Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality

Where is the marker for the start of the neoclassical?

What this means is we have a marker of when the Neoclassical collapse into dust – the Modern was, in a sense, forced to take the reigns. But as with most transitions, it was not ready to command the forces given it. This is because while it had been running individual operations for example automobiles under Ford and GM, it was in no way capable of running society. Thus, part of the problem was that a mechanism still had to be made operational. There was also the problem that even while the Neoclassical order had been defeated it still had adherence that felt that going back to the Neoclassical order was better than committing nations to a new design. This despite the large changes after the First World War.

However, it is at the other end that we turn our attention to: if the Neoclassical age was brought low by the First World War, when would it have started? Since we are looking for a mark, not a reason, It means that we only have to pick out one example that is supported by events at the same time which shows that the Neoclassical has become a force. Remember that be previous social order is still present and competes with the Neoclassical for dominance.

But when was it and why then?

The reason for the marker at the end of the First Battle of the Marne was the need to control the trading network based out of Europe. This was seen in the plans made not only by Germany but by England as well. The reason England had to go into the European conflict was that it needed to maintain of the global network. In order to do this, it needed to keep the Naval power which dominated the trading network at the time both militarily, and economically, for example by the price of gold which was the standard on which all currencies were pegged. For Germany, the need was to make supply and demand rather than transport the key mechanism. It wanted a system where the European continent was under the de facto control of Berlin. This included Belgium and France as well as Austria-Hungary and other nations on the European continent. This conflict was inevitable once the war went from being about control of territory to a larger structure of trade.

This means we should be looking for a time when the global trading arrangement was pegged to the Navy, and that Great Britain controlled the largest Navy. Which means we should be looking between 1840 and 1870. But this is still a wide range to look for and there are many possible occurrences. Thus, we must look for a moment when the exchange of information was possible not only in Europe but throughout the world.

What made the Neoclassical reach a new pinnacle was the telegraph cable across the Atlantic. In the 1840s there were a series of inventions that swept the world such as Colt’s revolver chambers for weapons as well as Morse’s constant pitching of the telegraph with “dots-and-dashes” designed of letters and numbers, and of course, the steam engine which powered not only railroads but batteries that could be placed for warfare in the Crimean war.ⁱ The 1840s-1850s was a breakpoint of the invention similar to the change in artistic output by J.M.W. Turner with his violent and imaginative landscapes which often showed military vessels in combat as Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water in 1840. There was a new system ready to overthrow the old but it needed a form to show what the differences were between the Romantic and a new generation.

This was crossing the Atlantic by telegraph and reducing the time it took for news, quotations in markets, and messages from one person to another. But this was not an easy task because the first attempt on 16 August 1858 was very slow, and the cable broke in September. As Thomas A. Dames dryly notes “There was a general failure to anticipate engineering difficulties throughout the project…”ⁱⁱ this meant that attempts were made in 1856, 1858, and 1862, Before finally achieving success in 1866.ⁱⁱⁱ It was called a “bold, Beautiful Failure” in IEEE Spectrum on 31 October 2019, and such was the power it had to members of the field. This was because not only was there an earlier on the financial side but there was new physics involved as well – both theoretical and experimental.

Since this a popular presentation that the mathematics can be looked up and a YouTube video that makes key points.^iv

The physics at the time showed itself as the problem of “retardation” of the signal. This was immediately apparent when the first sentence from Queen Victoria to then Pres. Buchanan took hours to reach the other side. While the elaborate details can be looked up in the original paper which was published December 1855 and explained in a rigorous analytical way by a book on Fourier analysis, what is interesting from this book’s perspective is it was not just one paper but a series of six papers which created a mathematical theory of magnetism, the Thermo electrical effects, and showing how this theory explains why the slowness of the effect is created. In other words, there is an underlying theory as to why the slowness occurred. What Thompson deduced: “We may infer that the time required to reach a stated fraction of the maximum strength of the current at the remote it will be proportional to kcl².” Where l is the length squared instead of merely the length which is why there is a “retardation” in the signal. This observation harkens back to Newton and the square of the masses for gravitation and is the key concept for all of what would now be called classical physics, which was disrupted by Dirac and Einstein.

