Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  These dilemmas help to account for the attraction German liberals exhibited for strategies that seemed highly practical but worked out badly for them. One was participation in the Kulturkampf, the high-blown name given to Bismarck’s attempt in the early 1870s to reduce the power of the Catholic Church. Bismarck’s reasons for mounting the campaign were very different from the liberal motives for cooperating in it: for him it was a way to continue the struggle against the pro-Austrian forces he had defeated on the battlefield, but which retained influence inside predominately Catholic states such as Bavaria; for them it seemed to offer a chance to attack a chief source of resistance to modernism and progress, while providing a cause around which to rally and enhancing their position in the new state. But Bismarck’s turn to a new course at the end of the 1870s, allying himself with conservative forces including some of his former foes in the south, and putting socialists in the place of Catholics as designated enemies of the Empire, lowered the curtain on earlier hopes for a regime in which parliamentary life and public debate might become real forces, instead highlighting the very dependency on state power the liberals had hoped to reduce.41

  A second failed strategy took that dependency as a premise, namely “liberal imperialism.” A number of prominent liberals, Max Weber chief among them, gave their support to imperial expansion and competition with France and England (who had been in the game much earlier than Germany), hoping thereby to further liberal goals at home. Struggling against other powers on the wider field of the world, Weber and others believed, would energize the nation, presenting it with a goal above and beyond narrow private interests, and unifying it on behalf of a program that relied on the advance of industry and the powers it brought forth. Some liberal imperialists hoped that the economic benefits of imperial ventures would raise income levels in society as a whole, thus increasing the satisfaction of workers and their involvement in national life, and weakening the appeal of the socialist left. Others, such as Weber’s associate Friedrich Naumann, hoped that these results would open the way to social reforms and expand the ability of progressive liberals to cooperate with unions and other worker organizations.42 It was a heady and unstable mix of visions and hopes, never wholly disentangled from a sometimes desperate sense of liberal and middle-class weakness. The positive role assigned to state power led, not surprisingly, to alliances with forces on the right, as in the short-lived “Bülow Block” of 1907, but the dreams of left-liberals like Naumann that the policy might promote closer relations with the social democrats remained unfulfilled, as visions of national grandeur proved unable to draw many workers away from the socialist fold.

  Naumann’s hopes that liberal imperialism might help forge ties between progressive bourgeois and workers shines a light on a particularly significant division in middle-class politics, namely the range of opposing attitudes on the “social question.” All through the nineteenth century some liberals placed their hopes in the broad (and often vague) category designated as the Volk, while others distrusted or feared it, especially as its urban working-class component stood out more. In the early part of the century, liberals such as Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch favored and sponsored cooperative societies and educational associations for workers, and their efforts, as noted earlier, were partly responsible for establishing one of the two organizations that fused to form the Social Democratic Party in 1875. Other liberals, such as Max Hirsch and Lujo Brentano, sought to further union organization. Such stances among liberals preserved earlier notions about the continuity between Bürger and Volk that had inspired the vision of a broadly inclusive bürgerliche Gesellschaft free of sharp social divisions; just for that reason they were vulnerable to being called into question in a period when rapid economic change and recurring crises made class relations tense and febrile. As early as 1849–50 anxiety about worker radicalism led some liberals to draw back from the demands for reform they had voiced in the spring of 1848, even to the extent of preferring a victory by harsh reactionaries.43 Similar expressions of distance from workers were voiced later by prominent National Liberals, perhaps most bluntly by the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who defended social inequality as both necessary and beneficial, and rejected universal suffrage in the 1870s (although he had favored it earlier). It was liberal skeptics critical of social and political intervention aimed at improving the condition of workers who tartly dubbed the largely professorial Social Policy Association “tenured socialists” (Kathedersozialisten), and one of them went so far as to deny, in 1872, “that a ‘social question’ or even a ‘housing question’ actually exists.” The instability of liberal attitudes to social reform measures was heightened in a curious way by Bismarck’s decision to sponsor a wide range of social insurance programs in the 1880s. Moderate National Liberals supported these measures, but some to their left who might have been expected to approve them recoiled, weighing their social benefits as less than their potential to justify authoritarianism. Most liberals opposed Bismarck’s law outlawing the social democrats when he proposed it in 1878 (the Progressive leader Eugen Richter called it a confession of bankruptcy for bürgerliche Gesellschaft), and some continued to condemn it, but in the face of growing socialist strength, many voted in favor when it came up for renewal.44

