Socialism, Utopian and ScientificEngels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Engels, Friedrich
Socialism
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine
ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The
middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the
country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three
great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to
do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory
once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of
that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England
had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and
for the _plebeian_ element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would
never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never
have brought Charles I. to the scaffold. In order to secure even those
conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the
time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further--exactly
as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be
one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.
Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily
followed the inevitable reaction which in its turn went beyond the
point where it might have maintained itself. After a series of
oscillations, the new center of gravity was at last attained and
became a new starting-point. The grand period of English history,
known to respectability under the name of "the Great Rebellion," and
the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the
comparatively puny event entitled by Liberal historians, "the Glorious
Revolution."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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