How did democracy become more widespread in the nineteenth century? What does the term "public sphere" mean? Why did forms of political radicalism emerge in the nineteenth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: In the West, enthusiasm for democracy began to mobilize popular movements to open up the political process. But where did the idea of democracy come from? The two usual—but not necessarily mutually exclusive—answers are: ancient Greece and primitive Christianity. Greek examples provided models of states in which all citizens shared decision making. The Christianity of the apostolic age enshrined the notion of the equality of all members of the group. However that may be, the United States—perhaps because men steeped in reverence for both the classics and Christianity founded the country—was the laboratory of democracy for the nineteenth-century world. Democracy as we usually understand it today—with a representative legislature, elected on a wide suffrage, and political parties—was, in effect, an American invention. From the perspective of Europe, democracy seemed at first to be one of America's "peculiar institutions," like slavery, that it would be best to avoid. The bloodshed of the French Revolution suggested that the "common man" was an untrustworthy political partner. In consequence, the first half of the nineteenth century was a time of democratic retreat in most of Europe. Reforms were designed to defend traditional privileges by enlarging bourgeois support for them. Whenever possible, the birth of working-class organizations was aborted, radical presses censored, demonstrators shot. In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832, often hailed as a first step toward democratic progress because it increased middle-class representation in Parliament, actually disenfranchised working-class voters. Nevertheless, the model of the United States became increasingly attractive as the young country proved itself. The efforts of Tocqueville, Bryce, and their like changed the way European elites perceived democracy. In the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century, most European countries modified their constitutions in a democratic direction and, in particular, enlarged the franchise. New states of the early years of the new century—Norway, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland (which was under the Danish crown but autonomous)—had even more determinedly democratic constitutions than the United States. Even where there was little or no democracy, more people got involved in the public sphere: in clubs, institutions, and associations outside the home, in arenas of debate in cafes and bars, and in places of worship. Newspapers brought affairs of state to everyone who was literate. Public readings of newspapers made even illiterate people politically informed. The public sphere was widest and most developed in North America and parts of Europe. That is why democracy got a foothold in those regions. But there were outposts and echoes elsewhere in Latin America, Brazil and Japan. Various forms of political radicalism emerged as people began to argue the optimist and pessimist view of the individual and the state. Fear and hope collided in conflicts that pitted rival kinds of radicalism—reformist philosophies that claimed to get to the root of the world's problems—against each other such as socialism and utilitarianism.