Late 20th-century modernist architecture's failure to give form to a humane socio-industrial revolution collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s into a veneration of inherently capitalist design geniuses.
If the Industrial Revolution seemed to supply all the problems frustrating the existence of a stable and humane society, the political-democratic revolution could be seen as containing many of the answers to these problems.
If the answer is no — if there were other, more humane and democratic paths for the revolution to take — then the whole question requires more thought.
Lukács's neo-Marxist literary criticism can be tendentious, but his neo-Hegelian insights, strikingly expressed, have appealed to those eager to salvage the more humane aspects of Marxism and to promote revolution, even against a modified capitalism and social democracy, by intellectual rather than political means.
The final mystery is eloquently put by Clark in the catalogue's introduction: how is it that the industrial revolution and its "appalling, resilient, humane, inhuman" social order have produced so little visual art – given that it had an earlier and larger effect on Britain than any other country – leaving the field to Lowry and his "deliberately limited and repetitive body of work".
She argues that to be sympathetic to the French revolution (i.e., the people) is humane while to sympathize with the French clergy, as Burke does, is a mark of inhumanity.
But Romania's revolution was more blood than velvet, and the humane, melancholy tone of "Kawasaki's Rose" is in keeping with the Czech experience of totalitarianism and its aftermath.
He returned from the Civil War believing "in a more humane socialism, in a more radical democracy, and in a revolution of some sort as necessary to give the ordinary people the chance to beat Fascism".
The reality is also that west European farming is overwhelmingly dominated by large-scale, industrialized farming, heavily subsidized by the European Union, and any attempt to revert to smaller, more humane and organic forms of agriculture would amount to an expensive revolution that most farmers would resist.
The wars, and betrayal by others, required Robespierre to defend that revolution with a device proposed along with his friend Joseph-Ignace Guillotin as a humane alternative to the breaking wheel, after the pair had unsuccessfully attempted to abolish the death penalty.
