Reflections on America

Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States

Claus Offe

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745635064, 9780745635057
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At a time when so many cracks have emerged within the imagined community of 'the West', this important new book, by one of the leading social scientists in Europe, examines the intellectual history of comparing Europe and the United States. Claus Offe considers the perspectives adopted by three of Europe's greatest social scientists – Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno – in their comparative writings on Europe.
While traveling, studying and working in the US, all three constantly looked back to their European origins, trying to decipher from their American experience what the future may hold for Europe, be it for better or worse. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, observed the functioning of American democracy with a mix of admiration, envy and deep concerns about the fate of liberty in the 'democratic age'. Max Weber, the German sociologist, reported enthusiastically about the youthful energy he found in the United States, which, however, he saw as gradually succumbing to the stifling tendencies of European bureaucratization. Theodor W. Adorno, the critical theorist and refugee from Nazi Germany, observed with a sense of despair the workings of the American 'culture industry' which he equated to the totalitarian experience of Europe, only to switch to a much more favorable picture upon his return to Germany.
Europe and the US are conventionally assumed to share the same trajectory and develop according to some common pattern of 'occidental rationalism', with the observed differences resulting from mere lags and relative advances on one side or the other. In this insightful book, Offe questions the relevance of this paradigm to transatlantic relations today.

1

Introduction

Towards the end of 2002, when Axel Honneth did me the honour of inviting me to give the Adorno Lectures of 2003, it might already have been foreseen that relations between Europe and America would define the current intellectual and political debates. In choosing my theme, however, I had no intention of involving myself in current affairs, and I would like to hold to that decision, even if not in a completely consistent manner. My academic teaching has already concerned itself with Max Weber’s largely unclarified relationship to Alexis de Tocqueville¹ – to whom he was clearly indebted for many of his ideas or actual concepts, yet whom he never once mentions – and with the subterranean relationship of Adorno and the so-called Frankfurt School to Weber’s sociology and diagnosis of the times. There are also a few things to be discovered about the intellectual legacy that links Adorno to Tocqueville (who was widely read among émigrés of the 1940s in ‘German California’), not the least being the latter’s surprisingly developed theory of a ‘culture industry’ in the 1830s. I therefore welcomed the opportunity to shed some light, if not on a continuity and contemporary elaboration of common intellectual themes, then on thematic affinities and divergences that the three great social scientists display, from their different temporal vantage points, in their analyses of a common object, the United States, as well as in the questions they raise about the condition of Europe in their time. The object of these lectures is the disturbing special case of the American model of Western modernization in contrast to European social conditions and the dangers and prospects of development in store for the continent.

To be more precise, the common theme of our three travellers is the precarious fate of liberty in modern capitalist societies. ‘Tyranny of the majority’, ‘iron cage of dependence’, ‘reification’ and ‘administered world’ – these are the wellknown formulas they used, at least in some parts of their work, to characterize the negative destiny of Western modernity, while constantly searching for counter-forces to halt its advance or even to change it for the better. The road to serfdom is the theme they all pursued, for an observation period amounting to no less than 120 years. They saw in America a highly ambiguous combination: both the emergence of a society of free and equal individuals, and its tragically misdirected outcome, which presented itself to them as a system of imperceptible and therefore all the more effective (or anyway inescapable) constraints that took its toll on liberty and ultimately also on equality.

The task I set myself in these lectures was therefore to reconstruct the contrasting self-descriptions and sociological diagnoses of contemporary Europe that arose out of, and as a result of, their trips to and inside the United States.

If, by ‘trip’, we understand a temporary change of residence with the intention to return, then we may describe as trips all three of these stays in the United States (however different their causes and circumstances). All three are equally governed by a comparative perspective on the European place of origin. These self-perceptions from afar belong to Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno; their trips took place in 1831–2, 1904 and 1938 respectively, with roughly two generations between Tocqueville and Weber and one more generation between Weber and Adorno. They stayed in the United States for nine months (Tocqueville), thirteen weeks (Weber) and eleven years (Adorno), for reasons that could not have been more different from one another: in Tocqueville’s case to conduct study and exploration on the instructions of his government department (the French justice ministry); in Weber’s to accept an invitation to a conference, followed by a tour; and in Adorno’s to escape from Nazi Germany and to find work in the field of the social sciences.

