aoe 10-13

In this week’s reading, Hobsbawm discusses decades leading up to WWI and the expansion of science and reason. First he talks about how the theories of science were hard to understand for most people because it completely changed the intellectual view of the world. Previously, science was thought about as a continual learning process that one day, complete knowledge would be attained, however, with this new science, knowledge was changing, evolving, and even being questioned. With this new intellectual ideology, emotion no longer played a role, and people were becoming more educated. I thought it was really interesting when Hobsbawm talks about this time period and the working class attitudes toward self-improvement and self-education. It seemed that all of a sudden during this time period, people were so eager to learn new theories and try to make sense of the world. In addition, with the rise of education, different fields of study also motivated to expand knowledge. For example, sociology wanted to understand the workings of society without just the aspects of politics and economics. Finally, Hobsbawm explains that with all this change of knowledge and thought, this naturally led toward a revolution.