BULWARKS AGAINST THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

PART 4 OF LESSONS FROM THE GERMAN “HOMETOWNS”

This is part of a series on how the history of German hometowns constitute an episode in the longue durée of the phenotype wars. New readers just entering at this point, who want to understand the phenotype wars, should read my new book on the topic, and those who want to situate this series, should see the introductory installment.

At the conclusion of the last installment, I emphasized the German hometownsmen’s role as bulwarks against spatialist French Enlightenment values. The German hometowns though not only were objectively bulwarks against spatialism, but according to Walker they thoroughly understood themselves as such. They perceived the protection of their hometown community as essentially entailing protecting themselves against the rise and deteriorating impact of what I’ve called spatials, though the phrase Walker devises for such people is “movers and doers.” As usual in the series, I’ll let Walker discuss the matter at length, to assure you that I’m not just projecting my own priors into his words.

The third main element of German society was numerically the smallest: those whose lives involved motion both geographical and social, and a kind of activity and initiative out of keeping with the lives of hometownsmen and countrymen. They were not conceived as a category or estate until, with the French Revolution and its aftermath, motion and activity became political touchstones and the different elements of the group came to recognize the goals they had in common.

…devisers of categories were themselves members of the group, and too jealous of the difference of status within it to put bureaucrats, peddlers, professors, merchants, wage laborers, and dispossessed peasants into one estate.

…disturbers, Storer, was a name the hometownsman applied to all of them, though he could not quite think of them collectively until a mobilized outside world seemed collectivized against him.

The sea of countrymen that surrounded the walls were outsiders too, but they stayed in place; hometownsmen understood them and were used to dominating them; the walls were firm against them.

Movers and doers were not rooted in the countryside. They emanated rather from the cities, and they could and did move regularly from one German city to another without serious change of personal habits or environments.

Itinerant peddler, court lawyer, busy merchant, and the academically trained shared a social psychology hostile to that which underlay hometown life, and when they came into contact with the home town they displayed it, each in his own way; but despite all they showed in common from the hometown vantage, they were no serious threat for so long as they were not working together.

The important division in the German town economy lay not between master guildsmen and their journeymen (whose goal it was to become respected masters), but rather between small and locally oriented producers on the one hand and on the other those whose ambition and success made them enemies of guild limits on labor force and markets.

Great merchants and small peddlers were easily recognized by hometownsmen as amounting to much the same thing. One stayed in the city most of the time and the other roamed the countryside, but both were purveyors of alien production, both were raiders of the hometown economy. The peddler retailed what the merchant assembled. Both tried to circumvent the guild system. Both were adversaries to the contract that existed between hometown guildsman and his civic community: that the guildsman would provide goods and services of acceptable quality and in acceptable supply in return for the security of his market and his price.

The trouble that arose when a town admitted or generated within itself that kind of mover and doer goes to explain the caution with which communities admitted outsiders and the persistence of guild limitations. It illuminates the political character of the home town, for such persons were an economic analogy to the civic patriciate, and became that too if they succeeded in taking political control for their own purposes. And the people such persons sought and attracted to their employ were the civic outsiders whose number, if the home town was to be healthy, had to be kept small.

If I’ve sufficiently established for you that the hometownsmen were temporals and the movers and doers were spatials, as I’ve defined those terms on this substack and in my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, then this series of passages from Walker should make clear that the historical struggle for hometown autonomy during these centuries of German history was in fact a decisive front in the phenotype wars. This remained the standard state-of-affairs until the militarized fist of the French Enlightenment, in the form of Napoleon’s army, came crashing into the lives of the Germans.

As he did elsewhere in the wake of his military victories, Napoleon made every effort to impose the spatialist regime of the French Revolution/Enlightenment upon his conquests. In Germany that situation gave rise to the prominence of administrative figures who previously, under the Holy Roman Empire, had been keep contained to minor roles. Walker describes this newly rising imperial official:

At the university he studied system and consequence from men whose task it was to create them; he learned ordered argument, cause and effect: intellectual patterns incompatible with the life of the home town (and maybe with the writing of its history). The intellectual discipline of scholarship and the professional discipline of administration had much in common. The similarity of method and of style was one reason for the importance of university training in the development of bureaucracy.