The three travellers were following a certain intellectual tradition when they set foot on American soil – a tradition in European social theory going back to the late seventeenth century, for which the nature of European problems and the range of possible solutions were to be understood through their reflection in the realities of America. Asia and, especially, Africa were felt by Europeans to be alien regions, and as such the objects of a detached interest in exotic conditions completely different from their own. It is true that America also displayed traces of the exotic in its indigenous peoples, and in the structures and traditions that had been largely destroyed in the process of colonization. But its settlement by Europeans and its share in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition gave it the status of a more or less distant relative whose independent destiny, though perhaps of interest because the welfare of kith and kin was at stake, inevitably also irritated us – and challenged us to make comparative assessments – because of its evident deviation from European patterns.

‘America’ – both here and there the customary term for the territory of the United States – has for Europeans always been not an exotic growth but a branch on the same tree. But how is it that this branch bears such unfamiliar blossoms and fruits? America provokes a question that makes no sense in relation to Asia or Africa: whether over time we will become like them or they like us – and, if neither, how the persistent differences should be explained and evaluated. We cannot describe America without describing ourselves as Europeans – whether as more or less similar variants of ‘Western’ society, or as a configuration of contrasts. Observation of the American social experiment has always been a cause for reflection and self-interpretation concerning European identity.²

Since the late seventeenth century, it has become customary in Europe to approach the society taking shape in North America as though in a time machine. In 1690, in connection with his contract theory based on natural rights, John Locke wrote: ‘In the beginning all the world was America.’³ And, according to Kamphausen, ‘in the eyes of the Old World, America really brought about a new beginning in world history’, offering to Europeans the model of a ‘natural’ social evolution that stretched from the first settlers, as huntergatherers, fur-traders and stockbreeders, down to intensive agriculture, industrialization and urbanization.⁴ With this time machine it was possible to travel in both the past and the future. It was possible in the past since the relatively short and transparent history, from the first settler communities in the wilds of nature to the gradual formation of a federal and democratic state system of the USA, was simply claimed as a model of development. That which, in Europe, lay hidden in the mists of a long untraceable past could be read as from an open book in the case of the United States. ‘Only by becoming Indians can [the settlers] survive in the colonies; they must return as hunters and gatherers to the first developmental stages of humanity, followed by fur-traders and stockbreeders and the growth of intensive agriculture down to industrialization and urbanization.’⁵ This conceptual model has defined the American sense of identity down to the present day. It has often been pointed out that many Americans still have great difficulties with the idea that any citizen in any other country could ever opt for economic, cultural or political conditions and values that are not at least similar to those of the United States, whose validity Americans claim to be ‘self-evident’.⁶

