Political Theory in Modern Germany

An Introduction

Chris Thornhill

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745620008, 9780745619996
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the major political thinkers of modern Germany. It includes chapters on the works of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. These works are examined in their social and historical contexts, ranging from the period of Bismarck to the present day.

A clear picture is presented of the connections between individual theoretical positions and the general political conditions of modern Germany. Areas of political history covered in particular depth include nineteenth-century legal and parliamentary history, aspects of German liberalism, Weimar social democracy, political Catholicism, Adenauer and Erhard, Brandt's reforms and the Tendenzwende of the late 1970s. By closely linking intellectual and political history, this work examines how recent German political theory has developed as a set of varying responses to recurring aspects and problems of political life in modern Germany. At the same time, it addresses the philosophical and political implications of the works which it treats, and it critically examines how modern German political theory has contributed to broader attempts to theorize political legitimacy and politics itself.

This book will be of interest to students of political theory, German studies and European political history.

1

Max Weber

Max Weber has entered intellectual history as the major sociologist of early twentieth-century Europe, and naturally his political thinking cannot be extricated simply from his general sociology. His sociological writings on economic history, law, religion and the city constitute the body of research upon which his political ideas are based. However, Weber’s political works stand also as responses to political dilemmas of his own time, and in this work they will broadly be treated as such. This chapter will therefore focus especially on his theory of politics, and it will draw on his wider thinking mainly in order to situate and explicate his understanding of politics and the political sphere.

It is of the greatest significance for Weber’s thought that his education coincided with the rapid expansion of industrial production in Germany and the corresponding rise in power of the industrial middle class. Weber’s father was a municipal councillor and prominent member of the National Liberal party in Berlin, and in his youth Weber was introduced to many of the leading liberal politicians and intellectuals of late nineteenth-century Prussia (Bendix 1977: 1). Weber’s thought exemplifies the complexity of liberal thinking during this period, and it provides an illuminating case-study of the peculiarities and problems of German liberalism in general.¹

Nineteenth-century German liberalism never constituted a uniform political bloc, and its history was marked by division. Even during its period of fleeting triumph in the revolutionary parliament of 1848–9, it was characterized by a latent schism between a statist tendency, which simply sought to secure the influence of the middle class within a constitutional monarchy, and a radical-liberal contingent, which was more inclined to seek support amongst the growing proletariat (Schieder 1980: 556). After 1848, the differentiation of political positions within the German liberal movements became increasingly complex as the liberal class itself increased in numerical size and its interests became less homogeneous. Partly owing to the fragmentation of the middle class, the position of the liberal parties in the political system of imperial Germany was also complex and deeply compromised.

After the unification period, the National Liberal party (founded 1866) acted as senior coalition-partner of the Free Conservatives in the imperial parliament and it collaborated with Bismarck in introducing important liberal economic reform measures throughout the early 1870s (Wehler 1995: 866; Sheehan 1978: 135). Although the separation of government and parliament in the imperial electoral system meant that the National Liberals never gained direct access to the governmental executive, the 1870s were marked by the unique (albeit temporary) prestige of liberal politics and ideas, by the willingness of Bismarck to negotiate with the liberal parties, and by the short-lived centrality of the parliamentary system in political decision-making. However, this period was terminated by the famous anti-liberal turn in Bismarck’s post-unification politics. In 1878 Bismarck discredited the market-oriented policies of the liberal parties and he dissolved the conservative–liberal coalition which had been sustained through the first decade of the united Germany. Following this, Bismarck introduced a series of anti-liberal laws, partly with the intention of weakening the influence of the liberal factions in parliament, and thereby of limiting the influence of parliament itself (Pack 1961: 27). These laws included the anti-socialist law (1878) which prohibited socialist political agitation. They also included the introduction of protective tariffs (1879) – intended to protect the internal market, increase governmental revenue, and weaken the autonomy of the liberal factions – and the welfare laws of 1883, 1884 and 1889, which established the foundations for an authoritarian welfare-system, designed both to palliate and undermine workers’ movements (Ullmann 1995: 179). The second decade of the united Germany was thus characterized by anti-socialist and anti-liberal policies. The quasi-parliamentary order of the 1870s was replaced by a more conservative coalition, which checked the reformist ambitions of the liberals, and supplanted the nascent parliamentary system with a more Caesarist style of government (Winkler 1979a: 36–7; Stürmer 1974: 327). Bismarck’s attempt to weaken the incipient parliamentary system also cemented the development of a corporate model of political and economic government (Wehler 1995: 936–7). In this system, the importance of personal connections between interest-groups and politicians in many instances outweighed parliamentary representation itself (Puhle 1970: 342–3). Notably, Bismarck’s anti-parliamentary policies came soon after the foundation of the first organized bodies for the representation of industrialists’ interests. The Association of German Iron and Steel Producers was formed in 1874 and the Central Association of German Industrialists was formed in 1876 (H. Rosenberg 1967: 161; see also Sieling-Wendeling 1976: 77). Bismarck himself toyed with the idea of reintroducing estate-based systems of corporate representation (Ullmann 1982: 146; Winkler 1972: 24; Pack 1961: 20).

