As we saw in Chapter 8, the situation of such “free professions” as medicine, dentistry, chemistry, and engineering altered perceptibly with changes in the market for services, itself conditioned by such factors as demography, the rise of large-scale business, and social insurance legislation. The “freedom” of the “free professions,” originally conceived in the liberal thought patterns of the 1860s and 1870s as liberation from bureaucratic control, appeared to take on a different meaning in the face of unequal “clienteles” such as large industry or the health-insurance funds. Words and sometimes behavior mimetic of organized proletarian labor appeared among the otherwise genteel professional organizations. The usually staid journal of the German Medical Association admonished its members in 1900 with words echoing the Communist Manifesto: “Physicians of Germany, unite! Organize yourselves! ‘Si vis pacem para helium’ [If you desire peace, prepare for war] is also valid for us.” Yet, it was not class warfare or the overthrow of the system that such groups preached and sought; instead they wished to use labor union and cartel techniques to strengthen their own bargaining position so as then to enter into a stable and equal partnership with the representatives of their “clients.” In these struggles the state bureaucracy and legislature served more as tactical allies, at least incipiently, than as instigators of their own original programs of professionalization “from above.”

Many of these generalizations hold true of the remaining professional groups in the period of 1900–18.