Notes from Pflanze

Some notes from Pflanze, Volume 1 Chapter 1

Prussian bureaucracy, idealism

‘The great cultural synthesis of the Enlightenment was in dissolution. Under the influence of economic change and laissez-faire doctrine, corporatism lost ground to capitalistic individualism, status society to class society, rationalism to romanticism, subjective to objective idealism. New centres of political orientation appeared in liberalism, conservatism, nationalism and socialism.’ OP

Before 1815 Prussia was poor in land, resources and population. Its frontiers were not easily defended. During the half-century that saw the triumph of absolutism in France (Louis XIV 1661-1715) and its defeat in England, Elector Frederick Wilhelm I (1640-88) suppressed the feudal estates. ‘Whatever possibility there might have been for their development into modern representative institutions vanished… During the century after 1640 the power and influence of the bureaucracy penetrated every aspect of Prussian society.’

The system discouraged initiative and rewarded conformity, obedience, and honesty. Advancement came through service not patronage. From the 18th Century, university training and exams were required.

The army’s officers were largely drawn from the Prussian aristocracy, footsoldiers from the peasantry. The army heavily influenced the bureaucracy. Many officials were retired soldiers with a harsh tone and authoritarian manner.

The Lutheran Church supported the monarchy and bureaucracy. Luther regarded the prince as ordained by God to defend the Christian few and maintain order. He denied the right of popular resistance and ‘made the church a vital prop of princely authority’. Before the 19th century the influence of commerce and business was low.

Frederick the Great (1740-86) spoke of himself as ‘the first servant of the state’. He refused to intervene in private law and strengthened the independence of the judiciary. He strengthened the principle that Prussian government was absolute but not arbitrary. Officials were subject to the laws and natural justice. ‘This was the beginning of the German concept of the Rechtsstaat, the state governed by the rule of law.’

The Junkers were allowed great local power, could enserf the presents on their estates, were largely exempt from taxation, and commoners were forbidden to purchase Juncker Estates. They controlled the army and bureaucracy. Frederick the Great wrote in his Political Testament (1752) how the Junkers had sacrificed its ‘lives and goods for the service of the state’ and the monarchy must repay them with protection. (The von Kleist family lost 30 in one of his wars.) While some of them were rich, generally they were not nearly as grand and rich as the British or Austrian aristocracy and many Junkers would actually deal with their farms themselves, going with their animals to market (AJPT).

Frederick the Great’s surprise attack on Austria to conquer Silesia in 1740 forced him to fight three wars to retain his gains, the last of which was nearly a disaster. While he concluded that a cautious foreign policy was best, the striking success captured popular imagination and ‘gave to his one great Machiavellian deed an enduring aura of respectability’ (OP).

German idealism developed during an era of exceptional intellectual and cultural creativity 1770-1830 — the era of Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Beethoven. German idealists, dissatisfied with rationalism, ‘sought a deeper understanding of man, society and history. Characteristic of the movement was an intense humanism, a vital absorption in problems of individual growth and self development.’ They were mostly non-political valuing freedom of the human spirit, not political freedom. The Romantic movement, epitomised by Goethe’s extremely influential The Sorrows of Young Werther, also emphasised emotions and the medieval against rationalism and the classical world. (In Britain, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron.)

The word Libertat in German was originally used in the sense of the corporate rights of princes against the Emperor, not in the sense of the natural rights of man. The princes struggled for autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire and absolutism internally. The German idea of freedom ‘became associated with political authority, an association that long endured’ (OP). Kant is seen as the father of German liberalism, with his insistence on the progress of reason, the rule of law, man as an end (not a means), and the ideal of popular sovereignty. But he also reinforced respect for the state, the ethics of duty and acceptance of the absolute state as a practical, though temporary, necessity. Kant’s transcendental idealism was challenged by Hegel’s absolute idealism which ‘ultimately had the greater impact on German thought’ (OP).

Herder prepared the ground for Hegel. Herder rejected Enlightenment rationalism. He stressed the organic individuality of national cultures. Each nation has a unique Volksgeist (folk spirit). The state is an organism endowed with individuality and moral worth. Hegel said the state is ‘the vessel of the Weltgeist’ (world spirit), ‘the divine idea as it exists on earth’, and ‘the actually existing, realised moral life’. For Hegel, history proceeded according to God’s ‘idea’ so there could be no distinction between the state as it was and as it ought to be. He accepted no conflict between the pursuit of power and the demands of universal law and morality. War was a logical necessity, not an evil. For German idealists, ‘the state replaced the church as the repository of moral values’ (OP).

