Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Riehl’s understanding of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, like Hegel’s, fits well with the perspective I am trying to develop here, which regards involvement in distant connections and the kinds of abstract and mediated relationships they foster as characteristic of all three main species of bourgeois: merchants and traders, administrators and officials, and professionals and intellectuals. It was just this orientation that made all of them appear to the traditional townspeople Mack Walker studied as “movers and doers.” But the particular role of each group was different in different countries, and Riehl was also correct to see state action as more wholeheartedly devoted to principles that undermined the traditional place of local and particularistic forms of existence in Germany than were Bürger as a general category. Merchants and traders were drawn into distant relationships to be sure, but many of them remained more attached to the traditional forms of communal life than were state officials or the intellectual supporters of Aufklärung Wieland described as the sole “men of the nation.” Like Hegel, but in a different way, Riehl’s analysis of bürgerliche Gesellschaft could not fail to highlight the features of it that made it different from bourgeois existence elsewhere.

  The limits within which the participation of merchants and traders in distant networks drew them away from traditional middle-class values and attitudes are also a feature of a third revealing portrait of bourgeois existence, Gustav Freytag’s novel Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben), published first in 1855, four years after Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Freytag’s fictional account of the life of a young merchant does not make easy reading today, partly because it is both militaristic and anti-Semitic (one of its characters, Veitel Itzig, became a stock figure of anti-Jewish polemic and satire); it depicts the relations between bourgeois and aristocratic characters in ways intended to show the first as both morally and intellectually superior to the second, despite the persisting power of the latter to surround themselves with an alluring but deceptive aura of quality. But Freytag’s several invocations of the way bourgeois endeavors created distant connections able to awaken and sustain human powers that lie dormant or shrivel in their absence deserve to be highlighted.

  The life course of Anton Wohlfahrt, the novel’s hero, took its rise from a good turn his father, a village accountant, once did for a merchant house in his province’s capital. In response, the firm sent him a gift of sugar and coffee each year, leading him to take an interest in the prices of these commodities, keeping track of them in a local newspaper. “A strange, invisible, filmy thread it was, this which connected Wohlfart’s quiet household with the activity of the great mercantile world, and yet it was by this that little Anton’s whole life was swayed.” The connection stimulated the boy’s imagination, making him see his own future by way of a “kaleidoscope picture” that mixed up images of exotic wares with his father’s pleasure in the gift, and “the mysterious daylight which the arrival of the box always occasioned him.” Later on, after Anton has begun to work for the same firm, he makes the nature of this illumination more explicit:

  I know nothing so interesting as business. We live amid a many-colored web of countless threads, stretching across land and sea, and connecting man with man. When I place a sack of coffee in the scales, I am weaving an invisible link between the colonist’s daughter in Brazil, who has plucked the beans, and the young mechanic who drinks it for his breakfast; and if I take up a stick of cinnamon, I seem to see, on the one side, the Malay who has rolled it up, and, on the other, the old woman of our suburb who grates it over her pudding.

  To be sure the image is much idealized, and we should not pass over the unlikely claim that the coffee beans had been gathered by “the colonist’s daughter” without calling to mind the actual realities of coffee-growing in a slave society. All the same, the connections Freytag idealizes had some of the power he attributes to them, as did the effects of their dissolution in moments of commercial crisis, the one in question brought on by the Polish wars of the 1830s. The breakdown of civic order at that moment meant that products could not be safely transported and that the sums invested in them would be lost. As people drew back out of anxiety, “Hundreds of ties, woven out of mutual interest, and having endured for years, were snapped at once. Each individual existence became more insecure, isolated, and poor … the country was out of health.”57 Freytag makes clear that the market ties that give way in such moments are material, even self-interested ones, but he sees them all the same as operating on other levels too, establishing contacts that involve more than profit and loss. We cannot pause here to attend to the novel’s romantic themes, but they too make clear that the world of debit and credit is also a world of human feelings, some ugly and destructive, but others (among some of the Jewish characters too) capable of fostering commitment and devotion.

  In Freytag’s story, these ties have the character of a particular time, the one before German life began to be altered by the revolution in transport that made the world of his readers in 1855 already different from Anton Wohlfahrt’s. “The business was one of a kind becoming rare nowadays, when railroads and telegraphs unite remotest districts, and every merchant sends from the heart of the country to bid his agents purchase goods almost before they reach the shore.” In those older and slower-moving times, business had both a certain dignity, since undermined by modern pressures, and a higher element of risk, because “the sea was far off, facilities of communication were rare, so that the merchants’ speculations were necessarily more independent, and involved greater hazard.” Factories have no significant presence in this world, the only one that appears in the novel being a failed attempt to manufacture bricks by a noble fated to lose his estate to the machinations of Jewish speculators, but whose family Anton saves by careful management of the much poorer lands where they are constrained to live, in Poland.

