AFTER NAPOLEON; BEYOND HITLER

PART SIX: GUILDS, OLD AND NEW

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.

In the past few installments of this series on Guilds, Old and New, we focused on Antony Black’s contribution to the history of guilds generally, across Europe and over the millennium. For most of the rest of this series we’ll focus on the history of guild corporatism within specific national cultures. Later we’ll look at guild corporatism in France, and to a lesser degree in Britain. But now, the next several installments of this series will be taken from Ralph Bowen’s history of German corporatist theory.¹ Though Bowen, much like Black, is primarily concerned with an intellectual history, or a history of ideas, such history must be told through the lens of actual historical events. While my interest, as it was with Black, lies more in the latter area, the history of events cannot be entirely successfully divorced from the history of theory. And in some cases, most notably that of Hegel, the theoretical innovations are of some intrinsic interest.

And it is noteworthy that early on Bowen draws a sharp semantic coupling between the ostensible topic of his book, corporatism, and the theme of this series. I find it useful to point out his emphasis on the co-terminus linguistic nature of guilds and corporations. To quote him, he notes that “The adjective ‘corporative’ in fact appears to have entered English as a loan word from the Romance languages, where corporation (French) and corporazione (Italian), for example, are the usual terms for ‘guild’."² This initial observation early informs the reader that in studying the history of corporatism, Bowen is aware of focusing on guild pluralism. But let’s not get the cart too far ahead of the horse.

To begin, Bowen, interestingly cuts right to the chase. Unlike Walker and Grossi who only at the very end of the long story they tell about the suppressed history of pluralism turn to discussion of the ever awkward matter of how National Socialism rhetorically associated itself to these traditions, Bowen clears the air on the matter right from the beginning. And, indeed, like Walker and Grossi, he comes to the same conclusion. While the National Socialists were always adept at co-opting the rhetoric of pluralism and gemeinschaft, likewise in the case of corporatism, in practice their regime was always one of unrelenting monist sovereignty. By now such an observation should hardly be surprising to find amid the literature we’ve been unpacking here. Still, it seems to be worth reiterating – given the persistence of such preposterous “guilt by association” allegations – the vacuousness of such claims.

So, we’ll begin alongside Bowen in this refutation of such ill-informed associations of National Socialism to the anti-liberal, anti-universalist, anti-Enlightenment traditions of pluralism, and indeed corporatism. And the relevance of this emphasis is further suggested by Bowen’s attention to the degree that 19th (and eventually 20th) century German corporatism was forged in the fires of German resistance to Napoleon’s militarization of French Revolution imperialism. Eventually, we’ll also follow him in his exploration of the roots of German corporatism in German Romanticism, and particularly the 20th century role of Social Catholicism. For now, though, we look at his depiction of German guild corporatism as being after Napoleon, and beyond Hitler.

Right off the top, Bowen acknowledges the cynical manipulation of the corporatism tradition by devotees of monist sovereignty: “It is generally recognized, moreover, that the totalitarian states made use of their ‘corporative’ organizations primarily to repress conflicts between labor and management.” He expands on this framing in a set of remarks quoted below.

The rise of National Socialism, in particular, was made easier by the support of individuals and groups in sympathy with a "corporative ideal" which they expected the Nazis to realize.

...the diffusion of anti-liberal and anti-Marxist ideas in Germany prior to 1933, to which corporatists made a definite contribution, tended to weaken the forces opposed to the National Socialists and to undermine the Weimar Republic.

...the exploitation of corporatist doctrines in National Socialist propaganda was by no means a decisive element in the movement's ultimate triumph, and the Nazi regime, once established, proved to have little in common with the prescription of any previous corporatist school.

So, off the top, Bowen’s warning is to not confuse these ideas with those of National Socialism. In this regard, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Bowen’s book was published in 1947, a time when the meaning of corporatism was still in play, and it was not uncommon for the term to be used as synonymous with fascism.

Bowen goes on then to emphasize the relevance of studying corporatism within German history, largely because of its unique history, both as an expressed rejection of the French Enlightenment-Revolution legacy and indeed as a cultural articulation of corporatism largely insulated from the influence of that legacy elsewhere across Europe.

German corporatist doctrines are deserving of special historical study if only by reason of the fact that nowhere has theorizing of this kind been more abundant, more varied or more continuous than in Germany.

The old craft guilds, which the French revolutionaries had suppressed in 1791, maintained a remarkably vigorous existence in most parts of Germany down through the middle of the nineteenth century, and unabridged freedom of occupation was not established in all parts of Germany until 1869.