If the differences between the USA and Europe are arranged on the temporal axis, we may say, rather schematically, that there are four possible answers to the question of how Europe and the United States relate to each other. The first answer, popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involves one of two evidently incompatible models of the United States: either (A) an advance guard whose explorations allow Europeans to gaze into their own future, or (B) a latecomer society standing at a stage of development that Europe has already paced out, a kind of ‘immature Europe’.⁷ In each case, a difference that is found to exist may be given either a positive (1) or a negative (2) interpretation. The ‘positive advance guard’ (A1) interpretation claims that in America a technological, democratic or other advance has an origin that we Europeans have only to reproduce, while the ‘positive latecomer hypothesis’ (B1) states that in America energies and resources already exhausted among us Europeans still have a salutary effect. On the other hand, a negative evaluation leads to the claim that in America certain fateful trends have already gone so far that to look across the Atlantic is not only to see a window on the future but to stare into an abyss (A2). Finally, the fourth variant maintains that America is stuck at a developmental stage of raw, unbridled, uncivilized and destructive infantilism, which ‘we Europeans’, by virtue of our own experiences and achievements, have already overcome and sublimated in the form of civilization (B2). Linked to hypothesis A1 is Europe’s admiration for progressive democratic America, for the mentality of the New Frontier, which is always there to be redefined and conquered anew, with the moral energies of a liberal, individualist, democratic, egalitarian and anti-statist American creed. Hypothesis B1 is associated with the theme of a vigorously youthful formation free of the sclerotic burden of tradition from which the Old World suffers;⁸ A2 with the terrifying vision of an unrestrained technological, economic and military rationality; and B2 with the collective damage due to socialization in a society without a history, trapped at the level of raw and permanent childhood.⁹ Not surprisingly, it is the first two hypotheses that form the basis of America’s sense of identity vis-à-vis Europe and its missionary thrust – in the name of civic religion or, simply, religious fundamentalism – to free the world of its ills; whereas it is the last two hypotheses that are the inspiration for many variants of European anti-Americanism.¹⁰ In B2, a major role is still played today by the idea of the New World’s ‘civilizational immaturity’¹¹ and denunciations of Americans as ‘equality boors’ (Heinrich Heine).¹²

¹  See Hecht 1998.

²  Kamphausen 2002, 146f.

³  Locke 1988, 301 (§49, and cf. §108). In the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Elementa Philosophiae (1642), libertas is already presented as synonymous with the state of nature, through the image of ‘a woman wielding a spear and bow and wearing no more than a grass skirt’ – ‘an obvious allusion to the savage natives of America’ (Münkler 1993, 46).

⁴  Kamphausen 2002, 169f.

⁵  Ibid., 169.

⁶  In the American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, the thirteen participating states famously proclaimed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’

⁷  Kamphausen 2002, 145.

⁸  In an often quoted poem from Zahme Xenién (1827), Goethe wrote that America ‘has it better than our old continent’, because ‘in your lively age you are not troubled within by useless memories and futile strife’ (Goethe 1958, 9.248).

⁹  In his vehement critique of America in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel compares the relationship of Europe and America to that between Hamburg and Altona, a suburb of immigrant tradesmen (1956, 82) that is nevertheless like a reborn ‘expression of a foreign life’ (ibid., 87). The settlers have not yet carried America to the level of a rational state – ‘the state was merely something external for the protection of property’ (84), involving ‘respect for law’ without ‘genuine probity’ (85). As to religious life, Hegel notes the prevalence of ‘unseemly varieties of caprice’, ‘the splitting up into so many sects, which reach the very acme of absurdity’, and the ‘unbounded licence of imagination’ resulting in a lack of the ‘religious unity which has been maintained in European states’ (85). In political life, too, the necessity for ‘an organized state’ has not yet made itself felt (86); rather, ‘the community [arises] from the aggregation of individuals as atomic constituents’ (84). Hegel’s picture of Americans as depraved half-savages therefore clearly belongs to type B2 and has been an important source and referent for modern ‘anti-Americanism’.

¹⁰  Diner 2002.

¹¹  Kamphausen 2002, 150.

¹²  Cf. Diner 2002, 49ff.

2

Alexis de Tocqueville or the Tyranny of the Middle Class

The Versailles deputy judge (suppléant) Alexis de Tocqueville, at the age of twenty-five, together with his friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont, applied to the French minister of justice for a study trip to the United States,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Alexis de Tocqueville or the Tyranny of the Middle Class
• 3 Max Weber: American Escape Routes from the Iron Cage?
• 4 Theodor W. Adorno: ‘Culture Industry’ and Other Views of the ‘American Century’
• 5 The United States in the Twenty-First Century: Traditions of Religious Socialization and Struggle against ‘Evil’
• References and Bibliography
• Index