GERMAN REFORMATION AND GUILDS (AND THE SCHOLARLY LACUNA, AGAIN)

PART FIVE: GULDS, 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.

To finish off this final installment on Black’s history of the guilds, we briefly turn our attention to the position of the guilds in the Reformation. It’s interesting to note that Black’s take on Reformation pluralism, at least as it relates to the guilds, contrasts somewhat with the analysis we’ve seen in the work of Robert Nisbet. The latter saw the Reformation’s individualism, inherent in Lutheran Protestantism, as corrosive of pluralism. Black rather argues that the guilds (and so pluralism?) enjoyed a rejuvenation during the reformation.

This set of installments on Black’s book will end with some reflection on his thoughts about the poverty of interest in the guilds within much of standard scholarship. But first, we address Black’s assessment of the guilds within the German Reformation. We begin with a passage in which he sketches out the state of the situation at the time of his writing:

The effect of the Reformation upon social and political thought has long been discussed and debated. Did the idea of the community of believers pave the way for democracy? Did the doctrine of resignation cede ground to absolutism? Did the emphasis on personal faith give rise to a general belief in liberty? Did ‘worldly asceticism’ promote capitalism? The question which concerns us here, however, is a somewhat different one: namely, the relation between the Reformation and the guild tradition — a subject which has not received a great deal of attention.

Black does observes that, “Luther and Calvin objected to the closed brotherhood of the confraternities as contrary to true Christian charity, which must be forgiving and universal in scope.” However, he goes on to observe:

Craft-guilds themselves, nevertheless, emerged from the Reformation unscathed, a sign perhaps that theologians could accept them as no longer having any properly spiritual pretensions. On the other hand, Luther’s attack upon the clergy as a separate, superior caste, his conception of all Christians as ‘truly of the spiritual estate’, of priests as elected officials, of the radical equality and dignity of each and every vocation, his elevation of manual work to the same spiritual status as lecturing, governing or administering sacraments, above all perhaps his profound and touching notion of the Christian community of love and brotherhood — so often overlooked in accounts of his ‘political thought’ — all this was an application to the church of principles latent in guilds and communes. It was what the medieval townsman and artisan had been faintly aware of in his various strivings at self-expression, but it was something he had not previously grasped so clearly: it was what he had been waiting to hear, a recognition of his value as what he was.

For Luther every form of human activity, so long as it contributes to the welfare of the community and is not immoral, is of equal standing and supremely worthy in the eyes of God. The artisan and journeyman were thus given a revolutionary assurance of their worth as what they were, a recognition of their standing in the highest court...

In Luther, at last, artisans and farmers are placed alongside princes and lords as equal members of the ‘spiritual estate’.

And so it was that even amid the radically individualizing culture of German Protestantism, the Germanic guilds maintained legitimacy as pluralist institutions. This attention to nuance explains the different conclusions Black draws from the impact of the Reformation upon pluralism – at least in relationship to the guilds – than we saw in the work of Robert Nisbet. (For more on Nisbet’s assessment, see my recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.)

Before concluding this post, though, there is an interesting additional angle to these matters which Black raises and I think might be useful to consider. This has to do with the fact that despite this quite impressive history of the guilds as agents of communal liberty, and expressions of heterarchical pluralism, it is quite remarkable how little the theorists and historians have had to say about them. This remarkable history, which it would seem should have generated a relevant theory of corporatist governance, somehow has been overwhelmingly silent on the this prospect of heterarchical pluralism.

It is remarkable that this age of guild polities produced no corporatist ideology.¹ True, principles deriving from the juristic theory of corporations, such as ‘let what concerns all be approved by all’, were applied to civic government; and guilds were mentioned in public documents as component parts of some states. But all this was far too implicit for one to be able to say that such constitutions were ‘firmly grounded in the principles of corporatism’.

As he observes, there was nothing especially novel about this neglect, noting the same tendency dated back to antiquity:

On the whole...guilds, especially in Italy, received very much less attention in public debate and official documents than their political role and importance warranted. (They were hardly ever mentioned in academic discussions of popular government)...This was probably due to juristic and humanist prejudice against political guilds, which in Roman times had been suppressed by, among others, Cicero himself, and which were abominated in Roman law. It could also be due to social prejudice among the upper classes and the learned against artisans and small men: manual workers were too stupid to govern.

Such conclusions, for some readers, may well resonate with the recent discussion on this Substack of Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the revolutionary council movement and its continual suppression (and indeed denial) by the revolutionary intellectuals amid their project of monist sovereignty. As in her examples from revolutionary modernism, so too Black finds in medieval Europe this same tendency to belittle or simply ignore those instances of heterarchical pluralism, in which people aspiring to impose their communal will upon history, find themselves written out of the history books by that same managerial class intelligentsia which would have us all believe that they alone, with their “emancipatory” theories provide the means to transcend oppression – even though history provides us plenty of grounds to suspect that their class rule may be the most insidious and bloody oppression of all (see my book, The Managerial Class on Trial.)

Returning to the main trajectory of this series, as Black leaves us off here with a discussion of guild corporatism in Reformation Germany, it seems apropos to turn our attention next to Ralph Bowen’s far more expansive history of German corporatism. And, as always, if you want to be on top of that discussion, soon as it hits the red hot pages of this Substack, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else who’d enjoy sharing in the exploration of the topics addressed here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. As we will see when we turn next to the work of Ralph Bowen, Black here may be somewhat overstating the absence of a corporatist theoretical tradition, at least in the German context. Still, his broader point, from my perspective, in the English-speaking world, remains salient.