The early development of corporatism in Germany was further shaped by the fact that the German nationalist movement, taking its rise during the Wars of Liberation waged under the leadership of monarchical Prussia against the heir of the French Revolution, Napoleon, conceived and retained a strong antipathy to the egalitarian and individualist principles which he had sought to impose east of the Rhine.

...striving to vindicate Germany's cultural individuality against these "foreign" ideas many subsequent nationalists were disposed to exalt the estates and corporations of the Germanic past and to find in the nation's "old corporative order" a model for projected new forms of social organization more to their liking than those deriving from revolutionary doctrine and practice.

This post-Napoleon context Bowen considers to better clarify the place of National Socialism in this German story of corporatism:

During the decade prior to 1933, however, the German reading public was offered a profuse assortment of printed material, mostly though not exclusively of a scholarly cast, the burden of which was to extol the virtues of a Ständestaat [corporative state] as contrasted with the shortcomings of the existing state and economy. Among the authors of these works there was little detailed agreement as to the precise shape of the new organization which they wished to see established, though they were unanimous in declaring that the early inauguration of a ständische Ordnung [Estates Order] represented Germany's only genuine hope of escaping the disastrous consequences which would flow from an otherwise inevitable victory of Marxian principles of social organization.

Heated controversies regarding the proper kind of "corporative reconstruction" (if any) to be attempted under Nazi auspices were carried on during 1933 and 1934. Although corporatist proposals were strongly supported in Labor Front circles there was much diversity of opinion among high Nazi officials, and the Fuhrer himself seems to have held aloof from the disputes. Industrial and financial circles were inclined to identify corporatist ideas with the "radical wing" of the party; Spann's theories came under attack from Catholic and academic quarters, and were pronounced heretical on certain points of racial dogma by Rosenberg and other official party philosophers. Bureaucrats were generally suspicious of proposals to establish "autonomous" estates which might jeopardize central state control of economic affairs. Though Dr. Ley, as leader of the Labor Front, had previously been among the most enthusiastic supporters of "corporative reconstruction," he finally capitulated to these and other pressures at the end of 1934.

So, it is hardly surprising that Bowen, as early as 1947, concludes that efforts to associate corporatism, in general, and German corporatism in particular, to fascism generally or National Socialism specifically is a deep misreading of the actual historical facts.

Although the exploitation of certain aspects of the German corporatist tradition in Nazi propaganda during the movement's rise to power and during the initial years of the Hitler regime has served to call attention to the problem of corporatism in German intellectual history, the Third Reich itself scarcely amounted to more than a minor and somewhat ambiguous incident in the evolution of that doctrine. The theories to which Nazi spokesmen paid tribute in the period before 1933 were neither the most representative nor the most influential expressions of the previous corporatist tradition, and after 1935 even these doctrines were officially repudiated. The actual political and economic organization of the Third Reich did not even roughly correspond to the specifications laid down by any of the main schools of modern corporatist theory. Certain so-called Stände were created by official fiat, but these figured merely as subsidiary organs of control in a centralized, authoritarian scheme which relied more heavily upon other agencies.

So then, if the common, lazy smearing of guild corporatism, in Germany and elsewhere, with fascism and National Socialism – the source of the frequent dumb-person-talk that one frequently hears these days, defining fascism as a blending of “corporations” and the state – is groundless in light of the actual history, what is the proper understanding, historically and theoretically, of German corporatism? Clarifying that is the task Bowen undertakes throughout the remainder of his book. And in the next installment to this series, we’ll begin the job of unpacking the details of that story. So, if you don’t want to miss out on this fascinating story of the history of German corporatism, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know others who’d profit from these discussions, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company Inc, 1947).

2. And, parenthetically, in all this reading I’ve been doing on corporatism, I’ve still not found any etymological explanation for how the terms “corporation” and “corporatism,” which Bowen identifies as originally synonyms for guilds, got transliterated into synonyms for “business conglomerate” or “(very!) big business.” No doubt this is another instance of the victors writing the history, and attributable to the same forces that saw the semantic transliteration of terms like rightwing, conservatism, and pluralism. Etymonline observes that the older usage dates from the 15^th century, while the latter is first observed in the early 17^th century. I expect though there is much more to this story than is illustrated by merely citing those dates. I remain curious to see a politically sensitive etymological dissection of that transliteration, which seems to me to only have become predominant in the 20^th century. If readers know of such a dissection, please forward it to me. Thanks.