The power of a country resting in agriculture is always stronger than that based on factories, which will, if indecently proliferated, only produce a large number of beggars The Diseases of Central European Modernization in Austrian Pre-March (Vormärz) and Revolutionary Journalism as a Discursive Landscape
Abstract
This article is devoted to an early discussion of pauperism and the social question in the early stage of Central European industrialisation on the pages of periodicals of the Habsburg Monarchy with an emphasis on Czech journalism. The authors attempt to follow the development of the discussion from the beginning of the 1830s until the collapse of the revolution of 1848.
They pay attention to the semantic dynamics of the terms and discourse that were used in connection with mass poverty, as well as the foreign models that contributed to the specific expression of ideas of the causes of the social question and its solutions. The paper studies the development of mass poverty representation at the time from the general Romantic rejection of the modernisation process to proposals for solutions to the social question, which had already been formulated on the basis of affiliation to a political group.