Topic 7.5 Notes – The Age of Progress and Modernity

Progress, Reason, and the New Doubt

Europe entered the 1800s with a strong belief that history was moving upward. The Enlightenment taught that reason could uncover truth, and the Industrial Revolution made that belief look convincing because railroads, factories, medicine, education, and state bureaucracy all seemed to prove that knowledge created improvement.

For many Europeans, progress meant more than change. It meant civilization itself was advancing through science, technology, public health, literacy, and better administration.

The key shift in this topic is that confidence in objective truth started to crack. New thinking did not destroy science. It grew out of science and serious inquiry. The surprise was that the more people studied nature and human behavior, the more they found uncertainty, hidden motives, and limits to old certainties.

By the early 1900s, this produced modernism, a mood shaped by:

• subjectivity because experience depends on perspective
• ambiguity because truth looked less fixed
• fragmentation because reality no longer felt neat and unified
• skepticism toward universal answers

Positivism, Realism, and Materialism

These all focused on observable reality, but they are not the same thing.

Positivism

Positivism said science alone gives real knowledge. It rejected theology, metaphysics, and unsupported speculation, and trusted observation, evidence, classification, and laws.

Auguste Comte is the name to know.

• He coined sociology.
• He argued society could be studied scientifically and improved through rational administration.
• His law of three stages described human thought moving through:
  1. Theological stage: events explained by divine forces
  2. Metaphysical stage: events explained by abstract ideas
  3. Positive stage: events explained by observable laws and evidence

This fit state-building too. Governments gathered statistics, demographic data, and studies of crime and poverty because they believed social problems could be measured and managed.

Realism

After the failed revolutions of 1848, many people lost faith in idealism. Realism turned toward the world as it actually was.

• In politics, this became Realpolitik, practical power politics.
• In culture, realism meant attention to ordinary life and concrete conditions. The art and literature side matters more in Topic 7.8.

Materialism

Materialism explained events through physical, economic, and biological forces instead of spiritual purpose. Darwin mattered here because natural processes seemed to explain life without design.

Together, positivism, realism, and materialism show mid-1800s confidence that reality was objectively understandable.

Thinkers Who Challenged Rational Certainty

Later thinkers pushed back against that confidence by stressing instinct, struggle, emotion, and intuition.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche attacked universal moral truth and what he called herd morality.

• “God is dead” meant Christian moral certainty was collapsing.
• He emphasized self-creation and the will to power.
• Values, in his view, are historically created, not eternal.

Students often miss this part. Nietzsche was later misused by nationalists, but he himself opposed anti-Semitism and crude nationalism.

Georges Sorel

Sorel argued politics is moved by myth and emotion more than careful reason.

• His key example was the general strike as a revolutionary myth for syndicalists.
• He believed violence could be creative or regenerative.
• He shows the growing belief that struggle can produce progress.

Henri Bergson

Bergson said measured clock time is different from lived experience, which he called duration.

• Intuition can reveal reality better than analysis in some cases.
• In Creative Evolution, he described élan vital, a vital life force.
• Science is useful, but it does not capture all reality.

That broader challenge to reason also sets up Freud, who pushed the critique of rational self-control even further.

Nietzsche and Freud

Freud and the Unconscious Mind

Sigmund Freud challenged the idea that humans are mostly rational and self-aware. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he argued that behavior is shaped by the unconscious.

Keep these ideas together:

• repression means disturbing thoughts get pushed out of awareness
• dreams express hidden wishes and conflicts
• free association tries to uncover buried thoughts
• slips of speech and symptoms can reveal hidden motives

The big point is that reason does not fully control behavior. People are not fully transparent to themselves. The id, ego, superego model is later and is not the core focus here.

New Physics and the Rise of Modernism

Newton’s physics had long represented an orderly, predictable universe. Around 1900, new science showed that Newton still worked in many situations, but he was not the final word.

Max Planck

In 1900, Planck explained blackbody radiation by proposing that energy comes in quanta, not a smooth continuous flow. That launched quantum theory and challenged classical assumptions at very small scales.

Albert Einstein

In 1905, Einstein’s special relativity showed that space and time are not absolute. Measurement depends on the observer’s frame of reference. He also gave $E = mc^2$, showing mass-energy equivalence.

By the 1920s, figures such as Planck and Einstein were part of a broader revolution in physics, alongside younger scientists developing quantum mechanics.

Do not confuse scientific relativity with “all opinions are equally true.” The historical point is that even physics no longer seemed to offer simple absolutes.