Suchergebnisse

Shortlyafter the turn of the century a Social Democratic newspaper characterized middle-class liberals as forming at best the "tail" (Schwanz) of Social Democracy, at worst the "tail of the Prussian Conservatives." If the remark reflects the contempt which Marxists as well as radical rightists have manifested toward the middle parties, it also suggests the precariousness, the uncertain orientation of the middle posture. Flanked on one side by the still politically dominant landed aristocracy and the influential industrial magnates, on the other side by an inexorably growing industrial working class was a variety of social and occupational groupings weakly unified by a claim to some degree of status and a consciousness of beingbürgerlich. In the imperial period the meaning ofbürgerlichwas shifting from "nonaristocratic" to "nonlaborer" without having attained the intermediate connotation of "civic." Thebürgerlichsocial and occupational groupings found their political representation primarily in the liberal and Catholic parties, secondarily in allegedly nonpolitical institutions and an array of regional, peasant, and anti-Semitic parties, increasingly in economic pressure groups.

The transportation of the nineteenth century; the opening of fertile virgin soil, farmed by extensive methods, in North America, Argentina, and Russia; the expansion of animal husbandry in the Americas and Australia; the development of refrigeration and canning; a chronic worldwide shortage of currency; and such natural catastrophes as the destruction of French vineyards by phylloxera, epidemics of hoof-and-mouth disease, and years of drought followed by years of excessive rain, produced a severe crisis for European farmers in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. European farmers found themselves in a squeeze between the cheap prices of their overseas competitors and their own high production costs, which were caused by intensive or antiquated methods. Two alternative policies confronted European of the high-cost areas.