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Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was born into the Danish Golden Age, the remarkable cultural flourishing that occurred in Denmark in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between about 1780 and 1850 Denmank's economy changed from feudal agrarian to predominantly mercantile and capitalist, with radical social consequences (Kirmmse 1990: 9-26). The population became largely urban; education transformed peasants into potential participants in democracy; newspapers and feuilleton literature burgeoned; artistic and scientific experimentation abounded; the fixed class structure of feudalism softened to enable greater social mobility; and the authority of religion was weakened under assaults from philosophical reason, bourgeois complacency, mass communication and new forms of aesthetic diversion (Pattison 2002: chs 1-4). |
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