Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of
Modern History.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Review Article
State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New
Edition of Reinhart Koselleck's Preussen zwischen
Reform und Revolution1
Jonathan Sperber
University of Missouri-Columbia
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
279
Yet the results of the subsequent Reform Era-and this is a key point in
Koselleck's work-showed the program's inherent contradictions. Socioeconomic modernization and liberalization-abolition of serfdom, noble
privilege, and feudal relations of productionin agriculture;the creation of a
free land market;the parallel creation of a free labor marketby the abolition
of compulsory guilds and of restrictions on the freedom of movement, settlement, andoccupation;encouragementof industrial-capitalistenterprisewere vigorously resisted by the existing corporatesocial bodies, the estates
(Stdnde). The nobility used the experimental representative institutions of
the Reform Era to demand a returnto serfdom, the urbanmaster artisans a
reinstatement of compulsory guilds. Seeing their socioeconomic program
threatenedby theirpolitical one, the reformingofficials decidedon the former's
priority, and after 1815, ratherthan grant a constitution and representative
parliamentaryinstitutions, they set themselves up as the representatives of
society. This "intraadministrativeconstitutionalism" (p. 264) was based on
the collegial organization of the administration,with its constant debate and
reexamination at different levels of proposed laws or decrees, allowing the
bureaucracyto articulate the interests of different social groups and guide a
still backward society on its journey toward modernity. The successful application of this program produced over several decades two new social
groups:a capitalistbourgeoisie, conscious of its economic influence,impatient
with bureaucratictutelage, the leading element in an emancipatoryliberalism,
and a propertyless proletariat, unprotectedby the abolished patriarchalrural
social order or the urbanguilds, ready for violent action. The opposition of
these two social groups, culminating in the revolution of 1848, broughtdown
rule-"The state of the administrative
the system of bureaucratic,authoritarian
bureaucracy succumbed to its own creation" (p. 587)-but the Prussian
constitution emerging from the revolution sanctioned the results of the bureaucracy's reform program.2
I feel a certain reluctance to criticize such an elegantly dialectical thesiswithin the book, Koselleck uses Hegel's ideas as a running commentaryon
his empirical research-but, allowing analytic interest to overcome aesthetic
reserve, I would suggest three ways in which the work can fruitfully be
considered. To start, it is an account of class formation, one which stresses
the role of the state in shaping social structures. The book is also a social
history of the Prussianbureaucracy,taking it up, as Koselleck notes (p. 16),
from Hans Rosenberg'sportrayalof the group'srise to power in the eighteenth
century, and examining it at the height of its power and influence. Finally,
the work can also be seen as an attemptto explain the uniquenatureof Prussia
among the various German states and, more broadly, among the European
2
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
280
Sperber
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
281
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
282
Sperber
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
283
the growth of factory industry, a capitalist bourgeoisie, or an industrialproletariat in Prussia primarily as products of state initiative.8
Industrialization was not the dominant fact of the Prussian or German
economy before 1850. Factory workers and machine-made products were
still outnumbered by protoindustrial outworkers, nominally independent
nonguild artisanproducers, working underthe direction and de facto control
of merchant capitalists.9 This form of production was expanding from its
previous strongholds in textiles and metalworking and moving into such
previously guilded crafts as shoemaking, tailoring, and furniture making.
There were some 21,000 workers in the Berlin garment industry in 1849, a
tradeorganizedalong outworkinglines, threetimes as many as were employed
in machineand optical equipmentmanufacture,a centerof factoryproduction.
Both critics and defenders of the Prussian bureaucracy'seconomic policies
have focused their attention primarilyon the early factories, as they were to
be the dominant element in post-1850 developments, but to provide a more
complete picture of the bureaucracy'srelation to civil society in the firsthalf
of the nineteenth century more attention needs to be paid to protoindustry
and other forms of outworking. 0
8Tilly, Financial Institutions, pp. 15-16; Herbert Kische, "From Monopoly to
Laissez-Faire: The Early Growth of the WupperValley Textile Trades," Journal of
EuropeanEconomicHistory 1 (1972): 298-407; id., "GrowthDeterrentsof a Medieval
Heritage:The Aachen-AreaWoolensTradebefore 1790," Journalof EconomicHistory
24 (1964): 517-37; id., "The Impact of the French Revolution on the Lower Rhine
Textile Districts: Some Comments on Economic Development and Social Change,"
EconomicHistoryReview, 2d. ser., 15 (1962/63): 304-27; Max Barkhausen,"Staatliche
Wirtschaftslenkungund freies Unternehmertumim westdeutschen und im nord- und
siidniederliindischenRaum bei der Entstehungder neuzeitlichen Industrie," Vierteljahrschriftfiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte45 (1958): 168-241; Karl Heinrich
Kaufhold,Das Metallgewerbeder GrafschaftMarkim 18. undfriihen19. Jahrhundert
(Dortmund, 1976); id., Das Gewerbe in Preussen um 1800 (G6ttingen, 1978), p.