Thompson then goes on to state what is obvious once one has thought of it: because the cable disperses the transmission by the square of the length, there is no regular speed of transmission only the transmission based on the length of the cable. This is why short distances work out quite nicely because the cable being short disperses the voltage and it is why long cables need to have a longer time to disperse the voltage because the length squared is longer.

What this means is that it is not merely an error but a fundamental observation and this meant that it had to be fixed from the beginning.^v

What this means is that the transatlantic cable was more than merely a scaling up of shorter distances, which was already being done, but a new idea that needed mathematical rigor, technological precision, and financial acumen. What this means is that the transatlantic cable was the point where a new form of logic burst onto the scene, and I call this Neoclassical, in the sense that it was the Enlightenment powered by calculus. But as we see this infected more than just electrical wiring but a new sense of how the world should be looked at whether in comedic or tragic novels, and as we will show in other ways as well.

This means that we have two points on the Neoclassical Cultural System: the point where the Neoclassical order collapses, and very soon this will be shown by the dissolution of the German Empire, the Russian Tsardom, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Chinese Empire. The end of the Neoclassical order was the end of traditional monarchy as it had been known to this point. This does not mean that dictatorship ended but its form was quite different than before; the other point is the creation point where a new economy based on instantaneous transmission became the standard with the transatlantic telegraph, which dissolved the older versions of monarchy which centered around a court system. Now it became possible to spread the power of the monarch directly as opposed to using satrapies with more power residing in subordinates.

This diagram is only a start because there are several points that must be answered. The first is what is the older system, and is it also part of the system we are talking about? The second point is while we have a revolutionary moment in the transatlantic cable and an ending of the late phase with the battle of the Marne we must also try to find where the Neoclassical goes from revolutionary to evolutionary and we’re the late phase begins.

The first step is to name the previous order. Fortunately, the previous order named itself the “Romantic” after the idea that the engines of the heart must be held equal to the machinations of the head:

Therefore, we can make the first change:

This graph makes an extremely important point: the Romantic was not the era before the Modern, even though there are several disciplines in which this is stated. The reason is that the Modern disciples wanted the Romantic to be the last hero because the contradiction of Neoclassical is transparent if the Modern comes after it. This is because what wants to happen is that the Modern is in the head whereas the Romantic is in the heart, this plays into the Modernist view of history. But looking at the politics, economics, industry, painting, music, and other features it is clear that it was not a Romantic movement that the Modernists overthrew but a movement that dealt with intellectual precision. But trying to pit one intellectual movement against the last intellectual movement is a great deal more difficult than saying that one is an intellectual response to an emotional time period.

The Rupture of Old Revolution and New Revolution

The Revolutions of 1848 were the end of the Romantic era, but it was not clear what would replace it. Were signs already afoot for example in literature a young author wrote the Pickwick Papers and started a stir. While the novel was only loosely connected with the eponymous character as the presence of the “Pickwick Club” what it did do was take advantage of the serialization of a novel and introduce things like cliffhangers into its mode of operation. Just as in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, what it did was to capture the moment of its creation and set about weaving a story. But its differences are also striking: it was meant in its conception for commercial success and had no overarching structure but instead told stories that showed the England of its day to an audience. Gone were the days of people living in a short space of their home and not looking outside. There was also be play of the city versus country and all that entailed because the two were bound together in ways which were formed the young Goethe as an author.

But this was not merely a single work but a new mode of telling stories, because the idea of serialization was beginning to be a means by which the current serialization can fund the next one. Another difference between Dickens and Goethe was that the Pickwick papers were comic and satirical versus the tragic and interlinked narrative of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. A new age of breaking the façade of a new city life was upon the world, and the world discovered that it was rather like this. This is a normative value of logical systems: just as the old system is producing its last great works, such as “Morphine” by Heine, the news comes at events differently, and where the old look backwards the new looks forwards. In the case of the Neoclassical, the 1830s are just the beginning even as the Romantic comes to a close.

Why “Neoclassical” as opposed to Realism? Because the individual movements do not express the totality of the latter half of the 19^th century, for example, realism is only one movement out of several that took the stage. Brahms, for example, does not have very much to do with realism but it be working out of counterpoint and distant tonalities. Symbolism is also not particularly realistic but was definitely part of the movements that gathered together. Der Schrei der Natur by Edvard Munch is not part of a movement that has the word “real” in any part of the word. But all of them can be described as searching for a Neoclassical perspective given the tools available at the time.

