By the late nineteenth century, many Europeans no longer assumed that truth, morality, and knowledge rested on firm universal foundations. This growing uncertainty weakened older certainties and encouraged new, experimental ways of thinking and creating.

From Confidence to Uncertainty

Earlier in the nineteenth century, many Europeans still believed that reason, science, and inherited moral standards could steadily uncover truth and improve society. In the later nineteenth century, however, that confidence weakened. Thinkers, artists, and educated elites increasingly questioned whether human beings could ever reach fully certain or universally valid knowledge.

One major reason was the rise of relativism, the idea that values and truth claims may depend on time, place, culture, or perspective rather than on fixed universal standards.

Relativism did not always mean that nothing was true. More often, it meant that truth seemed less stable, less universal, and more dependent on the observer or the society making the judgment.

What Produced the Crisis of Certainty?

The spread of relativism contributed to a broader crisis of certainty.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) embodies the late-nineteenth-century “crisis of certainty” by turning inner psychological distress into the central subject of art. Rather than presenting a stable, objective external world, the distorted forms and vibrating color suggest perception itself is fragile and subjective. In AP Euro terms, it helps students connect new doubts about knowledge and morality to the cultural mood that modernism would later intensify. Source

Europeans began to doubt whether objective knowledge could fully explain the world or provide clear moral guidance.

Several developments fed this change:

• Rapid social change made older moral and social frameworks seem less secure.

• Urbanization and industrial life exposed people to new experiences, new classes, and competing values.

• Historical and comparative study showed that different societies had very different customs, beliefs, and standards.

• Criticism of traditional authority weakened confidence in institutions that had once provided fixed answers.

As a result, many educated Europeans asked difficult questions:

• Are moral values universal, or are they created by societies?

• Can observers ever be completely neutral?

• If knowledge is shaped by perspective, how “objective” can it really be?

• If older religious and rational certainties are questioned, what remains as a guide for life?

This was the heart of the crisis: people did not simply gain new facts; they became less sure that facts alone could produce final truth. The problem was especially serious because nineteenth-century Europeans had long associated progress with certainty, order, and rational explanation. When certainty weakened, faith in automatic progress weakened as well.

Doubts About Objective Knowledge

The phrase objective knowledge refers to knowledge that is believed to be true independent of personal feelings, cultural background, or point of view. In the later nineteenth century, many thinkers became less confident that such knowledge could be fully achieved in human affairs.

This doubt appeared in several ways:

• Morality seemed less absolute and more historically conditioned.

• Truth appeared tied to language, culture, and interpretation.

• Human perception seemed limited rather than transparent.

• Shared standards of judgment became harder to defend.

These changes did not necessarily destroy learning or scholarship. Instead, they changed the intellectual atmosphere. Scholars and artists became more cautious about sweeping claims to certainty. The idea that one system could explain everything became less persuasive.

This atmosphere encouraged a turn away from the belief that culture should simply reflect stable truth.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) demonstrates modernism’s rejection of inherited artistic rules in favor of experimentation and fractured viewpoints. The flattened space and angular, masklike faces disrupt Renaissance-style realism, signaling that representation is constructed rather than transparently “true.” As a study-note illustration, it concretizes how cultural forms changed when thinkers and artists doubted stable, universal standards. Source

It helped prepare the way for modernism.

How Relativism Contributed to Modernism

Modernism grew in part from the sense that old standards no longer worked. If values were relative and knowledge uncertain, then traditional artistic and intellectual forms seemed inadequate. Writers and artists began to search for new methods that could express ambiguity, instability, and the fragmented nature of modern experience.

Modernist tendencies often included:

• emphasis on subjective experience rather than shared external truth

• rejection of neat, orderly, or idealized representation

• interest in ambiguity, fragmentation, and multiple perspectives

• willingness to challenge accepted standards of beauty, meaning, and morality

In this way, relativism did not just create doubt; it also encouraged innovation. If reality could no longer be presented as simple, unified, and universally understood, then culture had to develop new forms to represent it. Modernism was therefore not just a style but also a response to intellectual instability.

The link between relativism and modernism is especially important. Relativism weakened belief in universal truths, while modernism expressed that weakening in new cultural forms. The two were connected by a shared rejection of older certainty.

Why This Matters in AP European History

This subtopic marks a major turning point in European intellectual life. The later nineteenth century was still an age of scientific achievement and material progress, but it was also an age of growing doubt. Europeans increasingly questioned whether science, reason, and inherited morality could provide complete answers about truth and meaning.

For AP European History, the key point is that the crisis of certainty helped transform European culture. It moved intellectual life away from unquestioned faith in objectivity and toward a modern world marked by uncertainty, subjectivity, and experimentation. That shift became one of the defining features of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.