwieldy; some of
Hobsbawm’s tangential forays into areas seemingly not germane to the book are alarming
(for example his ill-advised generalizations about Egypt, Asia, North America, Latin
America, Euclidean geometry, etc.). Nevertheless, Hobsbawm’s position is largely
persuasive. The global supremacy of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century
is undeniable. The liberal idea that humans have a natural right to pursue profit and
accumulate capital without fetters played a central role in nineteenth century world affairs
-- perhaps the most central. Surely the consecration of private property paved the way for
the Dual Revolution.