But as we have noted before it is with the Great Exhibition of 1851 where the new seeks to render a new vision of the world. This was not coincidental because the revolutions of 1848 to 1849 were a traumatic event and one response to such trauma is to introduce a new vision of the world which is a replacement. This means that the revolutionary spirit of the past was contradicted by a new spirit of the terrorism and opulence.

But even the tragedy was changing, instead of shocking and immediate the tone was eventually called realistic. This is the opening of the 1846 novel:

"I'll take the odds against Caravan."

"In poneys?"

"Done."

And Lord Milford, a young noble, entered in his book the bet which he had just made with Mr Latour, a grey headed member of the Jockey Club.

It was the eve of the Derby of 1837. In a vast and golden saloon, that in its decorations would have become, and in its splendour would not have disgraced, Versailles in the days of the grand monarch, were assembled many whose hearts beat at the thought of the morrow, and whose brains still laboured to control its fortunes to their advantage.

"They say that Caravan looks puffy," lisped in a low voice a young man, lounging on the edge of a buhl table that had once belonged to a Mortemart, and dangling a rich cane with affected indifference in order to conceal his anxiety from all, except the person whom he addressed.

"They are taking seven to two against him freely over the way," was the reply. "I believe it's all right."

"Do you know I dreamed last night something about Mango," continued the gentleman with the cane, and with a look of uneasy superstition.

His companion shook his head.

"Well," continued the gentleman with the cane, "I have no opinion of him. I gave Charles Egremont the odds against Mango this morning; he goes with us, you know. By the bye, who is our fourth?"

"I thought of Milford," was the reply in an under tone. "What say you?"

"Milford is going with St James and Punch Hughes."

"Well, let us come into supper, and we shall see some fellow we like."

Known is called Sybil, or the Two Nations, and its author was better known for his political career: Benjamin Disraeli. The focus is on how they work two different nations, rich and poor, and the decisions of each. You can see immediately how there is a difference: the Romantic is thought of as being internally driven, such as Wuthering Heights which is more focused on how the characters feel about one another than the national economics.

This difference between internal and external dynamics is the basis of the difference between the Romantic and the Neoclassical – The Neoclassical wanted the same durability and usability that the Romantic had put into clothing. Originally, clothing was made in the home by either a member of the family or by servants. But as time went on the idea that clothing should be made by outside forces became prevalent. In 1850 New York became a hub for rating made clothing manufacturers.^vi This was the beginning of what can be called the industrial marketplace and more items could be manufactured in a factory by means of industrialization.

This meant that the Neoclassical movement was about the industrialization of what had been hereto for the province of the house. Of course, there had been manufacturing, but it gained its prominence before the Neoclassical buying tools and the efficiency of tools. Now, the machine made it possible to use the industrial manufacture, of which the engine was the most prominent. Again, in the Romantic period there was the watermill and the windmill, but now using coal was again, much more efficient than either the watermill or the windmill. Because there were objects produced in a home that could be more efficiently produced in a factory, the Neoclassical caused a shift from goods that were essential to be produced to the reverse, where anything that could be produced in a factory was. For example:

Industrial revolution in the USA, as in England and other parts of Europe, occurred in two stages. Industrialization first began in rural New England between 1820 and 1840 as the artisanal method gave way to factory organization of production in a handful of industries. However, between 1850 and 1920, as industrial revolution deepened, scale economies rose, factory organization spread to numerous industries and regions, and industrialization became significantly concentrated in urban areas throughout the northern region of the US.¹

In other words, the Neoclassical era took the Romantic and supercharged it. This made manufacturing a key tenant of the Neoclassical era.

This means we should look for a moment that is a marker of the industrialization of manufacture and the trade between locations as a visionary point of the Neoclassical era. That means our next step is to place the stages underneath the curve. We shall have to adjust them when more specific events are found but this is only a preliminary hypothesis as to when the events, we are interested in will be found. So, for example, if we know that the revolutionary period of the Neoclassical is somewhere in the 1850s, we can then search for an event that has a specified duration and has the qualities that make it a good candidate for being an effect of its creation and a cause of future events. In other words, we do not know that the Great Exhibition of 1851 is a good candidate, but you have narrowed down the time to look for it. Similarly the end of the revolution period and the beginning of the evolutionary period looked for a similar dividing event around which there will be establishments of a new kind of order even if those events are before and after.

