ABSTRACT

The comparison of bourgeois ideal and capitalist reality, reveals one of the greatest tragedies which have ever overtaken the human race, a tragedy so great as to remind us of the one which is said to have fallen on mankind in the beginning of things. On the 1st of November, 1755, a terrible disaster befell the ancient city of Lisbon In fact, the news of the disaster gave rise to an almost universal intellectual crisis, and it was amid this crisis that the fundamental concept of bourgeois society was, perhaps for the first time, clearly conceived and publicly proclaimed. In the Thirty Years' War, whose ravages were already forgotten and its wounds long healed, the Middle Ages had died, and men were now witnessing the awakening of a new world. Religious persecution, too, had been ousted by universal toleration, and there was such a feeling of brotherhood and progress as has never been experienced before or since.