The impact of the crisis-year 1878–9 on the liberal groupings was devastating (Gagel 1958: 104; Nipperdey 1961: 131). The right wing of the National Liberal party broke away in 1879. The members of the party’s left departed in 1880 and eventually fused with the left-liberal Progressive party to form the Deutsche Freisinnige Partei in 1884, which itself dissolved into rival factions in 1893 (Pack 1961: 131). The remaining members of the National Liberals regrouped and reformed the party in 1884, with an avowedly pro-conservative, pro-Bismarck manifesto, which declared support for the anti-socialist law, for protective laws for agriculture and for reinforcement and expansion of the military (Langewiesche 1988: 180). The refounded National Liberal party collaborated extensively with the Conservatives, even forming a majority-coalition in the period 1887–90. Even the left-liberal parties which emerged after 1893, primarily the Freisinnige Volkspartei and the Freisinnige Vereinigung, were only hesitantly opposed to the major political programmes of the conservative governments. After 1900 the left-liberal groupings became more acquiescent in their dealings with the government, and even collaborated in part with the 1907–9 coalition-bloc with the Conservatives and the National Liberals (Elm 1968: 174). The history of liberalism in the Kaiserreich can therefore be summarized as a history of decline. During this time, the right-leaning liberals were at times willingly absorbed into the coalition-structure which supported Bismarck’s executive, and the left-liberals were left to dream of expanding their influence by attracting support from the working class in order to block the executive. Between 1893 and 1907 the percentage of votes won by the left-liberals declined from 18 per cent to under 7 per cent. Only after the recreation of a unified left-liberal party in 1910, the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive People’s party: FVP), did the left-liberal share of the vote again reach above 10 per cent.

Importantly for an assessment of Weber’s thought, the liberal tradition in Germany contains conceptual and historical traits which distinguish it from the individualistic premises of liberal politics. Owing, in part, to the enforced collaboration between the liberal parties and the Prussian executive, German liberalism did not seamlessly absorb the classical-liberal (private-legal) proclamation of freedom of contract – or, freedom from the state – as the foundation of political liberty. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German liberalism retained a belief in the state-executive as the co-ordinator of the public good. Similarly, traditional German liberalism, both left and right, was strongly marked by its sympathetic approach to welfare-policies. The Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policies), founded by Gustav Schmoller in 1872, was an important forum for liberal debate in the Kaiserreich. This association attracted figures from both left- and right-liberal orientations who proposed alternatives to the laissez-faire policies of the National Liberal era (Boese 1939: 20), and who approved the corporate welfare-system which Bismarck began to introduce in the 1880s (Lambi 1963: 88–9). Representatives of this association even harboured hopes of effecting greater co-operation between the liberal movements, the unions and the SPD (Feldman 1966: 22; Sheehan 1978: 153). Weber was close in outlook to certain doctrines of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, which published his first major work.

