Tocqueville worried about the "tyranny of the majority" looming over democratic cultures. Carlyle wrote a pamphlet "Shooting Niagara, and After?" Carlyle found himself predictably more depressed than anyone else...his metaphor for the literal equalizing of all peoples in the new democracy; he found himself unable to work as he watched his country "getting into the Niagara rapids far sooner than I expected". In Matthew Arnolds' "Culture and Anarchy", Arnold was critical of the aristocracy = the "barbarians" and even more, the Middle Classes=the "philistines" ; then there was the lower orders of the populace which loomed as the true danger to Public Order.
The German economist LUJO BRENTANO was born in 1844, the same year as Nietzsche, not far from Frankfurt. The brother of the father of MODERN Psychology FRANZ BRENTANO and the nephew of the original ROMANTIC poets Clemens BRENTANO and his sister Bettina von ARNIM. Germany's Prime Minister BISMARCK's defiance of the Prussian legislature in the early 1860's was a disturbing signal from a powerful neighbor showing no disposition to develop into a constitutional state. Prussia quickly overtook Austria in the War of 1866, as Prussia took such territories as Frankfurt. These Germans were catholic and doubly disliked the prospect of being ruled by Protestant and arch-Protestant Junkers. German industrialization was also well underway only to speed-up by 1871.
BRENTANO had to navigate through this political/militarism as well as the social factors of the people being jostled about. LUJO was an unrepentant "Frankfuter" and observant catholic, which took years for him to make peace with a Prussianized Germany, to separate himself from the rigid political and religious faith of his family, and to then throw himself into social problems. BRENTANO would later in life concede the brainwashing of his catholic childhood of uncritical thinking and political conservativism which passified all to its conformity. Science replaces religion through the second-half of the nineteenth century as it brought the realization of secularism to a world rapidly becoming urbanized. As with the great British authority on the Arts JOHN RUSKIN; the issues of the poor, humanitarianism, what industrialization was all creating deeply influenced BRENTANO's development. Since the efforts of the French Sensibilite' at the end of the eighteenth century ; intellectuals had developed arguments and began analyzing the lot of the lower classes looking to better all society by fixxing the floor first. Britain, oddly enough, was early in developing a social welfare program with 'The Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor' launched in 1796, as studies were made yet little would be done as their findings continually assumed that the overwhelming problems of the masses would continuously keep them locked in their own perpetuation of poverty and vices.
Industrialization only complicated this "reality". Britain, along with Scotland, became the first modern society under the unending advancements of this brave new world. Astonishing population growth began, invigourating the urban behemoths being erected. Manchester increased from 40,000 to 70,000 by 1801 and then doubled that population in the next thirty years. Yet London and other Industrial early giants also created the modern ghetto and urban squalor with incredibly inhumanly demeaning levels. Child labor, 14 hour work days, coal miners, prostitution and murder, dens of inniquity, dehumanizing capitalist practices began creating the evils which social reformers from Engels and Marx to Charles Booth in England: and then LUJO BRENTANO scrutinized and attempted to resolve. Liberalism was being developed. On an economic level this approach had worked wonders for Queen Elizabeth with Worpole two hundred years before. The first Earl of SHAFTESBURY created the WHIGs to polarize the TORY -ROYALIST's and the notion of FREE TRADE which successfully got underway. Expanding Urbanization with it's by-product of ghettos and then the new democratic spirit which argued more "rights" for all prompted the psychology of Liberalism which as an answer will also continue to be itself problematical.
LUJO BRENTANO had become a prolific author, a respected economist, and an embattled partisan in debates on the "condition-of-England" conversation throughout Europe. Poverty was an old story, which was taking on more weight with scientific approaches to everything including social scientists and the new Anthropology studies. Around 1800 at least one quarter of the German population lived at the subsistence level. Much of the time they dipped below it. Through Industrialization in Germany the poor were reduced in numbers yet thousands fell in casualties to machinery; Artisans were being ruined by mechanization, as the up and down roller coaster ride of the smaller percentage of those getting wealthy at the expense of others losing everything began its Capitalist syndrome. In 1844 there was the Silesian weaver uprising as problems developed in Cologne, Bremen and elsewhere.
All workers got jobs but new problems without protection from unemployment, old age, work related injuries, and sickness from work emmerged. BRENTANO was astute to the problems which were intangled within systems from his catholic upbringing. His ideas were far from acceptable to his upbringing. Then it would be a fateful trip to England in 1868 when BRENTANO decided to become a political economist and then moved to Berlin for his doctorate at the University of Berlin, which changed everything. LUJO had like many educated Germans been a fervent Anglofile. BRENTANO rejected the abstract theorizing to economic thinking and instead favored a historical view of the field. LUJO also looked past his Berlin academian liberal Ernst Engel who argued granting workers co-ownership in industry; for enforcing a strong independent trade.
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