This post is an installment in a longer series on Guilds, Old and New. To review a full index of all the installments to this series, see the introductory, part one of the series, here.
While Bowen’s book1 is an intellectual history, and my interests have been more in the practical pursuit and application of corporate pluralism, it will be understandable that there are several currents of corporatist theory covered by Bowen which I’ve not emphasized in this series. I thought though that it may be beneficial to survey Bowen’s broader reflections on this fuller theoretical context of German corporatist thought as provided in his book’s conclusion. Before getting to that task, however, we should examine the other period of practical corporatist experimentation covered by Bowen: that provided through the, perhaps, to popular imagination, unlikely source of none other than Otto von Bismarck.
Early in life Bismarck had developed an interest in the German corporatist tradition. This seems to have been largely under the influence of the conservatism of F. J. Stahl, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and eventually the “monarchical socialism” of Albert Schäffle. (All figures and topics covered in Bowen’s book, but I’m glossing over in this series). Though early in his Chancellorship he’d entertained a more liberal policy than those figures would have endorsed, as he became increasingly disillusioned with the governance effects of such a policy — as well as his perception of the liberals’ political weakness — and concerned with co-opting more socially and politically radical (even revolutionary) tendencies, he returned to his earlier interest in guild corporatism, a Ständestaat, as a solution to these compounded problems.
His initial aspiration toward corporate governance had been quite in keeping with many of the ideas we saw in the work of the Social Catholics. In the end, Bismarck’s vision of Ständestaat too, despite his greater influence on the mechanisms of government than the Social Catholics could ever claim, faced too much resistance. Though he did manage a more modest form of guild corporatism through the implementation of social insurance. Bowen takes us through this story, I hope not in an excessively indulgent set of episodic quotations:
Bismarck's efforts to promote the development of corporative political and economic institutions during the decade 1880-90 were closely bound up with his "new orientation" away from liberalism. His plan to supplement (or perhaps even to replace) the democratically elected Reichstag by establishing a National Economic Council was defeated. He came somewhat closer to a realization of corporatist ideas in the insurance schemes which he carried through, and his corporatist sympathies were also strongly reflected in the amendments to the Trades Law (Gewerbeordnung) enacted under his auspices in the same period. He was thus only partly successful in his efforts to find in corporatism a means of counteracting what he considered to be the socially and nationally disruptive tendencies deriving from both economic liberalism and democratic collectivism
As a young man in the years just before 1848 Bismarck had been a warm partisan of the "estates" theory of political organization propounded by Stahl and von Gerlach…
In the early 1840's Bismarck had been thoroughly convinced of the eternal rightness of such a scheme of "stündisch aufgebaute Volksvertretung [literally translated as ‘Hourly representation of the people’]." In 1848, however, he came to the conclusion that a "fourth estate of the dispossessed" should be drawn into the political scheme as a counter-weight to the liberal middle classes. Like his political mentors and associates, Stahl and von Gerlach, he still had as little use for the "head-counting" principle of universal suffrage as for the three-class system of property qualifications subsequently adopted for the Prussian Chamber of Deputies.
...as the Reichstag began to fight for power and influence over the government and as the parliamentary strength of an avowedly "reichsfeindlich" [hostile to the Reich] revolutionary socialist party increased by leaps and bounds, the Imperial Chancellor grew more and more disillusioned with his experiment in democratic parliamentarism, and seems to have turned once again to the political ideal of his youth, brought up to date by the newer theories of Schäffle on "vocational representation."
He repeatedly voiced his disappointment with the Reichstag's low level of competence in economic matters and deplored the fact that the majority of its members were "not drawn from the producing classes...but rather are estranged from the real working life of the nation by reason of their literary or scientific interests, having neither sympathy nor understanding for its weal and woe."
Bismarck made his first attempt to find such a way [of avoiding the partisan bickering in the Reichstag which he thought was tearing the country apart] in 1880-81, when he brought forward his project for setting up a National Economic Council (Reichsvolkswirtschaftsrat). He seems to have hoped that the success of this project would be a first step toward his ultimate goal of modifying the democratic franchise and of supplementing or perhaps superseding the Reichstag by means of a corporative chamber based upon vocational associations. After his retirement, he frequently laid claim to a belief of many years' standing that "in Prussia, as well as in the Reich, our electoral laws could be founded upon...vocational bodies, with each of these associations enjoying the right to be represented directly by its own deputies."