While there was very little movement among the three main German social castes of countrymen, hometownsmen, and movers and doers (except insofar as nobles became upper civil servants), within the mover and doer caste there was considerable interchange among merchants, officials, and intellectuals, or more nearly among their sons; and the university, where they met, was the core of their association. There the particular characteristics of the intellectual were absorbed into the mover and doer caste.

Even writing in the 1960s, Walker could see in the emergence of the movers and doers of late 18^th century Germany the vital role of the university as managerial class bootcamp for the rising spatialist regime. As Walker acknowledges, the university was effectively – to borrow a favorite metaphor of Carl Schmitt’s – an engine of motorized-spatialism.

Social distinctions remained there to be sure, but still young men of many ranks and backgrounds attended, so that the university did not match up with the more stable and uniform social orders Germans were accustomed to. That has often made social analysis of the university-trained troublesome, but just that gave the university its place in this analysis: it was Germany's place for mixing and for changing.

University life and the careers it led to were very nearly the only way to escape one's condition of birth, so that outsiders were anxious to go there: young men who lacked secure social location by birthright, or else who in their ambition had renounced it.

Of course, such universities were located within specific towns, and insofar as these were hometowns (not imperil towns), the temporalist culture and polity could constitute a threat to this incubator of spatialism. Walker discusses how the emergent spatials avoided this risk.

For social and quasi-political purposes the students joined together into corps (Landsmannschaften), fraternities designated by the presumed geographical origins of their members: the Swabian corps, the Prussian corps, and so on. These organizations, together with the university's legal rights of self-government, separated and indeed protected students from the civil society of the town where the university was located – defense of academic freedom against outraged Bürger.

In embracing this mover and doer ethos, so richly cultivated within the spatialist university, the student:

…was asserting his difference and an occupational contempt for the quiet little worlds of hometownsmen and countrymen. That was the birthmark of the educated man he was becoming, and the unifying spirit of his caste. Students whatever their origins set themselves over against townsmen as opposites, calling townsmen philistines, Spiessbürger, and so defining themselves by the contrast, conceiving themselves collectively as individuals, free of social restraints and prejudices, outside the static dull complexities of Germany's predominant hometown and country life.

The hallmark of the spatialist, as I’ve defined him (see my new book), you’ll recall — in his psychology of high openness and lower conscientiousness — is the propensity for transgressing norms and boundaries. Gradually, these spatialists, these movers and doers in Walker’s terms, began carving out their place within a world that as late as the end of the 18^th century had remained overwhelmingly temporalist due to the sheltering space of the German hometowns.

After university training a man might get a job in the civil service, or a pastorate, or a licensed medical position; or failing these he could tutor the children of a wealthy or a noble family. It is remarkable how many of the intellectually dominant figures of the time – Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Holderlin, for example – had put in terms as private tutors before escaping to other things.

Writers lived by choice in centers of literary traffic like Gottingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, to name places with especially high concentrations of writers in proportion to population. They had to be where the news came in – political news, business news, cultural news – and the best channels of information that would interest the reading public were still channels of government. Grist for a writer's mill came where the channels met and crossed: where the state's officials, the professors, the travelers were, at the university towns, at the courts, the salons, the coffeehouses.

In all of this we see the territory being staked out for a rise of a new phenotype’s hegemony and its regime. All this ambition though was directly in confrontation with the legacy of the temporalist hometowns, and directly challenged their autonomy. While Napoleon’s control over the Germanic people was – in the big picture – relatively short, this military infusion of the French Enlightenment into temporalist German culture set off a phase of the phenotype wars, a struggle between the spatialist imperil bureaucratic administrators and the temporalist communal hometowns, which was to play itself out in a constant tug-of-war struggle across the 19^th century. That’s the story of this phase of the phenotype wars that we’ll start to unpack in the next installment.

To be sure not to miss it, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know of others who would be interested in these topics, please…

Meanwhile: be seeing you!