  Freytag’s account of bürgerliche Gesellschaft shared much with his contemporary Riehl’s: the bourgeois penchant for establishing distant and generalizing connections was a source of strength and change for both, cut across by a commitment to social and moral stability, and a determination to distinguish between the genuine spirit of bourgeois enterprise, always connected to real objects of use, and the dangerous abstraction from it constituted by pure speculation. Freytag gave the state no place in his story, nor did he seek to account for the changes that separated Anton Wohlfart’s world from the one coming into being after 1850. Whether or not he recognized state action as an important contributor to the changes he described, there is no doubt that it played a part, as we shall see when we come to German industrialization later on. Well into the twentieth century, the special function of the state as an engine of modernization, and the ability of state power sharply to alter social relations, would be a defining characteristic of German history. In the period considered here, it was the opportunities a still fragmented and undeveloped country offered interventionist states to take bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of action, and the linked encouragement to make it an object of contemplation fostered in members of a developing stratum of Bildungsbürger by their close but often uncomfortable ties to those same states, that made Germany the site where bourgeois society as a form of life received its most elaborate and in some ways most insightful theorizations, albeit ones that could not escape being abstract and one-sided.

  5 Modern industry, class, and party politics in nineteenth-century England

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century the three countries on which we are focusing, England, France, and Germany, all possessed more tightly integrated national spaces, linking together regions and their components – towns, cities, countrysides, people, resources – through networks structured in remarkably similar ways. Everywhere railroads and telegraphs were creating conditions for the rapid spread of modern industry, and a new species of nationally organized parties gave a changed character to politics. Sharing common institutions and frames of action (in culture too, as will be seen later on), all three places seemed
in many ways to be traversing a shared path to modernity. Yet the diverse earlier patterns of development generated by the differing configuration of networks we have sought to describe still made themselves felt, giving a distinct quality to life in each place, and in particular to the relations between bourgeois or middle-class people and those with other social identities. In this and the next two chapters we consider the particular path each country followed as it achieved this tighter mode of integration, the distinct kinds of industrial modernity and party politics each evolved, and the forms and limits of bourgeois power that ensued.

  Industrial growth and the limits of precocious integration

  The two-sided story in which England appears at once as the pioneer industrial nation and the model for others from late in the eighteenth century, and as following a rhythm more like that of France and Germany than has often been recognized, achieving a modern industrial economy only from around 1870, is well exemplified in the crucial topic of railroad building. Railroads were a key element of modern industry because of their importance first as a means for improving the speed and reducing the cost of transport for both people and goods, and second as a powerful stimulus to metal production and manufacturing more generally. Britain embarked on building railroads markedly earlier than any other country, and by 1850 the United Kingdom had almost 10,000 kilometers of track, nearly twice the German number and three times that of France at the same date – especially remarkable given her smaller size. Beginning from their lower bases, the latter two countries chalked up striking gains in the next two decades, Germany multiplying its mileage by a factor of around four and France by five. But Britain’s growth in the same period continued at an impressive pace too, giving her nearly two and a half times the 1850 figure by the early 1870s, so that only at that point can the rail network be described as providing a unified web of connection for the country as a whole.1

  The numbers in themselves are significant, but still more was the impact this completion now had on the British economy. To be sure the difference it made was less sharp than on the continent, since there (as will be seen in detail later) the railroads brought sudden and radical change, linking distant producers and consumers together for the first time and giving an economic viability to significant investment in machine production that England already exhibited a century before. But the island nation’s market was transformed too. Before 1870 goods circulated easily between regions, but transport costs still gave local conditions power to determine what it made economic sense to produce in particular places; not only were regional specializations not undermined by the kind of integration Britain exhibited until around 1870, they were amplified and expanded. As Lynn Lees notes, “the pattern of industrial expansion that dominated Britain during the industrial era was a regional one,” concentrating “all the stages of production of a commodity within one area, [and] mixing management, production and exporting.” In textiles, as Richard Price points out, the kinds of cloth produced in parts of the country depended on each region’s earlier history: manufacturers in Yorkshire specialized in cheaper worsteds, while weavers in the southwest continued to devote themselves to higher-quality woolens. In general, before the mid century “it is not possible to speak of a nationally integrated economy whose imperatives dictated regional development.” This changed in the next decades: from the 1870s “the industrial revolution arrived in the East Midlands in the wagons of the railways,” whose ability to reduce the price of both raw materials and finished goods “transformed the potential of the region beyond the local market.” The same conditions encouraged the development of industry on a larger scale: it was at this point that “the workshop basis of the manufacturing sector gave way to larger industrial structures as heavy industry made its appearance.” William Langer provides evidence of similar transformations: between 1850 and 1880 there occurred a marked expansion in the average number of spindles in British cotton factories (although the pace, like that of railroad building, was less rapid than in France or Germany), and the larger capital requirements led to an expansion in corporate as opposed to family organization of firms.2 Further technical advances such as the “second industrial revolution” techniques in chemistry, metallurgy, and electricity, now combined to carry Britain, like the major continental countries, into the era of “large-scale industry, integrated production, scientific management, reconfigured social relations, and the fusion of science and technology.” We should not neglect the role played in creating the foundation for these results by the steady growth of railroad construction, iron production, textile mechanization, and steam engine capacity throughout the century, but Price seems justified in insisting that in Britain no less than across the Channel the era in which the railroad network approached its completion ushered in a new and more markedly modern phase in industrial history.3