This also means that smaller logical systems can be done in this same way if we can include that there is a sigmoidal curve, the events happened in the correct order, we can find single events that show where we are, and we can reduce down to a small number the differences between one logical system and the next.

The next aspect is that we need to interlay one logical system with others. This means that the events that signal the beginning of a new system should be close to the endpoints of the old system. Taking the romantic revolutions of 1848-49 is clearly the endpoint of the idea of a romantic liberal revolution. Which makes them very close to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Remember that the new event must be in opposition to the old event. Thus, a new manner of living one’s life is antithetical to destroying the old way and correcting a new one. That is the old event must be antithetical to the new event and it must be plain so that most people can see that.

But why does this work? Does it work was answered by the second section of this book, a new way of thinking comes into being. This new way of thinking effects all of the modes of thinking but in different ways. This is why there are many sigmoidal curves - because each one requires different levels of organization from the participants.

That means that there are multiple sigmoidal curves representing the competing eras. Again, we must stress that there are multiple ways of looking at a society or societies and this is merely the one that has meaning to many of us at this particular moment. The problem with Digitality is that this particular moment is crucial to its throwing off of the Postmodern. This does not mean that all of the Postmodern is to be dispensed with: the lessons from one logical system inform and transcribe the next. But the difference is that while the old system once to thwart the new and tries to close its eyes, ears, and fingers to what is being said, and remember there will be such even after the revolution has happened, whatever revolution that is, there comes a moment when the old system realizes that it needs to find a place in the new system, but with its ideas transferred so that they do not need to be engulfed. The old system gives way to a new system with its paradigm shifted but not destroyed.

Discoveries of the Neoclassical and Their Opponents

Within the Neoclassical Era several markers of a discipline forming along new lines can be discerned: biology, with its evolution by natural selection, chemistry, with its periodic table of the elements, physics, with its discernment of electromagnetic waves, and economics, with its restructuring along the lines of marginal utility rather than labor as the source of value. But it is also that the expansion of industrialization made it possible not only to explain different theories but also to apply them and exploit them.

This means that not only is there a scientifically developed world, but there is a technologically developed world. And with that nations are being formed to access the technical developments for a variety of reasons. It is clear that Great Britain was the leader in industrialization, that topic will be for another time because there are many misconceptions as to what “industrialization” actually means and the ways in which it developed. But a unified core set of nations developed which had as their basis an industrially developed core, which also meant that they had stresses on their population because on the one hand,, they developed a richer sector of the population that demanded the goods and services, and on the other hand they placed a greater fraction of their populace in servitude to the manufacturing process.

What arose from this is a pair of competing politics: on the other hand, there was a larger and larger share of the population that wanted the goods and demanded that anything that could be done would be done; on the other hand, there was a larger and larger share of the population who had little and had to produce to stay alive. (μεν/δε)

This tension was seen in both industry and art. It also was felt in the attempts to expand out into further reaches where the population could farm because while farming was a hard life, it was also one where the hands were on the gears of survival, whereas in a city this was often not the case.

Industry and Art

The mixture between industry and art is seen in the field of painting. We often call the Impressionists “modern” but in reality, they were neoclassic first and foremost. What began the Impressionist movement was the ability of paint in tubes which made it possible for starving artists to use them to paint “En plein air” instead of in the studio where the older way of making paint with its laborious grinding up of materials was no longer needed. When it came possible for young artists to venture outside the studio and dab paints from tubes the world changed. But what also became evident was that time was still important: one needed time to paint and that was of limited supply because even the sun moved while you were painting. That meant that more and more the brush stroke was visible as opposed to invisible in academic painting. The immediacy of the brush stroke made a business decision, to make paints in tubes, into an artistic decision to use the paint in a way that would capture the “en plein air” moment.

