ABSTRACT
The tension between a humanistic view of man and society and a more materialist vision of the world which had been felt in Europe’s learned elites from the fifteenth century onwards, heightened in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. People became detached from their traditional social and religious institutions, especially the rural community and its centre, the church, where the clergy still held a powerful grip on the population. Removal to the ever more anonymous environment of the big city meant an erosion of the ‘moral economy’ of traditional societies. Protestant communities, especially the many less hierarchically-organized ones, had problems binding their congregations to tradition, whether or not revamped and revitalized. In 1900, the American observer of things European, Henry Adams, found a friend willing and able to explain to him the implications of the new sciences.