Whereas in the rest of Western Europe morality continued to rest on Christianity and natural law, for German idealism it was identified with the state and the ruling power. What the Hohenzollern rulers had created in their own interests ‘was apotheosised by German philosophers’ (OP) who influenced 19th Century students.

Napoleon’s invasion, the post-1806 reforms, and the Congress of Vienna swept away the Holy Roman Empire and hundreds of states became 39 formed into a new German Confederation. Metternich updated Richelieu’s systematic attempt to keep ‘Germany’ politically disintegrated and therefore weak.

As the forces summarised above changed society, Germans sought new ideas to reverse (romantic conservatism), contain (realistic conservatism and moderate liberalism), or promote (radical liberalism and socialism) social change.

Liberalism

Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon sparked internal changes that echoed long after his exile. Stein and Hardenberg introduced some reforms in 1807 in order to inculcate what they saw as a necessary feeling of national citizenship. They tried to convert subjects into citizens by more social and economic freedom. Serfdom was abolished, local government was opened up, the legal prohibition on the sale of noble estates was lifted (1807) and there was an increasingly market system for agriculture. They were not seeking a transformation of society or government. Government remained absolute in theory and practice. The power of the gentry in rural government continued.

In 1818 Prussia abolished all internal duties and introduced a low uniform tariff. Von Motz and Bernsdorff used the extension of the Prussian Union as foreign policy tool. Metternich tried to counter with a Central Customs Union headed by Saxony and Hanover but this failed (Austrian commercial interests did not push for lower tariffs and joining with Prussia). The Zollverein proper was formed in 1834.

Liberals saw the bureaucratic state evolving. In the southwest, proximity to France pushed liberals closer to the natural law concepts of the Enlightenment. In the north, liberals rejected natural law and, following Hegel, deified the state. The concept of the Rechtsstaat, the state governed by the rule of law, became ‘the most popular word in the lexicon of German liberalism’. Moderate liberals had more in common with bureaucratic liberals than with radical liberals. The Mittelstand came to believe not only in themselves as the embodiment of civic virtue but in a form of moderate liberalism. They rejected bureaucratic absolutism and popular democracy in favour of the Rechsstaat which was thought to embody a middle way between authority and freedom.

The French Revolution created a German radical liberal movement but it was small and impotent. There was a flurry of revolutionary activity in some German states around the French revolution of 1830. Some key figures were, like Marx, in exile.

Conservatism

Romantic conservatives regarded traditional social relations as imbued with moral and religious value that must be defended. As Burke had described it, civilisation rested on ‘the great primeval contract of eternal society’, an indissoluble social contract across generations that came from God, not rationalism. They romanticised the feudal system. Rationalists, starting with Machiavelli, had divorced religion and political theory. Ultraconservatives wanted to bring them back together. The state came from God to improve morality.

But they had a problem — how to reconcile ‘the feudal system they admired with the absolute state that was its natural foe’. They idealised the monarchy as the apex of the social pyramid but did not idealise the absolutist bureaucracy that the monarchy had nurtured and which had diminished aristocratic power.

Von Haller developed a theory: the natural condition of man is inequality and dependence with only the prince independent, subject only to God, and the state is the highest in the pyramid of contractual relationships and lies outside public law. His ideas were taken up by the Gerlach brothers who were influential with Friedrich Wilhelm IV after 1840. Leopold Gerlach became his personal adjutant and Ludwig the president of the superior court of appeals, though their influence was ironically limited given that FWIV’s belief in divine right extended to the idea that he possessed insights inaccessible to other mortals, including aristocratic intimates. For them, the nobility followed God’s will, not natural law, and they found in Haller a defence of aristocracy against absolutism and bureaucratic liberalism. It was in accord with the Gerlachs’ romantic ideas that FWIV called the United Diet in 1847.

More realistic conservatives thought von Haller’s rejection of the modern state unrealistic and looked for a doctrine they could more easily apply. They seized on the ideas of Stahl, a converted Bavarian Jew. Stahl opposed the Enlightenment, natural law, and Hegel. Like Luther he thought the state came from God to keep order and power is properly concentrated in the hands of a prince, not decentralized in a feudal order. He believed in estates (Stande) based upon existing occupational groups not the medieval corporations loved by romantics. In 1848 he was prepared to include the urban proletariat. For Stahl any assembly was purely consultative and had no control of the executive. In the 1850s he argued for representation only for landowners and industrialists with the former dominant. After 1848 Stahl’s thinking provided conservatives with a system to reconcile themselves to the constitution ‘but it also paved the way for their eventual acceptance of the Bismarckian Reich’ (OP). He was elected to the Upper House in 1848 and soon became the leader of the ultra-conservatives (JS). Gerlach would later write of him: ‘he [Stahl] fell for the most part into a vulgar constitutionalism and sought only to temper it in a conservative manner through Christian moral feelings.’