It is arguable, therefore, that liberal thinking in nineteenth-century Germany remained distinct from the general premises of European liberalism for the simple reason that it opposed the primacy of private law and the private economy. By the late 1870s, few influential liberal theorists showed unqualified support for free-market liberalism. For this, Weber’s thought is exemplary. Weber argues that the crucial feature of modern political systems is that the state is increasingly rationalized in accordance with the private-legal order (1972: 506). The modern state, Weber explains, operates by purely formal norms and it creates its legitimacy by such norms. This formality of the modern state is due to its legal basis. Positive law, upon which the modern state is founded, has developed through a process of rationalization in which the state has assumed legal and functional responsibility for the economy (1972: 487). The state must therefore guarantee the conditions which allow the economy to function. Rather than viewing this, however, as a successful accomplishment of the bourgeoisie, Weber sees it as a process which undermines law’s power to define political life in substantive terms (1972: 499). In keeping with the general climate of liberal debate in Germany after 1878, Weber insists that the state possesses a structural dignity above the economy, and that the integrity of political life is undermined wherever the basis of the state is placed exclusively in the private-legal order. Significantly, Weber’s systematic reflections on law began to appear after the establishment of the Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch, which became statute in 1900.

The key aspect of late nineteenth-century liberalism in Germany can, however, be most accurately assessed as a problem of integration. Weber’s thought again has exemplary status in this respect. After the failure of the proto-parliamentary reforms of the 1870s, parliament itself – and the political parties – declined rapidly in influence and prestige. The liberal parties, therefore, were (at least in part) deprived of the classical arena of liberal organization and integration. The middle-class share of political power was reliant either on the pursuit of blocking-tactics (‘negative politics’) or on the forming of unholy alliances with the Conservatives. After the secession of the left-liberals in 1880, the liberal movement was never again in a position to present itself as a united front against conservatism (W. J. Mommsen 1990a: 22–3; Schieder 1980: 199–200). Generally, in fact, the German political parties never performed the organizational and integrative function which they possessed in Anglo-Saxon political systems. Indeed, the organizational weakness of German parties can be viewed as a factor which directly played into the hands of the executive of the Kaiserreich and which prevented the broadening of the political power-base (Grosser 1970: 15). Liberal intellectuals of the late Kaiserreich were therefore forced to reflect on special means for the (re)establishment of an integral bloc representing middle-class interests. In many respects, Weber’s entire opus can be interpreted as an endeavour to recreate liberal politics as a substantive ethic of integration, which encompasses private, public and social law and which thus appeals to, and involves, all sectors of society. However, here too the years of co-operation with the anti-liberal executive in the Kaiserreich left their mark on liberal thinking. Weber himself (as will be seen) affirmed many attributes of Bismarck’s executive. Bismarck’s employment of ideological processes of integration, such as autocratic welfare-measures, heroic nationalism, colonial policies and charismatic Caesarism, is strongly echoed in the technical nature of Weber’s own theory of democratic legitimacy (Winkler 1979b: 34). Therefore, Weber’s work can, on one hand, be viewed as an attempt to recast liberalism as a popular appeal. However, on the other hand, it also marks the end of liberalism as a set of more or less determinate convictions. It is, at the very least, a plan to deploy traditionally anti-liberal means of integration for the salvation of liberalism itself.