  The history of steam power and its effect on what the term “factory” called up in people’s minds provides one revealing index of this change. The first steam engines in factories made a strong impression on observers from late in the eighteenth century, but only in the 1870s did steam replace water as the most common source of manufacturing power, and only with the widespread turn to the steam turbine from the 1880s (it was invented in 1884) did mechanized power come fully to dominate industrial production, allowing the term “factory” to take on its modern connotation as a locale of machine production rather than an assemblage of workers using various techniques. Because the turbine directly produces rotary motion it is far more efficient than the piston-driven Newcomen-Watt engine, and especially well suited to generating electricity; as with other new technologies, however, investing in it became economically viable only because market conditions made it so. The general validity of this point has been emphasized by Samuel Lilley in connection with his demonstration that steam power did not replace wind and sails in ocean shipping until well after the change had become technically possible, because the cost of taking away cargo space for engines and of setting up fueling stations only became worth paying when the volume and distance of trade reached a certain level. Many-masted sailing ships dominated international sea routes all the way to the 1880s because only then did the volume of international trade (aided by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869) give enough value to greater speed and regularity to overcome the price that had to be paid for them. Here, as in other instances, Lilley concludes, “it was the general movement of the economy and not the technical innovations as such, that dictated the pace of change.”4

  The same understanding provides us with a necessary perspective from which to grasp an otherwise puzzling feature of economic history, namely that the moment when modern industry spread through Europe as a whole was also the one when Britain, the pioneer innovator, could no longer keep up with the rivals she had outdistanced earlier. Various explanations have been offered for this reversal, including the one I noted earlier, that the persistence of aristocratic values and preferences gave English businessmen a “gentlemanly” orientation (fostered for instance in the public schools where offspring of middle-class and aristocratic families intermingled) that discouraged cut-throat competition and encouraged retirement from business in favor of more refined pursuits.5 Such an account is hard to credit given that aristocratic values survived everywhere at the end of the nineteenth century and that of all European aristocracies, the English was the one with the deepest history of involvement in commerce, so much so that the contrast between French elite disdain for practical knowledge and upper-class British interest in it has been suggested as a reason for the slow pace of French industrial change. A much more cogent explanation is simply that the conditions that made the international spread of modern industry possible turned the advantages England had enjoyed earlier into limitations. The economic regime that put her markedly ahead of other countries before 1850 rested on the geographical conditions – smaller size, navigable rivers – that allowed for a precocious integration and therefore a more consolidated national
market on the basis of a pre-industrial technology of roads, canals, and costal shipping, invigorated by the special role London played in national life. France and Germany could not achieve such integration before modern means of transport brought their more distant and varied regions into closer effective connection, but once they did they were able to draw on bigger populations and greater endowments of resources than Britain possessed. Their larger, and in Germany’s case much faster-growing, populations gave them bigger internal markets, expanded supplies of labor, and greater potential tax revenues; in addition, they possessed more highly developed educational institutions, originally instituted to support pre-industrial programs of military and administrative expansion, but able to aid economic advance as science and technology assumed greater importance in it (I will return to this question in the German context in Chapter 7).6 Once these resources could be effectively mobilized, Britain’s relative position was bound to reveal limitations hidden before.

  In a certain way the higher level of national integration England achieved in the last decades of the nineteenth century was part of what worked against her. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the relations between London and the rest of the country that had been so important in its early economic advance continued to be favorable to it. More than any other country England as a whole could profit from the economic development of certain regions – notably the burgeoning cities of the north – because of the way they were tied into the national economy as a whole. Could any similar development have somehow taken place in Toulouse, say, or Frankfurt, it would not have had the same kind of impact on France or Germany that Manchester and Birmingham had in England, if only because regional connections were simply too weak (in the German case Hamburg developed important industries based on refinishing imported goods well before 1850, but with little direct impact on other German areas).