The sixty years between 1789, when Louis XVI still reigned, and 1848, when Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, were for Europe a period of dual revolution, which caused the greatest social transformation the world had seen since ancient times.

This book analyzes and interprets the remarkable changes caused by the French Political Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution: the "old regimes" collapse in the face of the power of the new capitalist countries. New paths open up in science, philosophy, religion, and art. New methods are applied in war and diplomacy, industry, trade, and governance of states. New words are created to express new ideas. However, the history of the dual revolution is not simply the history of the triumph of the new bourgeois society; it is also the history of the emergence of forces that, within a century from 1848, were destined to transform expansion into contraction.