This led a group of students, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille to go near Paris rather than a sketch and then go back to the studio to finish the work out of doors. As is usual in Paris, after going out and painting they gathered together in a specific café - Café Guerbois, on Avenue de Clichy - and talked about money, and painting, and how the two did not seem to go together. This was because the annual Salon was a ritual where the academic painters chose the best works to exhibit. In the café a Le groupe des Batignolles, where Édouard Manet lived, and somewhere in this discussion, either at the café or in one of the meetings the idea was formed to create their own salon and exhibit their paintings, because of a radical new style that was supposed to the academic tradition, they had little success in there Salon submissions. Edouard Manet was the dominant member of be group both because of his force of personality and because he had painted early masterpieces such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) a painting which had a nude female in a Modern context. Academic peers did nude but usually in the context of mythology or history, not in the present and not so casually as if nothing was wrong.

The critics were vicious and even coined the word Impressionism after a Monet scene of the sun rising which he called Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise). As is often the case the critics’ sneer becomes the name of a movement.

This movement would start others’ pitches all seeking to capture a different way of seeing. Before the goal of painting was to hide the brushstrokes and present a realistic scene, even if it was macabre in nature. This meant that the academic Neoclassical spawned a number of other movements that opposed the Orthodox style. This was indeed “modern” but not Modern. By the end of the Neoclassical movement painters such as Edvard Munch were using paint to show the inner life of the mind rather than the impression that the outside imposed.

This would come to industry in the Modern. But in the moment the dominant mode in painting, sculpture, theatre, and artisanship, as well as in most other advertising, was Realism. Realism does not incorporate all that happened in the Neoclassical, but it was the dominant strain in the overwhelming majority of visual representations. One can see a totalizing effect from the late 19^th century, but it is as much because of the materials that are available to work with as the work itself.^vii But totalizing and multiplicity do not add up to a synchronic event because it takes a great deal of time, especially as one goes back, for one piece to exert trends.^viii Simply put the entirety of a slice of time must both explain the dominant movement and the movements which are opposed to it but come out of the same era because of techniques and aesthetics.

However, even realism needs a counterpoint in the form of satire and one can see this in almost every magazine that purveys to the humorous element. But even this has a tension because much of the satire is still enmeshed in the forms of the time, which means delicate crosshatching and a certain way of exaggerating features that are similar in form if not in feature. Consider in the illustration above that the shoes are realistic down to a fault and the crosshatching is realistic in terms of the folds and bends. Clearly the artist was trained in the details of realistic portraiture even though he now does satire as his bread.^ix

This means that totalizing means totalizing in the worldview of a given period. There is the dominant mode, Realism, the dominant counter mode which can be seen in the satire of the time in art, and then there is the resistance, for example, Impressionism. The first is applauded, the second one is a counterweight to the first, and the third is the place for resistance to the mainstream, but which holds a similar point of view and aesthetic. Partially this is because they are all working with the same tools and have similar options but are looking for a difference in that area. When a change comes it will be seen almost everywhere. So the simple lines of magazine covers respond quickly to the approaches in the magazine production. They have to be because the changes in economics are a powerful motivator to commerce. That also means that things such as Art Nouveau spread rapidly because it was in response to realism, but in the same form because decorations were still utilized to heighten the form. This means that while Art Nouveau once blurs the line between arts and crafts and asserts the fundamental reality of the material, it still has one but in the 19^th century the same people are looking at it.^x

Remember that industry needs to appeal to what is and differentiate itself within the same context. But that does not mean that radical industry is not possible, for example, Industry had before been responsible for the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument, with the products of industry being much stronger than before. This was preceded by bridges over previously unsustainable gaps. In fact, the notion that compression and suspension acted on iron was only clear when a bridge made of iron collapsed because when a train went over it, the bridge compressed and then relaxed. The layout of such cities as New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo, and most especially Paris was changing as the well-off changed the cities to be an extension of their homes.

The size of the revenues in the United States was explosive.^xi This is directly traced to the movement of people from the countryside to the urban environment, but remember in these years only 2,500 was enough to be considered an urban environment.^xii But what is interesting is that New York City the prominence a US in the leading city came in the Romantic rather than the Neoclassical: in the decades between 1800 and 1860 other than 1820 the population growth was far in excess that from 1870 through the present, with the exception of the booming decade of 1900 and the more moderate 1910, both of which showed an enormous spike from immigration.^xiii This showed that the Romantic period was more about the growth of New York City than either the Neoclassical, Modern, or Postmodern. The difference is that the rest of the US copied New York City and the Neoclassical period. And the numbers on the revenue show that all over the United States the cities were becoming upgraded in their amenities.

