There was some arbitrariness to how an issue became widely recognized as a formal "Question" with a capital letter, but the following were among the most important: the Social Question and the Woman Question.

Most of these questions had obvious roots in the past, but there was now a significant novelty to them: People in Europe had begun to believe that there were reasonable, proximate, and definitive solutions to these questions, whereas in the past the tendency had been to regard poverty as an issue. The growing belief in the possibility of solutions was associated with a rising respect for the power of reason and the scientific method. Society could be incomparably more productive, more just, and more free than it had ever been because of a growing confidence in Europe's superiority to the rest of the world.

There were substantial and lasting objections to this expanding belief in progress and human perfection. The horrors of the French Revolution were not far away, and industrialization was still viewed negatively by many. The legend of Faust, a tragic figure who, in a bargain with the Devil, gave up his soul for god-like knowledge and eternal youth, fascinated Europe's educated population in the 19th century. Prometheus, who had revealed the secret of fire to mortals and was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock, was one of the ancient tales that found renewed interest.

The isms were assumed to be a result of an intricate process of ideological debate, and are best approached not as isolated or entirely coherent entities, but as initially diffuse and inchoate, taking form in dynamic interplay with one another over time. The ideologists of the left were challenged by those of the right, who distrusted reason and harbored no hopes for ultimate human perfection. Competing ideologists borrowed elements from one another and used them in different ways. Few on the right actually announced that they were against liberty or justice, but what they meant in using such terms was different from what those on the left understood. The meanings of various isms have changed remarkably by the twenty-first century, making it all the more difficult to understand what they were meant to mean.

There is a broadly felt need for new words. In the case of the isms, it seems obvious that while powerful new forces and disruptive developments were everywhere in evidence, their ultimate meaning for the future was uncertain. The need to coin words for these developments was done as part of an effort to come to grips with them. It also meant demystifying them.

The critical work of twentieth-century scholars has helped to undermine assumptions about the appeal of these ideologies. Marx and many other nineteenth-century philosophers considered axiomatic are no longer seen as correlations of social class and ideology. In the 19th century, it was obvious that the poor would be attracted to ideologies that promised them a better life. Entrepreneurs would have been attracted to an ideology that promised to liberate them from governmental restrictions.

Complicated factors, such as the difficulty of defining, or even understanding, what a given person's self-interest actually is, have been found to be an important factor in ideological preferences. The earlier assumption that most individuals would be able to arrive at informed decisions about their true interests must be considered seriously flawed because people define their interests in subtle, unpredictable, and even self-destructive ways.

Class identity is an imperfect guide to why ideologies were embraced in the 19th century because of the additional difficulty of defining social class. The powerful supra-class appeals of the revolutionary mystique, as discussed in Chapter 1, were felt by people from all classes, as well as the emotionally unstable and those who were hungry for power. Rational calculations of self-interest or the interests of one's class were often worked against by religious beliefs.

We need to be alert to the dangers of oversimplification, related to the mysteries of the human psyche, because we can certainly make useful generalizations about the ideological identities that Europeans were assuming.

By the early twenty-first century, most of the isms that existed in the early 19th century have evolved to the point that they still have their original meanings. Conservatism, liberalism, and socialism are the three most significant histories. Conservatives rule by conservatives in the first half of the century.

Liberalism reached its zenith in the two to three decades following 1848 as conservatives were challenged with growing boldness. socialism remained a fringe ideology until the last decades of the 19th century, despite the fact that there were highly diverse strands of socialist theory.

In the 19th century, the three ideologies were constantly modified and the lines that divided them were not always clear. The overview gives an impression of greater clarity and coherence than was obvious to contemporary observers. Each of the three had their own visions of the Highest Good and the Enemy of the day.

The most characteristic ideology of the 19th century is liberalism. Human beings are best off when they are free, according to the liberals. The liberals' Highest Good was freedom for the individual. The face of the Enemy could be seen in those who tried to suppress freedom.

Conservatives harbored large reservations about the effects of individual liberty; they believed that human beings, especially the lower orders, are best off when guided and sheltered by religion, authority, and tradition; without such guidance, liberty was positively dangerous and "free" people inevitably stumbled. The conservatives' highest good had to do with order. They believed that free individuals were fatally inclined to sin and that traditional political authority was divinely sanctioned. Those who harbored naive, dangerous hopes about what freedom could accomplish were the enemy for conservatives.

Both liberals and conservatives were attacked by the socialists. Most socialists believed that human beings are best off when they are bound together in a harmonious union, which is only possible in the context of social and economic equality. Their Highest Good was harmony and cooperation, and they defined the Enemy as those who violated or disrupted fraternal feelings, either by using freedom or abusing authority, as they believed the liberals did.

Conservatism might be the most fundamental of the three, the ideology with the strongest claims to a long and distinguished lineage. Most human societies up to modern times have been conservative. The European rural lower orders revered tradition more than the nobility, royalty, and Church authorities did.

Conservatives in power, such as Metternich, believed that social stability required the application of physical force by ruling authorities. Joseph de Maistre believed that fear of the hangman was the foundation of a properly functioning society.

The more extreme conservatives, such as the Ultras in Restoration France, were often termed "reactionaries," another new word, first used to describe those reacting against the violent excesses of the Terror in 1794. The Ultras in France wanted to overturn the reforms of the Revolution. A return to an idealized past was what many in their ranks wanted. Metternich's liberal opponents used to call him a reactionary, but since he accepted that at least some of the recent past had to be preserved, he was simply conservative.

Conservatism's most influential theoretical expression was dated to a quarter-century before the term gained currency. His writings attracted special attention because of the penetrating way he described a rationalism gone wild in France - the belief by revolutionaries that they could simply abolish, within the span of a year, institutions laboriously built up over hundreds and thousands of years. Their ideas were often catastrophically so. Burke's defense of the social utility of privilege and tradition was characterized by an unusual sophistication that continued to impress generation after generation of conservatives.

Even if they heaped praise on him. Burke was sympathetic to the revolutionaries in Britain's American colonies and his record up to 1790 might have been considered liberal, at least in the respect he showed for the traditional liberties of the upper orders in opposition to royal power. His description of state and society as similar to a complex living organisms was not original, but he made the case with unusual delicacy. He identified the enemy of conservatives as the terrible simplifiers who were away from their natural leaders.

He said that corruption, inefficiency, and cruelty, not wisdom and social responsibility, were the main products of tradition and privilege. The clarity and effectiveness of his prose, linked to his preexisting fame by the early 1790s, was the main reason for his importance. He was one of the most effective defenders of the American Revolution, along with Burke.