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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

fasquardon said:
The process got started before the development of modern democracy and modern nationalism - both things that were pretty contingent when you look at the watershed moments that defined these ideas, it is easy to imagine how a world with no American Revolution or no French Revolution would have very different ideas of "democracy" and "nationalism", for example. And I have seen no evidence that there is any sort of virtuous circle between democracy and nationalism and industrialization.
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Nevertheless, one can start with the fact that the feudal order was a brake on progress - start with the fact that the nobles and clergy did not pay taxes. And nationalism is largely associated with the secularization of consciousness.
 
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Comrade Future said:
Nevertheless, one can start with the fact that the feudal order was a brake on progress - start with the fact that the nobles and clergy did not pay taxes. And nationalism is largely associated with the secularization of consciousness.
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And was what succeeded the feudal order in OTL the only practical way to reform or replace the prior system? Was nationalism the only way that consciousness could have secularized? Was secularization a necessary precursor for or inevitable outcome of industrialization?

I see no compelling reasons to believe that the answer to any of those questions was "yes".

Indeed, it might be that in a less secular Europe, where the wars of religion hadn't gutted Germany and undermined what had been (and would continue for some time to be) the main source of funding for blue-sky research, would have industrialized faster than the Europe of our timeline.

To be sure, I could make a case for why representative democracy and nationalism were likely outcomes of the industrial revolution, since both could be seen as responses to economic power shifting out of the hands of the landed aristocracy. But I at least can't make an argument so strong that I could say that industrialization plus representative democracy and nationalism are necessary or inevitable.

For example, one of the timelines I play around with and might post/publish one day involves an alternate industrial revolution in Iran and India. And though it involves tremendous social changes, the social changes that seem plausible to me in the context of the location and the timeline are very different from the social changes that happened in Western Europe.

fasquardon
 
fasquardon said:
To be sure, I could make a case for why representative democracy and nationalism were likely outcomes of the industrial revolution, since both could be seen as responses to economic power shifting out of the hands of the landed aristocracy. But I at least can't make an argument so strong that I could say that industrialization plus representative democracy and nationalism are necessary or inevitable.
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Nationalism - industrialization will inevitably lead to mass education (more precisely, it will require it) and the formation of identity with unification.
Parliamentarism - as practice shows, in developed societies the upper classes require delegation of powers and participation in government.
As for secularization, the Enlightenment is impossible without thinking "I do not need this hypothesis (the idea of God) to explain the world," although it does not eliminate religion as such. In addition, it is useful in terms of putting into circulation church assets, primarily land assets.

I note right away that they do not play an essential role for the industrial revolution, but during the period of development they will inevitably lead to this. I can refer you to Robert Allen's book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, which describes an example of a state where the development of parliamentism and nationalism is not associated with the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time they were the result of the development of industrial capitalism.
 
Yeah, I think that the main theme of the 19th century IOTL: Masses.

Mass movements (including the "national project"), mass politics (and hence, democracy and nation states instead of dynastically defined states), mass production (industrialization), mass armies (leading to army numbers in WW1 unthinkable in the Napoleonic Wars, whose numbers were already unthinkable in the mid-18th century), etc. In the 19th century, everything became geared towards the masses. That is why I think the development of democracy and nationalism, at least, are inseparable sides of the same coin - you can separate democracy and nationalism later on, of course, as sort of happened IOTL, but their rise comes from the same source: A focus away from the aristocracy, towards the masses of the population. Which, of course, is also tied to the huge conscript armies that formed in that time, just as the rise of Athenian democracy was tied to the masses of sailor the new thassalocracy needed: Who holds the power has always been at least weakly linked to who holds the weapons. Really, it's all about that new focus on the masses of the population.

So that whole complex is all one tangle of interconnected issues following more or less the same path of development. So, the question is, can we take industrialization out of that tangle? And I think that yes, you can, at least initially. As has been noted, various Chinese golden ages (most notably Song, but also already Tang before) did have mass production, did have a sort of industrialization, just not mechanization. And mechanization is "just" the development and adaptation of new technologies; the "mass" part is indeed already in "mass production". And yet the Tang and Song managed that without any notable shift of power to the urban masses, with especially Song being noted for the power of the Neo-Confucian scholar-gentry.

However, I don't think that is sustainable in the long run. If you have mass production, you will eventually get mass armies, mass movements and mass action. IOTL, "mass politics", i.e. nationalism and democracy, predated industrialization "in earnest". It is possible to instead have them postdate industrialization, which means that no, they are at least not a requirement, but they will probably eventually appear.
 