Weber’s party-political connections were closely bound up with the career of Friedrich Naumann, for whom Weber acted both as political disciple and intellectual adviser. Naumann is remembered chiefly as an influential left-liberal political thinker and popular theorist of the early twentieth century, and as one of the founding fathers of the constitution of the Weimar Republic. In each of these respects, Naumann’s closeness to Weber is important, and Naumann’s activities often illuminate Weber’s basic ideas. In 1896 Naumann founded the short-lived left-liberal Nationalsozialer Verein (National Social party), a party which endorsed a policy of simultaneous external economic expansion and internal democratization in Wilhelmine Germany (W. J. Mommsen 1959: 145). Naumann’s writings of this time, especially Democracy and Empire, are the most revealing reflections on the problems confronted by the left-leaning German liberals around 1900 (Naumann 1900: 127). In Democracy and Empire, Naumann laments the archaic nature of the three-class electoral system in Prussia. He examines the emergence of the Social Democratic party (SPD) and the unions in the late Kaiserreich, and he advocates broader co-operation between the SPD (especially the revisionist wing, under the influence of Eduard Bernstein) and the various liberal parties.² He supports the creation of a system of political alliances, as an alternative bloc to the conservative executive (see G. A. Ritter 1985: 27; Kühne 1994: 282), able to connect all sections of society from the non-revolutionary industrial proletariat to the leadership of the National Liberals (Naumann 1900: 116). His plan for a coalition stretching from Bebel (leader of the SPD) to Bassermann (leader of the National Liberals) perfectly captures the spirit of the rather desperate left-liberal attempts to expand the legislative influence of the middle class in the early twentieth century (Heckart 1974: 16; see also D. S. White 1976: 162–3; Theiner 1983: 112). Naumanh argues that a coalition between the SPD and the Liberals would provide a legislative counter-weight to the ministerial cabinet (G. Schmidt 1964: 251), and would thus facilitate electoral reform (see G. A. Ritter 1978: 367). A liberal-revisionist coalition, Naumann therefore claims (1911: 320), would be the most effective device for maximizing the power of the middle class. Ultimately, he asserts, a broader-based political system in Germany would also help secure the objectives of the German imperialist programme, as it would strengthen the spirit of national community (W.J. Mommsen 1959: 100). Naumann’s interest in social-liberal co-operation, therefore, has an essentially functional character. A politically integrated proletariat, he projects, would enable the middle class to gain a hold on power, and would ultimately serve the economic interests of the middle class. In Democracy and Empire, Naumann also picks up the threads of social imperialism which derive from Lorenz von Stein and the members of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Fehrenbach 1969: 186–7), and he grandly represents Kaiser Wilhelm II as the charismatic co-ordinator of social integration and external expansion.

Naumann’s ideas gained especial significance at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, after the dissolution of the liberal–conservative ‘Bülow bloc’ (due to differences in fiscal policy) and the renewed fusion of the left-liberal factions to form the FVP in 1910 (see Kühne 1994: 470, 540, 565). In this period the abruptly interrupted process of parliamentarization of the 1870s regained momentum. In 1907 the left-liberals and the Zentrum (the Catholic party) had both independently appealed for electoral reform to strengthen parliament against the executive (Pateman 1964: 15). Parliament itself had been in part responsible for the end of Bülow’s tenure on power in 1909, and by 1912 there existed a large anti-government, reformist majority in parliament (Feldman 1966: 11). The prospect of a united liberal-socialist body was therefore an important component in the renewed move towards the consolidation of parliamentary power (Bertram 1964: 54). Naumann especially greeted the dissolution of the Bülow bloc as an opportunity for recementing the lost alliance between left- and right-liberals (Eschenburg 1929: 269–70). It is unlikely, however, that either Bassermann or Bebel seriously supported Naumann’s plans (Langewiesche 1988: 225–7). Bassermann, for example, despite his apparent move to the left after 1909, evidently retained hopes of renewed co-operation with the Conservatives (Bertram 1964: 62).

Naumann was certainly not a great political theorist. His ideas comprise a rough fusion of revisionist Marxism, nationalism, cultural Protestantism, mythologizing monarchism and imperialist euphoria. However, his proposal for a political order combining interhal integration and external expansion crystallizes the broad climate of liberal political debate in post-Bismarck Prussia (see Schustereit 1975: 221). For all the crudeness of his thinking, Naumann, like Weber, recognizes the weakness of liberal politics in Wilhelmine society. He seeks accordingly to reinvent liberalism as an integrative ideology and thus to rescue the liberal movement from its assimilation into the Wilhelmine executive (Gagel 1958: 102; Kühne 1994: 276; Conze 1950: 355). In order to achieve this, Naumann combines aspects of diverse and even conflicting political positions. His thought assimilates both the social policies of the left and the constitutional and imperial legacy of the right (W. J. Mommsen 1975: 137). His endeavour to link social integration, aesthetic monarchism and imperialism perfectly underlines the ideological coalescence of Wilhelmine liberalism with the politics of its adversaries. Both Naumann and Weber recognized that purely liberal programmes had little appeal for the German middle class at the turn of the century, and that liberal groups would have to abandon liberal ideals in order to achieve their objectives (Rürup 1972: 222).

