Fragmentation, consolidation, and the Bürgertum

No less paradoxical than the status of England as both the most bourgeois country and the least, or the case of France as at once the homeland of modern revolution and the country whose transformation during the nineteenth century was most gradual and the least complete, is the case of Germany. By many measures the country of the three where bourgeois groups retained their pre-modern features for the longest time, and where middle-class influence over the direction of government policy was weakest, it was nonetheless the place where the characterization of modern society and politics as “bourgeois” first found clear expression.

In its fully fledged form the notion only emerged during the 1840s, in the writings of Marx and Engels, and soon after, rather differently, in their contemporary W. H. Riehl (whom we will meet later in this chapter). But all of them relied greatly on Hegel’s theorization of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Philosophy of Right of 1821. In Hegel as in his German predecessors, bürgerliche Gesellschaft had a meaning best rendered in English as “civil society” rather than “bourgeois society” (Bürger also means a citizen in German), and their use of the term owed much to earlier discussions about it in other countries, notably eighteenth-century Scotland. But Hegel’s theorization differed from these others in a way that revealed its peculiarly German lineage. As will be seen when we consider his analysis in a bit more detail later on, he made a clearer distinction between civil society and the state than earlier thinkers did. The general notion of civil society as an organized form of social life governed by laws made it seem natural to consider political authority as part of it; but rulers and administrators in Germany sowed the seeds of their separation by taking bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of state action and policy, focusing on social relations and private behavior as targets of their efforts to improve and develop their territories. Hegel’s clear distinction between society and the state gave more explicit theoretical form to this division. In doing so he provided the starting point from which Marx, in a dialectical reversal of a kind he first learned from Hegel, would turn the notion of bourgeois society as a formation whose development and elaboration served the aims of state policy into the idea that state power had to be subservient to the needs of society’s dominant forces.