Paradigm and Politics

One of the key moments is with the “Tammany Hall” corruption led by William M. Tweed, called Boss Tweed, the Democratic party-political machine. The reason is to make Tweed rich: at the height of his power, he was, among other things, the third largest owner of land in the city and director of numerous corporations such as the Eire railroad, the 10^th National Bank, and numerous companies which supplied lighting to the city. Is power came not from a title but from the way he dispensed patronage in New York City.^xiv This meant there was a great pro quote: he created jobs for people who then could be relied on to vote for the candidate because at the time there was no secret ballot. At the time your vote was known. This was financed by a 15% charge on all government business: graft as a tax.

But the scheme unraveled starting in 1871, from attacks in the press such as cartoonist Thomas Nash and from the New York Times, and internally from politicians who had been stepped over by Boss Tweed’s agglomeration for profits that used every single Avenue as a way of getting bribes, embezzlement, and extortion from any who wanted a slice of the city’s business.

Tweeds fail From grace is very much the same way that the transatlantic telegraph cable system was based on: the old way of doing things was to put people in charge and have them take money to be able to do things. The problem was that the person in charge had a simplified notion of what needed to be done and more complex projects were outside of the scope.

This became a problem when there were projects such as the Central Park which was proposed in the 1840s with a 778-hectare plot approved in 1853. In 1857 the team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed the design with everything including the reservoirs to be made by artificial means. The plot was then seized by eminent domain, including a majority-owned black settlement, and was then razed to build the Central Park.

When it was completed in 1876 it centered the green space for Manhattan and was then duplicated not in detail but in the way that green space became a central part of many cities: for example, the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, Frederick Law Olmsted designing Seattle, Buffalo, Boston, Louisville, and Montréal. In other words, this was not just a design for New York City but a movement that had green inexorably intertwined with not only urban fabric but national parks such as Arcadia and Yosemite Valley.

In Paris, the once President now Emperor Napoleon III began a program and put Haussmann in charge. This was not merely a chance fascination with Paris, although that was part of Napoleon III’s fascination, but a means to make monumental the capital of the Empire of France. Victor Considerant, a utopian French socialist and author of Democracy Manifesto before the Revolutions of 1848, pointed to the area of Paris when he said in 1845: “Paris is a terrible place where plants shrivel and perish, and where, of seven small infants, four die during the course of the year.” But the man which he hated would be the one to remake Paris, often by bulldozing down the tiny Rue because they got in the way of broad boulevards to key monuments such as Arc de Triomphe. And raze Haussmann did, but in its place, the wide boulevard version of Paris was established. This made it a point for trains: well after Napoleon III had been sent packing away there were train stations that would wed Paris to the rest of France. Along the Seine, the Musée d'Orsay was built as a train station but would only stand for less than 40 years when it was converted to a museum for 1845-1914 artworks in the 1980s.

What this means is that there was a movement to adorn cities for a number of reasons: one is simply practical in that, in Paris’ case under Emperor Napoleon III, making the streets wider made it harder to build ramparts to court police intervention. But the idea that a city should be a center of light permeated the notions of the era. This is antithetical to the nighttime visions of the Romantic but very much in line with the Neoclassical notions. But it also tells us about how the poor were treated, in thats tenement apartments, which had little to no light and were packed in with as many people as was possible. It was such a scandal that when flashlights could be mounted on cameras the book How the Other Half Lives was published in 1890 which showed the dilapidation of the ruined rooms. The author was Jacob Riis, and it is purpose was to show that while the upper class and the middle class had had the benefits there was an entire section of society that did not have these advantages. This to his heart of the Neoclassical argument, in that it believed in laissez-faire and thus raised up an entire anti-movement that preached greater equality. While Marxism is the best-known of these movements, there were also utopians socialism, anarchism, and many others. This means that the Neoclassical began by noting the divisions between the upper and the lower classes in society, that is what Sybil was ultimately about, but rather than ease this issue it doubled down and created a wide distinction between the upper and the lower class.

