The Two Revolutions

Upon the breaking up of the old order in Europe, a number of elements (power wealth and status) were liberated whose consolidation dated to the Middle Ages. Revolution, industrialism and democracy were the key driving factors. The 19th century politics tried to make the elements relevant to science and philosophy. Both the Industrial and French Revolutions accelerated the science’s rich themes. Even though the French Revolution is without controversies such as Alfred Coban’s description of it as a myth, to may sociology founders among them Comte, Tocqueville and Le Play, its myth meant otherwise.
There are fives themes of Industrial Revolution which proved “most evocative of sociological response and most directive in sociological problem and concept formation. One of the themes is the labor condition. There was the degradation of labor and wrenching of work from the society’s protective contexts. Ways through which this was done included the common man’s and craftsman’s status decline. Conservatives among them Tocqueville, Taine and Hawthrone described the negative effects it had on rural areas (Monahan, 1975). The second theme is property transformation, which result from weakened institutional property supports. Property would be “fragmented and atomized” into “impersonal shares which didn’t inspire allegiance or stability.” Joseph Schumpeter observed that people with possession ambitions of impersonal stock fail to see the capitalism to socialism transition.

The third theme is urbanism. Before early 19th century, the city was “the repository of civilized graces and virtues.” The city was the context of many sociological propositions associated with “disorganization, alienation and mental isolation”. Manchester’s population soared from fifty thousand to over three hundred thousand and increased squalor, catching the European’s man unprepared and “unbounded aggregates that eyesight” shown of Midlands’ new cities. Initially, radicals and conservatives hated urbanism but with time radicalism increases “urban” character. It drew varying opinions as Marx’s view of it being a capitalism blessing.
The fourth theme is technology and lastly the factory system with radicals having an ambivalence on both. For sometime, Marx found machine enslavement and labor alienation not with machine but with private property. Radicals idealized machine acceptance and its imposing of labor division in their literal works in contrast to the conservatives who distrusted both the factory and its labor division as it was against the nature.
The Revolution influenced the Europeans’ thinking and it “seized the minds of men…dominating” diverse fields because of the Revolution being ideological (Nisbet, 1966). It led to political changes with state structural, religion, social and economical changes. Behind the Revolution was power and later to terror. If regarded from “the point of view of most fundamental and widespread processes,” both the Industrial and French Revolutions brought individualization (“separating individuals from communal or corporate structures”); abstraction— moral values;and generalization whereby “national and international sphere” is now seen as “essential areas of man’s thought and allegiance.”
The aspect of society highlighted in the article is that revolution, ended the communal forms that had traditionally been a norm in the society and ushered in a system whereby “individuals” were separated from the integration of communal “generalization”.
The concepts that are referred to in the article are industry, industrialist, democracy, class, middle class, ideology, intellectual, rationalism, humanitarian, atomistic, masses, commercialism, proletariat, collectivism, equalitarian, liberal, conservative, utilitarian, bureaucracy, capitalism, liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and crisis.

References
Monahan, W.G. (1975). Theoretical dimensions of educational administration. London: Macmillan.
Nisbet R.A (1966) ‘The Two Revolutions’ In The Sociological Tradition, London: Heinemenn, Chapter 2 pp. 21-44