ABSTRACT
The aristocratic liberals used many levels of explanation in analyzing the French Revolution and the Enlightenment: social struggles, battles of ideas, long- and short-term transformations of political life and of society all played large roles in their account. In essence, they described two sorts of change in Europe, social and ideological, whose chameleon-like synthesis was the world of politics. The aristocratic liberals saw contemporary nineteenth-century Europe as a mesh of dominant ideas, social forces, and political structures. The dominating class in nineteenth-century Europe was the middle class, the dominating set of ideas the commercial spirit. Together, they ruled nineteenth-century culture, in the eyes of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis De Tocqueville. Tocqueville summed up the middle class and the commercial spirit as "moderate in all things, except in the taste for material well-being, and mediocre". For aristocratic liberalism, mediocrity was characteristic of the middle class, of democratic society, and thus of the nineteenth century.