The problem is that be lower classes have a consciousness of assassinating or is during the upper classes. This is most obvious in Russia where the Tsar (Царь) Alexander II on 13 March 1881 was assassinated. To realize just how backward rational was, it was still using the old Julian calendar rather than the “new” Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar was then 12 days out of the solstices and equinoxes. Even the stars knew that it was time. The assassination was planned by Наро́дная во́ля (Narodnaya Volya) which can the translated as “People’s Will” or “Will of the People.”^xv This is what can be termed a terrorist movement in hurry. This meant that a parallel movement of the intelligentsia called the народники (“Narodniks”) committed several ideologies based on the idea that Capitalism and Socialism were the two dominant ideologies and Russia and that socialism and out because capitalism does not deal with agriculture effectively. This led to a split between the Critical and Doctrinaire, the critical difference is whether capitalism has any role in Russia or is doomed to failure from the outset.

A good example is from “Обоз” (lit “Convoy” or “Wagon train” but called “Porridge” in English) by Nikolai Uspensky (Никола́й Васи́льевич Успе́нский 1837-1889) in 1860:

The deacon flung down the abacus, and, plunging his hands into his pockets, began to pace the room. The peasant moved away to the corner, so as not to disturb him.

Presently the innkeeper came in.

“Landlord,” said the deacon, “what do I owe you for my man's dinner ?”

“He had everything on the bill of fare, didn't he? “

“Well ... I suppose he did.”

“Then it comes to a silver ruble.”

“Can't you make it a bit less.”

“No, no, little father, we never bargain ; we make all our little profit off the oats ; the dinners cost us what we get for them.”

The humor here is that the peasants do not make a profit only the oats for the horses. The deacon wants to the price of the human meal before the notice that there is no profit for the landowner and the deacon does not get a slice of the profits made from oats. Both horses and humans eat porridge and much of the conversation is about the deacon wanting to know how much his man ate, to get a discount, and the man holding back. The gag is the landowner does not care because the meal for men is not for profit but to get the men in and make money on the horses.

The meeting here is that the profit is parsed out and will not be bargained for even one of the capitalist classes: the deacon only has profit for the men and not the horses. We see this because there is an abacus to compute the money and therefore the profits. And we know that a silver ruble is not much on the scale things, but its profit is computed, nonetheless. Even for a man-of-God, because silver is of higher value than the word of God.

Then when looking backward to the beginning this is the first paragraph that God’s servants have a strict hierarchy, which is natural for neo-feudalism, but the landlord has no other direct superior but instead has money and suppliers in a web of capitalism. This means that Uspensky is showing the difference between feudalism and capitalism but that they both rely on different means to control the serfs with the end result being the same. This tells us why Uspensky means the story wagon train, which in Russian is a tight word indicating that it is commonly used while the English translation once to equate the porridge which bowl men and horses eat. By the time that the English translation is completed the original word does not make sense because the word has become obsolescent for the readers and it is the landlord is more important.

This means that in the Neoclassical Era there was a heightened sense of self-worth that had been building since the revolts in the 1300s and it was heightened by the wider scale of communication that the telegraph made possible and that the universities came to the cost of as independent from the monarch. This is why the Narodniks were from the universities and formed an alliance with the popular socialist revolt from Narodnaya Volya. The fact that the Narodnik were not nearly doctrinaire but filled with a sense of glee in how they skewered the aristocratic and capitalist classes in Russia.

On the 1^st of March, because it was still the “Old Style” the Julian calendar, a massive team from Narodnaya Volya was assembled to participate in the assassination. 10 members of The Will the People were gathered opening that the assassination would provoke a revolution. Since several attempts had been made in Odessa and other places, the scheme was to assassinate Alexander in the capital of St. Petersburg and have several ways to go about it. A large group of informers was tasked with knowing the various engagements that Alexander used to attend and finally picked one: on Sunday he usually attended the attending of colors at the Mikhailovsky Manege. It was discovered also the two routes that Alexander took.

