Fragmentation, consolidation, and the Bürgertum

No less paradoxical than the status of England as both the most bourgeois countryand the least, or the case of France as at once the homeland of modernrevolution and the country whose transformation during the nineteenth centurywas most gradual and the least complete, is the case of Germany. By manymeasures the country of the three where bourgeois groups retained theirpre-modern features for the longest time, and where middle-class influence overthe direction of government policy was weakest, it was nonetheless the placewhere 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 thewritings of Marx and Engels, and soon after, rather differently, in theircontemporary W. H. Riehl (whom we will meet later in this chapter). But all ofthem relied greatly on Hegel’s theorization of bürgerlicheGesellschaft in his Philosophy of Right of 1821.In Hegel as in his German predecessors, bürgerlicheGesellschaft had a meaning best rendered in English as“civil society” rather than “bourgeois society”(Bürger also means a citizen in German), and theiruse of the term owed much to earlier discussions about it in other countries,notably eighteenth-century Scotland. But Hegel’s theorization differedfrom these others in a way that revealed its peculiarly German lineage. As willbe seen when we consider his analysis in a bit more detail later on, he made aclearer distinction between civil society and the state than earlier thinkersdid. The general notion of civil society as an organized form of social lifegoverned by laws made it seem natural to consider political authority as part ofit; but rulers and administrators in Germany sowed the seeds of their separationby taking bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of stateaction and policy, focusing on social relations and private behavior as targetsof their efforts to improve and develop their territories. Hegel’s cleardistinction between society and the state gave more explicit theoretical form tothis division. In doing so he provided the starting point from which Marx, in adialectical reversal of a kind he first learned from Hegel, would turn thenotion of bourgeois society as a formation whose development and elaborationserved the aims of state policy into the idea that state power had to besubservient to the needs of society’s dominant forces.