  It was in part fear of socialist advances that led liberals throughout the country to persist in defending the unequal voting systems that still survived for many regional and urban assemblies. Unaltered by the constitution that established democratic suffrage for the national Reichstag, these arrangements left as much as half the male population (and to be sure all women) disenfranchised in some local elections, giving greater weight to those who paid higher taxes or granting clergy or landowners special status. Bourgeois liberals were able to reject calls to alter these arrangements in many towns and cities because constitutions surviving from earlier eras still gave those in control of the governing councils power over suffrage qualifications; they justified their resistance on the grounds that local communities were concrete associations of taxpayers, not abstract bodies of citizens. Reduced to a minor force in national politics, bourgeois possessed governing authority in many cities.

  If their behavior in regard to suffrage questions suggested that urban liberals were moved by a fairly narrow conception of self-interest, however, the ways they used their local power tell a different story. To be sure, there were expedient reasons as well as principled ones for improving town centers, building new streets and sewers, creating municipal waterworks, improving public health and popular education, establishing savings banks, and expanding poor relief. All the same, the energy and resources that liberal mayors and councils in many places devoted to such projects testify to how far their social vision stood from the unstinting allegiance to laisser-faire too often attributed to them. Town and city governments sometimes took over management of gasworks and electrical supplies (although there were cases where fears about the cost stood in the way), establishing a kind of municipal socialism similar to what their British counterparts were setting up in the same period. In both places, carrying out such activities involved overcoming the resistance some propertied citizens put up against paying the taxes to finance them. But Dieter Langewiesche sees in the German programs a stronger link to old urban traditions of communal commitment to the common good than in the English ones, a difference rooted in the greater autonomy possessed by many pre-modern German towns (by contrast a place such as Manchester had no independent institutions of government before the nineteenth century). The survival of that independence was not always a blessing to residents, as the example of Hamburg in 1892 shows: alone of cities on the continent the great port suffered a murderous outbreak of cholera in that year, in good part because its ruling circles’ insistence on preserving what remained of their independence from nearby Prussia led them to turn their backs on the new discoveries about the disease’s causes made in Prussian laboratories.45 All the same, Langewiesche seems on firm ground in maintaining (and
the transformation of Hamburg’s local government during the later 1890s confirms it) that these urban projects give evidence “that the old tradition of the commune as a bürgerliche protection society, with authority to limit the free economic movement of individuals for the good of all, had never been wholly displaced by the liberal economic idea of laissez-faire.” Liberal opposition to government regulation of economic activity on the national plane was compatible with readiness to subordinate market freedom to communal solidarity on the local level when economic transformation put people’s well-being in danger. Many liberals appear to have been aware of the duality this introduced into their position, and willing to accept it.46 In some cities, in addition, close cooperation developed between liberals and social democrats, notably in Munich, where common opposition to clerical conservatives in the Catholic Center Party led at once to electoral alliances and to extensive arrangements for conciliation between employers and workers when disputes broke out.47

  To some degree the power German bourgeois held in towns and cities made up for the weakness they could not overcome on the national level. But it was a very old kind of Bürger power, rooted in the pre-modern past and invested in measures that – for ill or good – preserved something of its character. Whether fin-de-siècle Bürger were aware of it or not, the limited degree of political control they were able to exercise was made possible by the Empire’s preservation of the old German localism for which its pre-modern predecessor had served as the incubator.