Comrade Future said:
As for secularization, the Enlightenment is impossible without thinking "I do not need this hypothesis (the idea of God) to explain the world," although it does not eliminate religion as such. In addition, it is useful in terms of putting into circulation church assets, primarily land assets.
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Possibly problematic underlying assumption:

You appear to assume that the Industrial Revolution is tied up in a specific set of ideas that you are calling "the Enlightenment." By this, do you mean to refer to scientific ideas, required for engineering and the design of new products? Or do you refer to philosophical concepts and social ideas?
 
Simon_Jester said:
You appear to assume that the Industrial Revolution is tied up in a specific set of ideas that you are calling "the Enlightenment." By this, do you mean to refer to scientific ideas, required for engineering and the design of new products? Or do you refer to philosophical concepts and social ideas?
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As a whole, it is true that the second is rather a consequence of the first, but for the political agenda of the bourgeoisie the ideas of constitutionalism, "natural law", "social contract" play an important role.
 
Comrade Future said:
As a whole, it is true that the second is rather a consequence of the first, but for the political agenda of the bourgeoisie the ideas of constitutionalism, "natural law", "social contract" play an important role.
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The point fundamentally under dispute here, though, seems to be whether the material transformation that we call the Industrial Revolution necessarily entails a socio-cultural transformation specifically resembling the one that occurred in Europe circa 1750-1875 or so.

The Marxist characterization of the bourgeoisie, a fundamentally mercantile class of capital-owners who had vested interests in society being configured in certain ways over and above just what was required to ensure their control of the capital itself, may well be tied up in the European history that provided Marx with the core of his model. It may or may not be true that "the political agenda of the bourgeoisie" or something like it would even exist in a radically different society undergoing industrialization.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The point fundamentally under dispute here, though, seems to be whether the material transformation that we call the Industrial Revolution necessarily entails a socio-cultural transformation specifically resembling the one that occurred in Europe circa 1750-1875 or so.

The Marxist characterization of the bourgeoisie, a fundamentally mercantile class of capital-owners who had vested interests in society being configured in certain ways over and above just what was required to ensure their control of the capital itself, may well be tied up in the European history that provided Marx with the core of his model. It may or may not be true that "the political agenda of the bourgeoisie" or something like it would even exist in a radically different society undergoing industrialization.
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The bourgeoisie is going to want a system that'd not dominated by the aristocracy and clergy, one way or another. It could take a lot of shapes. The advantage of a broadly democratic one is in being able to rally the masses to their revolution though.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Industrial Revolution necessarily entails a socio-cultural transformation specifically resembling the one that occurred in Europe circa 1750-1875 or so.
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Social being determines social consciousness - a real change in the material conditions of life inevitably entails changes in society and culture. And the bourgeoisie in any case is disadvantageous neither the nobles with the clergy who do not pay taxes and live at their expense, nor the monarch who decides everything for them.
 
Nyvis said:
The bourgeoisie is going to want a system that'd not dominated by the aristocracy and clergy, one way or another. It could take a lot of shapes. The advantage of a broadly democratic one is in being able to rally the masses to their revolution though.
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I'm questioning whether all hypothetical industrializing societies would even have a distinctive "bourgeoisie" that would mirror the developmental trajectory of 19th century Europe.

Comrade Future said:
Social being determines social consciousness - a real change in the material conditions of life inevitably entails changes in society and culture. And the bourgeoisie in any case is disadvantageous neither the nobles with the clergy who do not pay taxes and live at their expense, nor the monarch who decides everything for them.
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See, now you're really making a lot of casually Eurocentric assumptions about how societies work. Like, to the extent of modeling specific taxation systems in place in 18th century France or whatever.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I'm questioning whether all hypothetical industrializing societies would even have a distinctive "bourgeoisie" that would mirror the developmental trajectory of 19th century Europe.
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Now that's a more interesting line of thinking. It's easy to analyze existing class structures, compared to predicting future ones. One possibility I've theorized is that of an industrialization by the top, where a monarch and their bureaucracy tie themselves to the new technology while the aristocracy remains behind as OTL. Potentially something to explore for societies where there was already a large bureaucratic element to central government, like China? In that case, the bureaucratic class is probably going to have its own aspirations though, similarly to the bourgeoisie.
 
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