Stahl supported above all the rights of the landed aristocracy. He wrote:

‘The party of legitimacy wants estates of the realm… But … at all events, there are to be occupational classes with special rights and a special participation in the representative body of the country. At all events, landed property is to be the basis of the most important political rights… True aristocracy is not restricted to counts and barons. It runs through all human society: the farmer before the cottager, the master before the journeyman, the freeman of the city before the resident, the clergyman before the parishioner. The foundation and essence of such a true aristocracy is that people ought to be considered not only as individuals, so that they are all equal, but as representatives of a cause, a property, an occupation, and that is the extent to which they have rights and powers.’

Bismarck’s view was closer to Stahl’s than to von Haller or the Gerlachs though it’s hard to tell how influenced he was. He worked with him in the period of the Erfurt Parliament and Radowitz’s initiative. He later told Bucher that ‘at least [Stahl and his circle] had a tangible goal and I could go a way with them, yet I knew exactly where our ways separated.‘

Nationalism

In western Europe nationalism was molded by the state. In central and eastern Europe awareness of nationality preceded the nation-state and helped it emerge and east of the Rhine nationality was forged by factors such as language and ethnic origin.

Meinecke showed that the idea of ‘German nationalism was born within the cosmopolitan sentiment of the 18th century from which it gradually separated’ (OP). Herder’s (1744-1803) concept of the Volksgeist emphasized the individuality of national cultures, encouraged national Consciousness in Germany and throughout central and eastern Europe, and encouraged Germans to abandon their imitation of French literary and intellectual models. Soon intellectuals asserted German superiority: ‘Every people has had its day in history but the day of the German is the harvest of all time,’ said Schiller. The cosmopolitan universalism of the Enlightenment gave way to nationalistic universalism.

Initially, this feeling that German civilisation had a world role was more cultural than political. However, defeat by Napoleon saw the first stirrings of a German nationalist political sentiment similar to France’s after 1789, though it was the Prussian bureaucracy that galvanised the response rather than a popular movement. Also, ideas of German unity threatened conservative interests.

The incorporation of the Rhineland into Prussia post-1815 brought disruptive new influences - a larger urban class, more businessmen, more Catholics, more liberals, more peasant freeholders, fewer nobles, some Napoleonic law and so on. At the Congress of Vienna Metternich gave Prussia agricultural territory in the Rhineland, nobody knew then that beneath these farms lay one of the great European coal seams. Initially the Rhineland resisted integration but after 1840 a new generation sought a constitutional government in Berlin and favoured German unity under Prussian leadership. Increasingly, Prussian militarism and state nationalism merged with the romantic view of the state as an organism requiring growth for self-actualisation — a disruptive combination.

Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemberg were creations of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. All three built a sense of national identity after 1815. Bavaria successfully bolstered loyalty to its dynasty, the oldest in Germany. In Baden and Wurttemberg, constitutions were granted. Liberalism and nationalism came together.

Liberals and nationalists could unite against particularism and reaction. Liberalism was a divided movement and nationalism helped liberals paper over their ideological cracks. German liberalism ‘was a child of the war of liberation and the crucial issue of its earliest years was national independence more than freedom.’ The Zollverein encouraged ideas of national unity. Many German liberals started to think of Prussia as the leader of the ‘national mission’. While they longed for her liberalisation, the reality was reaction therefore liberals ‘took refuge in the Hegelian myth of her liberality’ and the assignment of a national mission to Prussia ‘reinforced the traditional synthesis of freedom and authority in German thought’ (OP).

Before 1848 German liberals relied on the force of idealism and thought the tide of liberalism would overwhelm the Metternich system. After the failures of 1848-9, ‘their trust in the power of principle suffered a terrible blow from which it never fully recovered’ (OP). Many radicals emigrated. Some like Liebknecht and Lassalle gravitated to socialism. Some like Lothar Bucher converted to conservatism (Bucher would be hired by Bismarck). ‘Most capitulated to the spirit of compromise’ (OP) and after 1859 most relinquished the goal of parliamentary government and radical change. Cf. June 1850 below.