  German new liberalism and the problem of hegemony

  One prism through which to examine the ways German bourgeois politics at once resembled and differed from its counterparts elsewhere is provided by the liberal left. As in England, so in Germany there appeared a “new liberalism,” taking various forms, but in general seeking to reknit its ties to popular and working-class organizations. An early exemplar was the “Young Liberal” faction that surfaced in the Rhineland in 1898, espousing an anti-clerical program and seeking an end to liberal cooperation with the Right, a platform that soon broadened to include suffrage reform (short of full democratization, however) and other planks intended to support cooperation with the social democrats. The growing prominence of reformist and revisionist currents among the socialists at the same time (Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism was published in 1898) helped to identify continuities between the two movements. Although never a major force on the national level, the Jungliberalen did establish a network of more than sixty local organizations, with around 10,000 members. When the “Bulow Block” joining liberals to conservatives collapsed in 1908–09, the new vitality of the liberal left helped to nurture hopes that a “Grand Block” of liberals and social democrats might replace it, dubbed by Weber’s friend Naumann “from Basserman [the National Liberal leader] to Bebel [the Social Democrat].” Only in the traditionally liberal state of Baden (where it had actually begun some years earlier, putting through reforms of taxation and education) did this formation acquire any concrete importance, but the vision that inspired it also found expression in Naumann’s persisting and well-publicized attempts to create ties with the Socialists, whom he regarded as “the proletarian wing of liberalism.”

  A similar spirit animated the left liberal Nationalverein für das liberale Deutschland, whose founding statement in 1907 declared that “being liberal means recognizing the right to economic organization, the full freedom of association for members of both sexes, and the equality of employees and employers,” and called for “the extension of social legislation and its expansion to include further circles of the population.” A pamphlet issued by the same group in 1910, with the title “What is Liberal?” insisted that the term could not be applied to existing German society because wealth was distributed in such a way that “two-thirds to three-fourths of the German population” had too little income either to satisfy basic needs or to sustain personal and moral development. All the same, the hopes for closer relations between liberals and socialists (themselves deeply embroiled in debates about their relations to liberal ideas and practices) were stymied by various obstacles, notably the continuing rejection by most liberals of a fully democratic suffrage in city and regional elections, and a suspicion of middle-class attempts to gain influence over workers on the part of working-class activists.48

  Both the rhetoric and the dilemmas of German new liberalism point to the ground it shared with its British counterpart, but only the latter was able to make a significant impact on government policy before the War. German new liberals never had a chance to give direction to a major party, much less to make their ideas the basis for significant reforms of the kind Lloyd George and Asquith enacted in 1909. This did not mean that Germany lagged behind England in social policy; on the contrary one of the important models for the “People’s Budget” lay in Bismarck’s social insurance programs of the 1880s. That these measures came from an autocratic government in the German case and from organized social forces in the English one speaks volumes about the persisting power of longstanding differences: we saw earlier that a similar contrast was already visible in the two countries’ social and political styles in the eighteenth century.49

  The contrasting fates of the new liberalism in England and Germany, and the ways they reflect larger similarities and differences in the two countries’ histories, highlight some of the central issues in the reinterpretation of the relations between modernity and bourgeois life we are pursuing here. Germany was the exemplary case of the rapid and transformative economic restructuring that came to Europe as a whole in the half-century before 1914. The shift in the relative positions of Bildungsbürger and Wirtschaftsbürger that accompanied it was one expression of this change; another was the legal reform embodied in a new civil code (the bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) at the end of the 1890s, and which established uniform provisions in regard to contracts, inheritance, and family relations in the Reich as a whole. It was a self-consciously modern measure, removing some traditional distinctions between landed property and other kinds, and reinforcing the right of individuals to own and dispose of their possessions; overall the new lawbook breathed a spirit that various commentators have described as individualistic and bourgeois.50 Despite the striking and rapid nature of the country’s transformation, however, Germany remained the place where bourgeois political power was weakest, unable to find even the limited effectiveness on a national scale it achieved in England (where the Liberal Party was losing its footing by 1914) or France (where persisting divisions of all kinds inside the bourgeoisie helped keep the regime from developing a stable tenor, setting the stage for anti-republican forces to gain prominence in the Boulanger crisis and the Dreyfus Affair).

