Skip to main content
Humanities LibreTexts

3: Political Ideologies and Movements

  • Page ID
    20769
  • \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)\(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)\(\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

    • 3.1: After the Revolution
    • 3.2: Conservatism
    • 3.3: Ideologies
      After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, conservatives faced the daunting task of not just creating a new political order, but in holding in check the political ideologies unleashed during the revolutionary era. Enlightenment thinkers had first proposed the ideas of social and legal equality that came to fruition in the American and French Revolutions. Likewise, the course of those revolutions along with the work of thinkers, writers, and artists helped create a new concept of national identity.
    • 3.4: Romanticism
      ven before the era of the French Revolution, the seeds of nationalism were planted in the hearts and minds of many Europeans as an aspect of the Romantic movement. Romanticism was not a political movement – it was a movement of the arts. It emerged in the late eighteenth century and came of age in the nineteenth. Its central tenet was the idea that there were great, sometimes terrible, and literally “awesome” forces in the universe that exceeded humankind’s rational ability to understand.
    • 3.5: Nationalism
      Romantic nationalism was an integral part of actual nationalist political movements. Those movements would ultimately succeed in seeing their goals realized almost without exception, although that process took over a century in some cases (like those of Poland and Ireland). Central to nationalist movements was the concept that the state should correspond to the identity of a “people,” although who or what defines the identity of “the people” proved a vexing issue on many occasions.
    • 3.6: Nationalisms Across Europe
    • 3.7: Liberalism
    • 3.8: Socialism
      Socialism was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related factors: first, the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution, and second, the growth of industrial capitalism. It sought to address both the economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the living conditions of workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern society.
    • 3.9: Social Classes

    Thumbnail: Portrait of Karl Marx (1818–1883), the father of communism. (Public Domain)


    This page titled 3: Political Ideologies and Movements is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Christopher Brooks via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.