Weber was the intellectual mentor behind Naumann’s political activities. Weber, like Naumann, belonged to the generation of middle-class intellectuals who drifted to the left after 1900, owing to their disillusionment with the failed reforms and the pragmatic accommodations of the National Liberals. Owing to his contempt for Kaiser Wilhelm II, Weber became an advocate of full parliamentary democracy in the first decade of the century (W. J. Mommsen 1963: 295–322). Although Weber was not a full member of the National Social Party (Düding 1972: 197), Naumann’s vision of a cross-party anti-conservative alliance has clear similarities with Weber’s ideas (Spael 1985: 43–4). Weber also shared Naumann’s sense that a successful imperial programme could only be pursued if the proletariat was integrated into the political system. However, it was not until the revolutionary winter of 1918–19 that the relation between Naumann and Weber gained its greatest importance. After the collapse of the Hohenzollern-monarchy in late 1918, and in the months prior to this collapse, Weber set out a number of proposals for the political reorganization of Germany. His favoured model was a system which combined parliamentary administration with plebiscitary rule. At the end of the monarchy, Naumann acted as head of the Commission for Basic Rights in the constitutional assembly in Weimar. Naumann’s contributions to the new constitution strongly reflected the influence of Weber’s more theoretical writings on constitutional law (Schiffers 1971: 12; Treippe 1995: 130–1; Theiner 1986: 75). Also at this time (1919), Naumann founded the DDP (German Democratic party). The DDP, true to Naumann’s earlier dream of a unified non-Catholic, bourgeois bloc, was conceived as a party of national unity. In the early Weimar system, the DDP sought to play the role of a hinge-party between the interests of the SPD, the unions and the parties of big business (Jones 1988: 25), especially the DVP (German People’s party), which emerged after the dissolution of the National Liberals (see Frye 1985: 45). Although Weber was not an active member of the DDP, he was close to the leading figures in the party, and he influenced its underlying conception (W. J. Mommsen 1959: 303–4). Neither Naumann nor Weber lived to see the outcome of their political projects, as both died before the Weimar Republic was much more than a year old. However, their political interventions between 1895 and 1919 mark the clearest threads which connect the debates surrounding the liberal movements in mid- to late-Wilhelmine society and the German (and liberal) experiment with democracy in the 1920s.

In short, therefore, Weber’s political thought constitutes a set of responses to the antiquated nature of the German political system of the Wilhelmine period. Despite the rise in strength of German industry, and the industrial class, during the last decades of the Kaiserreich – by 1913 Germany had the second highest level of industrial production in the world (Wehler 1995: 610–11) – actual executive power was only rarely placed in the hands of figures who had not emerged through the dynastic families and the high ranks of the bureaucracy (W. J. Mommsen 1990b: 64). Although Weber never wholly abandoned the old-style Prussian liberalism of the National Liberals (Gagel 1958: 72), his political contributions focus on the need for the adjustment of the governmental apparatus to the conditions of modern Germany, with its altered class-configurations. Central to his thought in this respect is the conviction that Germany could only consolidate its position on the international stage through vigorous constitutional modernization. Modernization, in Weber’s national-political sense, means the consolidation of the role of the middle class in political administration. Above all, Weber sought to create a political system which would facilitate the emergence of a middle class equipped with the skills and abilities required for the international reinforcement of Germany’s power. Weber’s thinking revolves around the classical liberal assumption that the political strength of the nation depends utterly upon the economic strength of the bourgeoisie (Gagel 1958: 15). He argues therefore that a system of representation should be created in which those responsible for the economic success...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Max Weber
• 2. Carl Schmitt
• 3. Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer
• 4. Jürgen Habermas
• 5. Niklas Luhmann
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Back Cover