Around mid-19th Century in the universities, students ‘deserted the lecture halls of the philosophers for those of historians. The romantic style was superseded in art by impressionism and in literature by realism’ (OP). Leopold Ranke rejected Hegel’s metaphysics but also ‘viewed the state as a spiritual force whose vitality and individuality were determined by its “idea”’ which took shape in conflict with the ideas of other states. He saw war as ‘a test of the moral and spiritual fibre of the state’ (OP). He also argued that ‘The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it has attained. It is obliged, therefore, to organise all its internal resources for the purpose of self preservation. This is the supreme law of the state.’ This principle became known as Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy).

After 1848, many liberals prioritised national unity over the morality of the methods used. ‘In many minds the romantic cult of genius and general discouragement of the efficacy of popular movements combined to produce a vague longing for a new Siegfried who could brave the flames to awaken the German nation from its sleep of centuries’ (OP p31).

Government from mid-Century

By the mid-century the social composition of the government was shifting from bureaucratic absolutism towards constitutional monarchy. The nobility were still favoured but did not monopolise state service. Most officials were now bourgeois or humbler. Some commoners had climbed the ladder to leading positions and were sometimes awarded with ennoblement (without feudal roots). Increasingly there was a bureaucratic caste proud of its status and the notion that they served a state above the competing forces of civil society. Between 1847-62, there was a shift in the proportion who were either bourgeois or recently ennobled: 31% to 27% of diplomats, 36% to 40% of the highest officials, 21% to 31% of generals in the Prussian army were. There was a generation gap with junior officials better educated but relatively poorly paid and the ranks were crowded with longer waits for promotion. Some officials participated in the 1848 unrest. (OP p107ff)

Officials in the early 19th century, including those trained in the new Berlin Technical Institute from 1821, were still paternalist in many ways and regulated important industries. In 1851 the Ministry of Commerce owned and operated a fifth of Prussian coal in state mines. The Prussian Overseas Trading Company (founded 1772) acted as a development bank raising funds to float private enterprises, seeking new markets for Prussian companies, constructing roads, operating factories.

But the message of Adam Smith was spreading. Stein and Hardenberg had removed many rules including on the sale of estates and freedom of occupation. By mid-century a new breed of entrepreneurs had emerged who wanted less government intervention, less competition from state-owned entities, fewer limits on joint stock firms. They wanted government to focus on things like transport infrastructure, banking facilities, railways.

During the 1830s the Prussian government had refused to subsidise railways and was reluctant to authorise private railway building. There were many arguments. Railways were seen as a threat to the old order. Joint stock companies would draw capital away from trade and agriculture and depress the price of government bonds. Landowners would lose property. Bureaucrats would lose control. The postal service would lose its monopoly. More government debt would mean more taxes and constitutional concessions.

In the 1840s they changed direction. Officials worried that Prussia’s international position would be weakened without technical progress. The military wanted railways. Joint stock companies were allowed, though in the 1850s they still needed a charter (which could take a year) and had to claim they had a ‘worthy’ purpose. Various industries saw some deregulation. In the 1850s the government gradually removed control of private mining companies and taxes were reduced (culminating in the June 1861 statute). Ministers still opposed allowing joint stock companies for banking as they feared the financial power that would accumulate in corporate banks, and they were supported by many private bankers, though there were loopholes that allowed, for example, the founding of the Berliner Handelgesellschaft in 1856. (High aristocrats sometimes worked with bankers to try to create new banks but still did not persuade the government — ie. the elite was divided over the right course.) Also financiers were innovative in creating financial instruments to evade regulations.

While wages of industrial labour rose maybe ~16% in the 1850s, prices rose 78% 1850-5 and were still 40% above their 1850 level in 1859. In the 1860s labour saw a 25% rise in wages while prices rose 12%. Strikes (and unions) were prohibited under the 1845 industrial code but still occurred especially in the 1857-9 depression. (1816-48 there were 186 examples of machine breaking and attacks on power looms in the Bund.) Anti-combination laws were repealed in 1869.

In the 1850s the growing commercial middle class resented the Junkers’ influence across government and the police state interfering in their liberties. Financiers wanted the abolition of usury laws which limited interest rates to 6%. Employers wanted regulations on employment lifted. Merchants and landowners supported free trade, heavy industry lobbied for protection. The Zollverein, railways and a common commercial code in 1861 helped a single market develop in Lesser Germany but business wanted progress on currencies, weights and measures, business laws and so on (OP p122). Most businessmen still kept out of politics in the 1850s and left it to the liberal intelligentsia, officials and landowners: between 1848-62 the proportion of businessmen in the Landtag remained flat at 7%. The percentage of votes cast for liberal candidates in 1863 was roughly the same across all three voting classes.