Description
When Europe tried to settle its affairs at the Congress of Vienna the touchstone was legitimacy, the tradition of territory-owning hereditary monarchs with their supporting aristocracies. By 1848, the year of revolutions, economics and the problems of industry had come to dominate men's minds. This transition, the events and the individuals who shaped it, from Tallyrand and Metternich to Owen, Engels and Karl Marx, are Bertrand Russell's theme in this book.. When it originally appeared, as the first part of a larger survey of political change, Bernard Shaw called it invaluable, 'a History of Nineteenth Century Mentality by a First Rate Mind. an oasis in a desert of Histories of Human Humbug.'
This book contains the first half of a book called Freedom Organization, 1814-1914 published in 1934. The second half of this book will be reprinted under the title, Freedom versus Organization, 1776-1914. The half of this book which is here reprinted deals first with conventional diplomacy from the Congress of Vienna to the out break of revolutions in 1848, a period during which European Governments remained aristocratic, reactionary, and traditional, representing in the main the interests of landowners. ISBN:9781406735307
