IMPACT OF THE TWIN REVOLUTIONS: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

It is often said that social sciences in 19th century are mostly understood as responses to the problem of order that was created in men's minds by the weakening of the old order under the twin blows of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The European society was hard hit by these twin Revolutions. THE old social order that rested on kinship, land, social class, religion, local community, and monarchy became very shaky. Thinkers were more concerned about finding ways and means of reconsolidating these elements of social order. Hence the history of 19th century politics, industry, and trade is basically about the practical efforts of human beings to reconsolidate these elements. Thus, it is obvious that the history of the 19th century social thought is about theoretical efforts to reconsolidate them - that is, to give them new contents and meaning.
"In terms of the immediacy and sheer massiveness of the impact on human thought and values, it would be difficult to find revolutions of comparable magnitude in human history. The political, social and cultural changes that began in France and England at the very end of the 18th century spread almost immediately through Europe and the Americas in 19th century and then on to Asia, Africa, and Oceania in the 20th. The effects of the two revolutions, the one overwhelmingly democratic in the thrust, the other industrial capitalist, have been to undermine, shake, or topple institutions that had endured for centuries, even millennia, and with them systems of authority, status, belief and community".*