A Political and Social History of Modern Europe | Page 2

The rise of the bourgeoisie is the great central theme of modern history; it is the great central theme of this book.
Not so very long ago distinguished historians were insisting that the state, as the highest expression of man's social instincts and as the immediate concern of all human beings, is the only fit subject of historical study, and that history, therefore, must be simply "past politics"; under their influence most textbooks became compendiums of data about kings and constitutions, about rebellions and battles. More recently historians of repute, as well as eminent economists, have given their attention and patronage to painstaking investigations of how, apart from state action, man in the past has toiled or traveled or done the other ordinary things of everyday life; and the influence of such scholars has served to provide us with a considerable number of convenient manuals on special phases of social history. Yet more recently several writers of textbooks have endeavored to combine the two tendencies and to present in a single volume both political and social facts, but it must be confessed that sometimes these writers have been content to tell the old political tale in orthodox manner and then to append a chapter or two of social miscellany, whose connection with the body of their book is seldom apparent to the student.
The present volume represents an effort really to combine political and social history in one synthesis: the author, quite convinced of the importance of the view that political activities constitute the most perfect expression of man's social instincts and touch mankind most universally, has not neglected to treat of monarchs and parliaments, of democracy and nationalism; at the same time he has cordially accepted the opinion that political activities are determined largely by economic and social needs and ambitions; and accordingly he has undertaken not only to incorporate at fairly regular intervals such chapters as those on the Commercial Revolution, Society in the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution, and Social Factors, 1870-1914, but also to show in every part of the narrative the economic aspects of the chief political facts.
Despite the length of this book, critics will undoubtedly note omissions. Confronting the writer of every textbook of history is the eternal problem of selection--the choice of what is most pointedly significant from the sum total of man's thoughts, words, and deeds. It is a matter of personal judgment, and personal judgments are notoriously variant. Certainly there will be critics who will complain of the present author's failure to follow up his suggestions concerning sixteenth-century art and culture with a fuller account of the development of philosophy and literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century; and the only rejoinders that the harassed author can make are the rather lame ones that a book, to be a book, must conform to the mechanical laws of space and dimension, and that a serious attempt on the part of the present writer to make a synthesis of social and political facts precludes no effort on the part of other and abler writers to synthesize all these facts with the phenomena which are conventionally assigned to the realm of "cultural" or "intellectual" history. In this, and in all other respects, the author trusts that his particular solution of the vexatious problem of selection will prove as generally acceptable as any.
In the all-important matter of accuracy, the author cannot hope to have escaped all the pitfalls that in a peculiarly broad and crowded field everywhere trip the feet of even the most wary and persistent searchers after truth. He has naturally been forced to rely for the truth of his statements chiefly upon numerous secondary works, of which some acknowledgment is made in the following Note, and upon the kindly criticisms of a number of his colleagues; in some instances, notably in parts of the chapters on the Protestant Revolt, the French Revolution, and developments since 1848 in Great Britain, France, and Germany, he has been able to draw on his own special studies of primary source material, and in certain of these instances he has ventured to dissent from opinions that have been copied unquestioningly from one work to another.
No period of history can be more interesting or illuminating than the period with which this book is concerned, especially now, when a war of tremendous magnitude and meaning is attracting the attention of the whole civilized world and arousing a desire in the minds of all intelligent persons to know something of the past that has produced it. The great basic causes of the present war the author has sought, not in the ambitions of a single power nor in an isolated outrage, but in the history of four hundred years. He has tried to write a book that would be suggestive and