  Historians still loyal to traditional stories that put the rise of classes and their struggles for predominance at the center of historical development have regarded this configuration as a puzzle. Of the various ways they have sought to solve it one has relied on the notion of “hegemony” elaborated by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. As Eric Hobsbawm put it, “the bourgeoisie was evidently not a ruling class in the sense in which the old-style landowner was, whose position gave him, de jure or de facto, the effective state power over the inhabitants of his territory”; instead a bourgeois had to operate “within a functioning framework of state power and administration which was not his own.” What gave the bourgeoisie its grip on society all the same was hegemony, a subtle and indirect mode of domination rooted in control over many everyday interactions and organs of opinion, the arenas of civil society in which values, attitudes, and expectations are formed; by this means a class that did not rule directly was able to shape people’s thinking and action by infusing them with a particular sense of how the world worked and how best to operate within it. Thus nineteenth-century bourgeois were able to attach leading strings to their various class enemies, in particular turning workers toward the parliamentary activity that gave them a false sense of power inside a social frame still bourgeois. (Gramsci hoped t
o see this deception dissipated as workers and activists developed the implications of Lenin’s return to The Communist Manifesto’s original revolutionary vision, on which basis they would create their own hegemonic culture.)51

  A somewhat different solution to the puzzle of how bourgeois forms of life were able to triumph in the absence of effective political power has been proposed by Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, who argue (in a no-longer recent but still-influential book) that the Bismarckian regime provided for an unusual but effective triumph of bourgeois interests and values. They arrive at this conclusion by a complex, even tortuous argument. First, given that only France offers an example of what might be considered a revolutionary transfer of power from aristocracy to bourgeoisie, they purport to abandon the search for historical patterns operative everywhere in favor of an approach that considers each national story in its own terms: the kind of direct transfer of power supposed to have taken place in the French Revolution may have been possible and historically fitting nowhere else. Despite this, the two historians have no doubt that successive historical formations are all regimes of class power, and that every national story needs to be told in terms of it. Therefore they conclude that, since the Second Reich provided “the conditions of bourgeois predominance in society,” that is, a ground on which both capitalism and the civil order of bürgerliche Gesellschaft could develop, the Bismarckian state should be regarded as a special kind of vehicle for bourgeois ascendency, “Germany’s distinctive form of the bourgeois revolution.”52

  Although this account differs somewhat from the Gramscian one, the reasons for rejecting both are closely related. It may well be the case that in some general sense bourgeois culture exercises influence, even of a regrettable kind, over what people outside the middle classes think and do, but what makes this influence deserve the name of hegemony in Gramsci’s sense can only be that it impedes the effective expression of the different and higher stage of consciousness and social being that it was the destiny of the working class to usher in. However attractive it may seem, such a reading suffers from a circular logic: only if the future form of life it theorizes can be shown to be gestating inside the world that keeps it from being born can the notion that it suffers repression make sense, but until that future arrives we have no ground for knowing it to be real. Believing it to be so requires a leap of faith that seemed reasonable to many people in the years following the Russian Revolution, and again in the 1960s, but it is bound to appear much less so in the aftermath of 1989–91, not to mention 2001. The Great Recession that began in 2007 has not revived it, despite the new doubts about capitalism’s stability and future it has generated. Eley and Blackbourn put themselves at a certain distance from Gramsci, but they base their thinking on a similar belief in the progression of historical stages that brings successive social classes to power; otherwise they would not vitiate their own claim to recognize that no single historical path can be found in every country by attributing some particular “form of the bourgeois revolution” to each national story.