ABSTRACT
The sociological writing of the nineteenth century is as rich in landscapes as any other sphere of the creative imagination. The social and cultural landscape is as much the province of the sociologist—or novelist or poet—as the physical setting is of the painter. No rendering of the social landscape created by the revolutions is commoner in the nineteenth century than that represented by the word masses. The idea of the masses, in the artist's and sociologist's sense here used, probably begins with Edmund Burke's strictures on the French Revolution. It was the memory of the French Revolution, and, emerging from the Revolution, of Napoleon Bonaparte that more than anything else generated both worship and fear of power in the nineteenth century. So far as landscape is concerned, the city came into its own in the West in the nineteenth century.