In the end, though, the liberal dominated Reichstag refused to fund his National Economic Council. Though Bismarck’s most ambitious aspirations for corporative government were not able to gain sufficient traction, it would be overstating the case to claim that he had no success in such directions:
A somewhat larger measure of success attended his efforts – apparently inspired principally by Schäffle – to organize workers' insurance along corporative lines. Testimony confirming such an interpretation of his policy can be cited abundantly out of his own mouth. In an article published in the Hamburger Nachrichten after his dismissal he referred to his desire, as Chancellor, to promote the development of groups "within which the tasks of social politics, in specie those of [workers']...insurance, could be worked out on corporative [genossenschaftlich] lines and which,...when established by legislation, could have formed the foundation for electoral colleges in a system of national representation."
The accident insurance law of July 6, 1884, represented in fact the closest approach under the Hohenzollern Empire to a practical realization of industrial associations of the type approved by the corporatist theory of monarchical socialism. Vocational bodies comprising both employers and workers were made the "bearers" of the insurance liability. All workers covered by the law were obliged to become members of the "insurance society" established for their particular trade. The state bore only the cost of maintaining a National Insurance Office, which was charged with general supervisory responsibility.
The amendments successfully sponsored by Bismarck in the 1880's revived a number of...sanctions and limited the right to engage in certain occupations independently of governmental or guild authorization. The principal effect of these reversions to the pre-liberal industrial regime was to strengthen and extend guild organization in some fields as against factory industry and, incidentally, to hamper the radical trade union movement.
So, the long 19th century legacy of German guild corporatism was not entirely a failure, thanks to the efforts of Bismarck. Though, it must be conceded that compared to the ambitions of Social Catholicism – and other corporatist theories discussed in Bowen’s book – Bismarck’s achievements do seem to pale. With that observation in mind, I want to end Bowen’s set of installments to this series on Guilds, Old and New, with some broader stroke reflections from his conclusion. Not only will they provide an overview of his topic, German corporatism, it will provide occasion to squeeze in at the last moment some insights into some of those other traditions discussed by Bowen but neglected in this series. Again, we leave Bowen a long leash in laying out those observations.
Although the stream of corporatist philosophizing has tended to maintain a fairly constant volume over the past century and a half, the degree of practical interest in those theories manifested by publicists, by statesmen and by the general public has tended to fluctuate rather widely. It is possible to distinguish four separate periods during which the most lively discussions of corporatist doctrines occurred. Each of these periods was marked by a profound political crisis, or by mounting social tensions, or by the occurrence of both in conjunction. Widespread interest in corporatist ideas was manifested, in particular, during the national struggle against Napoleon; during the constitutional and social conflicts of the 1840's; during the years of rapid industrialization accompanied by social polarization and religious contention between 1870 and 1890; and during the years of war, national defeat, political turmoil and social unrest that preceded and attended the birth of the Weimar republic.
Probably in no country has corporatist speculation been more abundant, more continuous or more varied than in Germany. A partial explanation of this circumstance is doubtless to be found in the tenacious survival in many parts of Germany of the guilds, and of the feudal estates as the only mediums for political representation, down to the middle of the nineteenth century and even beyond.
Hostility generated at that time against the French conqueror came to be directed also at the political and social principles which he sought to impose upon the satellite states of the French Imperium. Romanticism sought to vindicate the cultural individuality of the German nation, especially by exalting its medieval past in opposition to the political and social philosophy of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Nationalist philosophers like Fichte and Hegel thought that Rousseau's atomistic conception of the state as an aggregation of undifferentiated individuals was inadequate as a moral foundation for the strong state that the German Volk obviously needed if it was to achieve political unity and social coherence.
Virtually all subsequent German corporatists have held the individualistic, rationalistic and egalitarian spirit of the Revolution to be the antithesis of a truly German social outlook, insisting that the German nation could fulfill its historic mission and develop its greatest potential strength only by giving full scope for expression to all the subsidiary communities which were its organic members
Especially after 1870 many corporatists were moved, largely by their alarm at the electoral victories of Social Democracy, to express antagonism toward the doctrine of monistic state sovereignty and toward the reality of bureaucratic centralism, seeing especially in the latter an instrument that might work much harm if it were to fall into socialist hands as a result of the operation of the democratic franchise. Just as revolutionary Marxian socialism came, after 1870, to supersede liberalism as the main target of corporatist attack, so after the rise of revisionism in German Social Democracy – and especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Leninism and revolutionary communism came to figure in that role.
