Three Pressures Meet
The unit inherits all three threads
- Different models of political sovereignty affected the relationship among states and between states and individuals.
- The expansion of European commerce accelerated the growth of a worldwide economic network.
- Scientific Revolution concepts and their Enlightenment application led to an increased but not unchallenged emphasis on reason.
Select all three threads the unit inherits.
Mechanisation belongs to unit 6.
Sovereignty is now contested from below
- Unit 3 asked which model a state used; this unit asks what happens when the model is rejected.
- 4.3's social contract gave a criterion — consent — by which any existing state can be judged and found wanting.
- So the sovereignty thread arrives at revolution because the theory arrived first.
4.3's social contract supplied revolution with...
The theory arrived first, which is why the thread reaches revolution.
Commerce funds and destabilises
- The worldwide network of 3.4 paid for the fleets and armies of 5.2 and 5.3.
- It also produced a commercial class with wealth and no corresponding political standing.
- So the same economic thread that strengthened states supplied the grievance that unsettled one.
Which thread does this belong to?
Sort each condition of the crisis.
This unit contains both the political triumph of Enlightenment principles and the reaction against them.
5.8's Romanticism and religious revival are the reaction, in the same unit.
This unit holds the Enlightenment's political triumph and the reaction against it at once. The same CED sentence that records reason's increased emphasis records that it was not unchallenged — and 5.8's Romanticism and religious revival are that challenge, inside the same unit as the revolution.
Commerce produced a class with wealth and no corresponding political ____.
The same thread that strengthened states supplied the grievance that unsettled one.
And reason is itself challenged
- The CED's not unchallenged becomes a subtopic of its own here: 5.8's Romanticism and religious revival.
- So the unit contains both the political triumph of Enlightenment principles and the reaction against them.
- Holding both is the unit's characteristic difficulty, and its characteristic reward.
None of the three conditions alone...
Each existed before 1789; together they are a situation with no ordinary solution.
Writing the context
- Conditions: a fiscal crisis produced by 5.3's wars, a political theory that supplies a criterion, and a commercial class with a grievance.
- Each condition existed before 1789 and none of them alone produces a revolution.
- Name the condition and what it made possible — the same shape as every context lesson in this course.
A treasury is empty because of wars fought overseas; a body of theory says legitimate government rests on consent; and the people with money have no standing in the state that owes them. None of the three is new in 1789, and together they are a situation with no ordinary solution.
The unit inherits three threads: models of political sovereignty, the expanding commercial network, and an increased but not unchallenged emphasis on reason. Sovereignty is now contested from below because 4.3 supplied the criterion of consent; commerce both funds states and creates grievances; and reason's challengers get a subtopic of their own in 5.8.