34ff. and passim. Parts of the Rhineland and Westphaliahad been Prussianterritory
underthe old regime, but there is no reasonto thinkthatFredericianeconomic policies
helped the industryof the region andplausible groundsto thinkit had negative effects.
Id., Metallgewerbe der GrafschaftMark, pp. 68-71; Gewerbe in Preussen, pp. 44749; HerbertKisch, Prussian Mercantilism and the Rise of the Krefeld Silk Industry:
Variations on an Eighteenth CenturyTheme(Philadelphia, 1968).
9 On the concept of protoindustry,PeterKriedte,HansMedick, JiirgenSchlumbohm,
Industrialisierungvor der Industrialisierung:GewerblicheWarenproduktion
auf dem
Lande in der Formationsperiodedes Kapitalismus(Gottingen, 1977) (now in English
as IndustrializationbeforeIndustrialization:RuralIndustryin the Genesisof Capitalism,
trans. Beate Schemp [Cambridge, 1982]). Kriedte et al. defended and elaboratedon
their views in "Die Proto-Industrialisierungauf dem PriifstandderhistorischenZunft:
Antwort auf einige Kritiker," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 87-105. An
empirical regional study of the development of protoindustryis Wolfgang Mager,
"Protoindustrialisierungund agrarischheimgewerblicheVerflechtungin Ravensberg
wahrendder FruhenNeuzeit. Studienzu einer Gesellschaftsformationim Ubergang,"
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8 (1982): 435-74. Koselleck's figures on the numberof
factory workersin Prussia in 1846 are exaggerated, as they include large numbersof
journeymenmillers and protoindustrialoutworkingspinners and weavers (p. 698).
10 Figures are from Otto Busch, "Das Gewerbein der Wirtschaftdes RaumesBerlin/
Brandenburg1800-1850," in Untersuchungenzur Geschichte der friihen Industrialisierungvornehmlichim Wirtschaftsraum
Berlin/Brandenburg,ed. OttoBusch(Berlin,
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
284
Sperber
1971), pp. 4-105; on outworking, see Bergmann(n. 6 above), pp. 280-91; further
information on outworking can be expected from Friedrich Lenger's forthcoming
Dusseldorf dissertation on the Dusseldorf artisanatein the nineteenth century. On
general trends in the first half of the nineteenth century, Karl Heinrich Kaufhold,
"Handwerkund Industrie 1800-1850," in Handbuchder deutschen Wirtschafts-und
Sozialgeschichte, ed. HermannAubin and Wolfgang Zorn, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 197176), 2:321-68.
" Different interpretationsof official policies are discussed by JiirgenKocka in his
illuminatingessay, "PreussischerStaat und Modernisierungim Vormarz:Marxistischleninistische Interpretationenund ihre Probleme," in Sozialgeschichte Heute, ed.
Hans-UlrichWehler (Gbttingen, 1974), pp. 211-27.
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
285
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
286
Sperber
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
287
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
288
Sperber
labor. Such a group had little interest in the dissolution of feudal obligations:
lacking both their own large estates and easy access to urbanmarkets, either
domestic or in WesternEurope, they had no incentive to engage in capitalist
agriculture. Consequently, the agrarianreforms in Saxony, Bavaria, Baden,
and the NapoleonicGrandDuchy of Berg andKingdomof WestWiurttemberg,
phalia were carried out slowly and reluctantly. Attempts by reform-minded
bureaucratsto abolish feudal obligations were quickly halted, both by the
hostility of the nobles and by official reluctance to underminethe economic
position of the nobility. Whetherabolishing or preservingfeudal obligations,
encouraging or hindering market agriculture, agrarianreform in almost all
of Germany was shaped by the interests and influence of the landowning
nobility and usually occurred to the disadvantage of the peasantry.19
More than in industry, the Prussian bureaucracyplayed a leading role in
the creation of capitalist productive relations in agriculture, initiating the
agrarianreforms and determiningtheir legal forms. The social andeconomic
content of the reforms, in Prussia as well as elsewhere in Germany, was
decided less by bureaucraticinitiative than by the power and influence of the
affected social groups. Even when they wanted to-and at least sometimes
they did not-officials were unableto protectpeasantinterests in the process
of providingcompensationfor abolished feudal obligations. Peasantinterests
were best protected by peasant actions, and the rustic uprisings of 1830 in
Saxony or 1848 in Wurttembergbroke a legal and administrativeparalysis,
leading to the redemptionof feudal obligations on terms relatively favorable
to the peasantry.20
Although there were repeated agrariandisorders in some parts of Prussia,
the absence of a widespread rural uprising meant that the Prussian agrarian
reform was shaped by the interaction of bureaucraticintentions and noble
interests. Researchers have concentratedon portrayingthe effects of these
interactions on the decision-making process at the ministerial level, and
19On agrarianreforms outside of Prussia, see the monographicstudies of Reiner
Gross,Die burgerlicheAgrarreformin Sachsenin der erstenHalftedes 19. Jahrhunderts
(Weimar, 1968); Friederike Hausmann, Die Agrarpolitik der Regierung Montgelas
(Frankfurtam Main, 1975); Wolfgangvon Hippel, Die Bauernbefreiungim Konigreich
Wurttemberg,2 vols. (Boppard, 1977); HelmutBerding, Napoleonische Herrschaftsund Gesellschaftspolitik im Konigreich Westfalen(Gottingen, 1973), esp. p. 76ff.;
and Elisabeth Fehrenbach,Traditionelle Gesellschaft und revolutionaresRecht: Die
Einfuhrungder Code Napoleon in den Rheinbundstaaten(Gottingen, 1974), esp. p.
