Part of the anxiety stemmed from a global recession/depression that started with the Panic of 1873. Sperber notes that prior stock market crashes, while not unknown, did not leave prolonged recessions in their wake (p. 121-2). Conservative protectionism became more popular, as in Bismarckian Germany where the state enacted new tariffs to protect German industrial and agrarian reforms. Although industrialization and urban growth continued apace in this period, this did not create a generalized increase in prosperity. This led to a political parting of the ways of bourgeois liberalism and the working classes away from their brief and fractious moment of consensus during 1848. Thus European liberalism tended to shy away from democracy as it began to be apprehensive about the emerging mass society and the working class movement gravitated towards trade unionism and socialist agitation.

An important part of the equation, and vital to Sperber's conceptualization of "uncertainty," was that no single side was able to exert something close to hegemony in this period of European history. Conservative East Elbian Junkers might have held the reigns of government in Germany, but they were ruling over a German society that increasingly was urban and industrial. Bourgeois liberals had command of the emerging public sphere, culture, and education in many European countries, but found themselves locked out of power in states like Germany or Russia. The working classes were increasingly organized, but Marx's promise of a revolution seemed quite distant, especially as one of Marx's core predictions, that proletarian class consciousness would transcend national boundaries and identities, did not come to pass. Although Marxist parties had banded together in the Second International, there were growing splits within the working class movements and some were expending energy against other socialist parties.