That meant that the monarchy had two roads to take: give more freedom to the lower classes or suppress them with utter repression. This is because The Decembrist revolution which was sparked by Alexander II’s assassination failed and a new Tsar was placed on the throne. While the new monarch was Alexander III, his style was almost the opposite of Alexander II. They drew the lesson that Nicholas I had a stable time on the throne while his father was assassinated. Nicholas I was an autocratic, nationalist, and reactionary ruler who repeatedly dissolved local control if it suited his needs and therefore Alexander III imitated this model of control. While it is easy to demonstrate that in the long-term Alexander III’s autocratic patriarchy was setting a revolution in the short term it succeeded in crushing revolt. He was also known as Миротворец or Peacemaker because he did not need Russia and to war during his time on the throne.

But outside affairs entered this program (and pogrom) for example the Russian famine of 1891-2. It began here on the Volga River with the delay of the rains and a cold winter. The problem with repression is that almost everywhere the people were already close to starting and the weather pushed many areas to below subsistence. While there was enough grain to feed these areas the railroad was not capable of distributing the grain. This led to the commoners blaming Alexander. Remember in an autocratic regime everything must be blamed at the top level the cause there is no other authority to make independent decisions. When Alexander the III died two years later in 1894 even Tolstoy blamed the Tsar for the famine because of the mismanagement of almost every step.

i There is a fine example of Morse’s to promote the telegraph in Yakup Bektas. “Displaying the American Genius: The Electromagnetic Telegraph in the Wider World.” The British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 2 (2001): 199–232. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4028010.

ii Dames, Thomas A. 1965. “The Transatlantic Cable.” The Military Engineer 57, no. 380: 401–3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44574898. 401.

iii Science Museum Group. Chart of the Atlantic showing proposed course of the Atlantic Cable, 1856-1857. 1862-176. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co32895/chart-of-the-atlantic-showing-proposed-course-of-the-atlantic-cable-1856-1857-chart-graphic-document.

iv The original paper is: Thomson, William. “III. On the Theory of the Electric Telegraph.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 7 (January 1856): 382–99. doi:10.1098/rspl.1854.0093. Smithies, F. “Fourier Analysis, by T. W. Körner. £60. 1988. ISBN 0-521-25120-6 (Cambridge University Press).” The Mathematical Gazette 73, no. 463 (1989): 63–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/3618232 gives a mathematical look at the subject, including the key one needs to figure out the resistance by Ohm’s Law. The YouTube video is here:

v The addendum is that “William Thompson” goes on to be “Lord Kelvin” and he is remembered by the Kelvin scale which has degrees as centigrade but its zero point is the absolute zero where the entropy of a cooled gas has reached its minimum point. This means of course that the Enthalpy is also zero, that is the internal energy has reached zero.

vi Zakim, Michael. 1999. “A Ready-Made Business: The Birth of the Clothing Industry in America.” The Business History Review 73, no. 1: 61–90. 63.

vii I take the view that logic, aesthetics, craftsmanship, and material all combined to evidence a totalizing effect.

viii That is, the search in this book is not within the context of an existing form of study but is interested in a larger picture. For a different view see Shiff, Richard. “Art History and the Nineteenth Century: Realism and Resistance.” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 1 (1988): 25–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3051152. Which looks for resistance in the art world.

ix André Gill was the pseudonym of Louis-Alexandre Gosset de Guines and he studied at the Parisian Academy of Fine Arts.

x A fine work on art nouveau is Silverman Debora. 1989. Art Nouveau in Fin-De-Siècle France : Politics Psychology and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press. Not least because of the goals of the movement, particularly form over function and the loosening of historical modes.

xi Legler, John B., Richard Sylla, and John J. Wallis. 1988. “U.S. City Finances and the Growth of Government, 1850-1902.” The Journal of Economic History 48, no. 2: 347–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121176 called Growth. 347.

xii Growth. 348.

xiii Glaeser EL. 2005. Urban Colossus: Why is New York America's Largest City?. 11 chart 3.

xiv Share, Allen J. "Tweed, William M(agear) 'Boss'" in Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. (1995). The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300055366., 1205–1206.

xv The up-and-down pronunciation of Narodnaya Volya should remind one that “Volya” is also “Liberty.”

1. Addendum: Kim, Sukkoo. 2006. “Division of Labor and the Rise of Cities: Evidence from US Industrialization, 1850–1880.” Journal of Economic Geography 6, no. 4:469–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26160964.