All [the German corporatist traditions] had a low opinion of the existing parliamentary system, and all were in agreement that the sphere of the political parliament would have to be redefined in relation to the powers to be exercised by a new, functional chamber; but, with the possible exception of Bismarck and Moellendorff, none seriously entertained the aim of suppressing territorial representation or of making the democratically elected Reichstag subordinate to a body formed on the basis of vocational suffrage
While, as we’ve seen in this series, and Walker’s book on German hometowns, Germany had a long history of heterarchical pluralism, but Bowen reminds us that though perhaps more limited in its historical impact, there was a strain of German corporatism which was hierarchical pluralism. Along with Bismarck’s efforts in this direction were those of what Bowen calls “collective economy” and the monarchical socialists which had so inspired the former.
...there was one fundamental issue – the role to be played by the existing state in bringing about the new corporative order – on which fairly sharp differences in principle may be noticed. According to the program of Monarchical Socialism, the secular state as represented by the "social monarchy of the Hohenzollerns" was to be the principal reorganizing agency, acting from above to impose the new institutions, and actively intervening afterward in order to p reserve a balance of social forces. Although there were Social Catholic theorists (Hitze and Vogelsang, for example) whose views might be construed at some points in a similar sense, the memory of the Kulturkampf and of earlier struggles between church and state in Prussia lingered among Catholic social theorists and made them extremely reluctant, on the whole, to enlarge the sphere of influence of a potentially hostile state. Collective Economy, although its authors had much to say about the evils of bureaucracy and about the advantages of self-government in industry, took the position that Germany's direst national catastrophe since the Battle of Jena could not be retrieved without vigorous, unified leadership, and that this leadership could come only from a strong, central authority.
Rathenau, Moellendorff and their associates projected their ideal corporatist order in the shape of a closely integrated structure of federated cartels in which the public interest, as well as that of labor and that of management, would receive appropriate recognition. Thus within the space of fifty years German corporatism ceased to be tinged with nostalgia for the age of the Meistersinger and came to focus attention sharply upon economic realities and social problems
...some of the most illustrious German names of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear on the roster of contributors to the German corporatist tradition, and few of the nation's pre-eminent political and social philosophers have not been in some way associated with its evolution.
Perhaps its not too on the nose to observe that the attention of German philosophers to the topic of corporatism may not have particularly inclined the tradition to a hard nosed practical implementation of such ideas. And perhaps (I have no data only speculation) a large section of the more materialist oriented German thinkers came under the sway of Marx and Marxism. The result was that the story of German corporatism certainly is an intellectual history. For all that, the efforts of the Social Catholics, and indeed even of Bismarck, should not be dismissed entirely out of hand. Though their practical lessons may be more cautionary tales than anything else. The risks of over-reliance upon electoralism, the danger of excessive rationalism in engineering an ideal Ständestaat, and risk of suffering a revolution within the form, have all been discussed earlier in this series’ review of Bowen’s book.
And undoubtedly, a major part of German corporatism’s practical failure as a social and political movement was a product of its position of constantly swimming upstream. These people were trying to recover temporalist pluralism amid a spatial revolutionary tidal wave. As Bowen frequently observed, the power of market driven commerce and industry became an increasingly formidable resistance to the recovery of such pluralism. I’ve always said that restoration was possible, never that it would be easy, and certainly not inevitable – as much as I’m sure most temporals dream of a “happy ending,” turning back the clock, at least long enough for them and their children to live our their lives in a less space biased society, with a firm negative feedback loop regulating their society’s relation to nature, and all that that entails. (See my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.)
So, with that lesson in the books, let’s take a look at another, nearby, national tradition in corporatism – source of the origins of Europe’s spatial revolution – la France. So, if you don’t want to miss the French leg of our journey, and haven’t yet, please…
And, if you know of someone else who’d be interested in the topics discussed here, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company Inc, 1947).
Very interesting! In some, sort of hidden but still real and impactful senses, Corporatism's big key structures were in some ways manifested through the person of Germany's Cartel Laws. Big Biz in the USA tried and kept failing to imitate them for decades, and they would reference Germany, although, they sort of, though the backdoor and in undercover ways succeeded on that front in the 1980s