School Policy and the Basic Principles Underlying the Organization of Public Education in the Socialist, Capitalist, and Developing Countries

As a socioeconomic formation, the capitalist system has appeared at various times in history and under various conditions. In Europe, capitalism replaced the feudal system as a result of bourgeois revolution or the gradual supersession of feudal social relationships by bourgeois relationships. The spread of capitalism in the European countries covered a period of two centuries, starting with the bourgeois revolutions in the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century, progressing to the bourgeois revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century, and ending with the bourgeois revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century. The Scandinavian countries did not experience revolutions in the form of armed mass uprisings to eliminate feudalism. The bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Germany and the bourgeois democratic revolution of 1905 in Russia did not extinguish feudal relationships entirely; in these countries, capitalism developed side by side with numerous vestiges of the feudal system.