79ff. The contrast between the Prussian and West Elbian agrarianreforms is well
broughtout in id., "Verfassungs- und sozialpolitische Reformenund Reformprojekte
in Deutschlandunterdem Einflussdes napoleonischenFrankreichs,"Historische Zeitschrift 228 (1979): 288-316. Christof Dipper, Die Bauernbefreiungin Deutschland
1790-1850 (Stuttgart, 1980), is a useful synthesis of much recent work which points
out the need for furtherstudy of the relationship among liberation from feudal obligations, other agrarianreforms (division of the commons, deparcelization), and the
development of agriculturalproductivityoutside of East Elbian Prussia.
20 See the works of von Hippel and Gross cited in the previous note. The two earliest
and most radical agrarianreforms in Germany, those in Schleswig-Holstein and on
the left bankof the Rhine, carriedout undervery differentpolitical auspices and from
equally different socioeconomic startingpoints, have still not been well studied.
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
289
98.
22
fur
tingischeGelehrteAnzeigen222 (1970):55-67, and"Die Immediatkommission
derPreussischen
Reaktion
imVormarz,"
diestandischen
alsInstrument
Angelegenheiten
Festschriftifur Hermann H,eimpel,ed. Mitarbeiterdes Max-Planck-Institutsfur Ge-
Obenaus's
schichte,3 vols. (Gottingen,1971), 1:410-46. Koselleckacknowledged
criticismsin the prefaceto the 2d ed. of his book, whichappearsas an unpaginated
in the 3d ed.
introduction
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
290
Sperber
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
291
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
292
Sperber
also lacked the support of potential allies from civil society provided by a
parliamentarysystem and found it more difficult to avoid becoming the tools
of a reactionary-aristocratic
clique dominatingthe highestlevels of government.
Neither south German nor Prussian officials could, in the end, do much
againstnoble privileges andinfluence,but they directedtheireffortsin opposite
directions. In Prussia, the authoritieswere sometimes able to dissolve feudal
and seigneurial relations in agriculture but could do nothing to shake the
nobles' hold on local government, while in southern Germany, the state
authoritieswere sometimesvictoriousin theircountlessbattleswith the nobility
for local political power in the countryside, but had enormous difficulties
before 1848 in arranging for the redemption of feudal obligations. South
German officials, although theoretically in favor of laissez-faire, hesitated
to engage in a broadside attack against guild privileges or residence and
marriagerestrictions, so threateningto the numerousclass of masterartisans.
Prussianofficials simply decreedlaissez-faireand the mastercraftsmenlacked
both the numbers and the political influence to reverse this decision.27
Just as forms of bureaucraticrule differed in the Germanstates during the
Vormdrz, so did the nature of oppositional liberalism. Opposition to bureaucratictutelagein political life was a majorfeatureof at least one important
strandof south Germanliberalism, but such opposition was frequentlycombined with a hostility towardor at least suspicionof laissez-faireand industrial
capitalism, both regarded as socially retrograde products of bureaucratic
interference with the naturalworkings of society. Rhenish and Westphalian
liberalism, althoughequally hostile to bureaucraticpolitical domination, saw
its negative socioeconomic effects precisely in its actions against the natural
order of laissez-faire capitalism.28It certainly seems ironic that the south
Germanbureaucrats,so carefulandgradualin theirapproachto guild privileges
and restrictions on freedom of movement and settlement, should have been
denounced as rabidly procapitalist while their Prussian counterparts, who
gave the guilds short shrift, were condemned for their hostility to business
interests. These varying forms of antibureaucraticliberalism, however, reflected the more autonomousposition of the bureaucracyin Vormdrzsouthern
