Ideas of Ideology

What were the major political ideologies of the 19th century and how did they influenced social and political action was the essential question of the day. Ideologies is a system of ideas and ideals that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. To answer the essential question we had to first know what the major ideologies of the 19th century were which are liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism. In groups we then discussed what these terms mean in the modern day so we could later on compare them to what they meant in the 19th century. Groups were then formed to focus on a specific ideology and make a one minute project on the topic. My groups’ ideology was liberalism. Each group had a source to read containing clues about their ideology and used that source to come up with the definition of the ideology during the 19th century. We had freedom on how we did our project, as long as it was one minute and described the ideology then we could do whatever we wanted.

A screen shot of my video project with John Locke speaking.

 
For my groups presentation we decided to use the Chatter pixs app. This app that lets you upload a picture, draw in a mouth, speak into it, and it makes it look like the picture is talking. In our video we had a picture of John Locke, who was a founding father of liberalism, explain what liberalism was in the 19th century using the information we read in our source. Liberalism back in the 19th century was the belief that the middle class should have a say in what the king does; that the people have god given natural rights and that the government should respect all rights, excluding women and the poor. This idea influenced philosophers of that time who started to write about liberalism. The middle class really liked this idea and it later lead to a revolt.

The other ideologies were conservatism and nationalism. Conservatives wanted to reserve traditional and political structures against revolution because revolutions always resulted in chaos. Conservatism also had set social classes and a monarchy. Nationalists wanted unification of all common German principalities with common culture, language and history. This way each nation could be more connected. The belief of nationalism motivated people to be the best nation they can be and fight out foreign rulers. Each of the three ideologies were very different and each group thought they had the best idea but the over all goal of each was to do what's best for the people.