Sticking Your Tongue Out at the Crystal Palace – What Can Dostoyevsky Tell Us about the Rise of Political Populism?

28 July 2018 (Wall Street International)*– Across the world, the major political events of recent years have left many people confounded and apprehensive. The rise of strong-man leaders and nationalism have surprised and shocked many who believed that increased democratization and global co-operation were inevitable.

In a recent discussion, the popular historian Yuval Noah Harari opined: For the past few decades we had a very simple and very attractive story about what’s happening in the world. And the story said that economics is being globalized and politics is being liberalized and the combination of the two will create paradise on earth… And 2016 is the moment when a very large segment of the Western world stopped believing in this story. [1]

In particular, the recent past has presented a profound challenge to what the political theorist Francis Fukuyama termed “the end of history”: the belief that liberal democracy represented the natural endpoint of human political development.

While such debates may seem unique to our era, in fact another version of this discussion took place in the middle of the nineteenth century in response to the construction of Crystal Palace in London.

The Crystal Palace was constructed in London to house the first major world fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition and provided an emblem of the supposed international peace and prosperity inaugurated by the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution. At the time, it was the largest glass structure then created.

The exhibition itself featured fifteen thousand contributors displaying over one-hundred thousand objects across an area of more than ten miles. Among the exhibits was the “mountain of light”—the world’s largest diamond from India—as well as a sixteen-foot telescope and a prototype of the modern fax machine.

This pageant of human ingenuity was so popular that admissions numbered over six million. While the Palace was intended as a temporary structure, a version of it remained standing for many years, before being destroyed by fire in 1936. [2]

Among the Crystal Palace’s astounded visitors was its greatest critic, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In his later account of his travels in London and other European capitals, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoyevsky described his experience of visiting the gleaming structure.