Soziale Strukturen: Von der feudal-agrarischen zur bürgerlich-industriellen Gesellschaft

This volume is a companion to volume IX/2, already published half a year ago, offering a cartographic-statistical basis for the narrative treatment of various social spheres. In the first part of this volume structural changes affecting the industrial society in the period 1850 to 1914 are dealt with, i.e. the prerequisites of the “Industrial Revolution” (“The Turn for an Industrial Society and a Society of Learning”). It was not within the historic lands and provinces or national and confessional cultural communities that these epochal changes took place but within socio-economically determined living spaces, professional life and zones of production (“Living Space and Working Process”). The second part is devoted to a description of the ambivalent way “From a Society of Estates to a Society of Class”. “Intermediate Europe” formed a zone of change “from estate to class” even as late as in the 19th century. In the multifariously structured society of the Habsburg Monarchy the “social question” showed many facets and provoked many answers. In this period of change from a society of elites to a mass society all estates and classes were affected by this question of survival. Helplessness and resignation in view of the challenge posed by the “social question” led away from discussions over possibilities of strategies concerning adjustment and accomplishment towards willingness to solve the seemingly unsolvable by means of force (“Social Change as a socio-political Challenge”). All in all the book deals with an overall theme that was of paramount importance for the modernization of Central Europe, yet in addition to that practical and mental influences stemming from these developments make themselves felt in Europe right up to now. The difficulties, described in this volume, of a common social and economic area formed by the multinational Habsburg Empire are relevant until the present day.