27 This comparisonis based on the importantessay of Fehrenbach,"Verfassungsund sozialpolitische Reformen."
28
James Sheehan, "Liberalism and Society in Germany, 1815-48," Journal of
ModernHistory 45 (1973): 583-604; id., "Partei, Volk and Staat: Some Reflections
on the Relationshipbetween Liberal Thoughtand Action in the Vormarz," in SozialgeschichteHeute, ed. Hans-UlrichWehler(Gottingen, 1974), pp. 162-74; id., German
Liberalism in the NineteenthCentury(Chicago, 1978), pp. 19-50; LotharGall, "Liberalismusund 'burgerlicheGesellschaft': Zu Charakterund Entwicklungder liberalen
Bewegungin Deutschland,"HistorischeZeitschrift220 (1975): 324-56; HelmutSedatis,
Liberalismus und Handwerk in Sudwestdeutschland(Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 9-118.
Muchof this recentworkwas anticipatedin the remarkableandstill not fully appreciated
study of LeonardKrieger, The GermanIdea of Freedom (Chicago, 1957), pp. 280325. The perception of liberalism as exclusively a laissez-faire movement of the
capitalistbourgeoisiefound in TheodoreHamerow,Restoration,Revolution,Reaction:
Economics and Politics in Germany1815-1871 (Princeton, N.J., 1958), pp. 63-64,
seems insufficient to grasp the complexities of Vormarzpolitics and society.
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
293
Germany than it possessed in Prussia. Even the modest steps taken toward
occupational freedom by the south Germanauthoritiesappearedshocking in
a social environmentlargely lackingin capitalistentrepreneurs,while RhenishWestphalianliberals opposed the Prussian authorities because their actions
seemed to discriminateagainst business interests, notjust out of bureaucratic
arbitrariness,but for the profitof anothersocial group-namely, East Elbian
large landowners.
By the 1840s, liberalismin Prussiawas by no meansrestrictedto its western
provinces, but had strongholds in Berlin, Silesia, and East Prussia as well.
It would be of interest to ascertain whether these liberals held a "RhenishWestphalian" or "south German" opinion of the relationshipbetween state
andsociety, or whethera thirdanddifferentpatternprevailed.An investigation
of this question might help to elucidate furtherthe political role played by
the Prussian bureaucracy.
IV
The general tenor of much recent research has been to break many of the
links suggested by Koselleck: those between bureaucraticintention or organization and bureaucraticaction, between such action and socioeconomic
or political change, or between the development of the Prussian state and
the growth of a capitalist social and economic order. I make no pretensions
of being able to reforge these broken links in a new alignment, but I would
like to conclude by discussing some avenues of currentresearchwhich have
the potential for leading to a new understandingof the interaction between
state and civil society in Prussia and Germany during the first half of the
nineteenth century.
One possibility involves a reorientation of historical periodization. The
firsthalf of the nineteenth century is often studied as a precursorto the social
and economic forms of the second, with historians straining, for instance,
to analyze every early form of factory industry. In doing so, they often
neglect the continuities with the preceding fifty years: the breakdown of
precapitalistforms of productionand theirreplacementnot by factoryindustry
but by outworking, an increasingly proletarianizedartisanate,a commercial
agriculture,anda growingrurallowerclass. Theseprocessesplayedthemselves
out against a very different political backgroundbetween 1800 and 1850,
however, from thatof 1750-1800. In such a context, the bureaucraticpolitical
initiatives of the first decades of the nineteenth century may be seen as an
interventionin an ongoingprocessof social changeratherthanas the origination
of a new socioeconomic order. Such a perspective, if not necessarily this
particularperiodization, is a familiar one in English history, given its post1688 political continuity, but it has been applied to the study of the French
Revolution as well, suggesting its application to the history of the German
response to that event.29
29 This pointof view, implicitin theAnnalesschoolcritiqueof the Marxistinterpretationof theFrenchrevolution(e.g., FrangoisFuret,"Lecatechismerevolutionnaire,"AnnalesESC26 [1971]:255-89; or EmmanuelLe Roy Ladurie,"Revoltes
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
294
Sperber
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
295
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
296
Sperber
et Bureaucrates
en FranceauXIXesiecle (Geneva,1980);CliveChurch,Revolution
andRedTape:TheFrenchMinisterial
Bureaucracy
1770-1850(Oxford,1981);Bernard
Le Clere and Vincent Wright, Les Pre'fetsdu Second Empire (Paris, 1973). German
historians seeking cross-national comparisonshave often turnedto England, but for
the first half of the nineteenth century, comparisons with France, a country whose
socioeconomic and political structures were then much closer to Germany's than
England's were, might prove more fruitful.
This content downloaded from 79.175.91.203 on Sun, 17 May 2015 22:15:18 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions