POPULAR GOVERNANCE REIMAGINED?

PART 7 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.

In numerous places I've explained why I think the concept of popular sovereignty is not only a theoretical myth, but from a temporalist perspective positively destructive in practice. Such arguments would seem sufficient to dismiss the ideal of democracy. (Surely at this point no argument is needed to dismiss "democracy" in practice.) But it's worth looking a little more closely into what's at play here.

For the real defense of democracy (and popular sovereignty) is the idea of popular control over governance: the idea that people should have some control over what their governors do: how their taxes are spent, who is allowed into their community, etc. I shouldn't be misunderstood as dismissing this as a worthy aspiration. I only dismiss the claim that “democracy” does (or can) realize such an aspiration. It would be wrong though to interpret that dismissal as dismissing any aspirations or capacity for institutionalizing of popular control of governance. Such distinctions are what I'd like to parse a bit in this last installment to the Walker series.

In speaking of the governance of the German hometowns, Walker is clear that there was both a formal and an informal dimension. As we’ll see, ultimately, it was the informal dimension which was most powerful and thereby most influential. The formal dimension has already been discussed at length in an earlier installment.

While processes varied among the hometowns, a common procedure for electing town councils was for the citizenry to assemble annually, with an electoral committee chosen by lot from among them. The electoral committee was responsible for choosing the Inner Council, sometimes voting in conjunction with the old Council or a comparable body. Though, as mentioned earlier, it was common for those committees to be chosen by a much smaller select group than the assembled citizenry. Guild representatives also had a majority role in such bodies, as well as the distinguished citizens of the town. And often it was only when the councils came to an impasse that the larger citizenry, through their guilds, had an opportunity to vote on town policy or practice, at all. Again, this has been examined previously. What I want to examine here is the informal dimension of German hometown governance. This was the governance exercised through what I’ve identified in a prior post as recursive social action.

As I noted in the earlier post, of course there’s no exclusive separation of recursive and discursive social action. A highly recursive model will have discursive aspects: we humans are social symbol manipulators by nature. Just as discursive social action must entail recursive social action, the physical actions of communication are of course recursive in many ways. The emphasis here instead is upon the grounds of legitimacy in measures of governance. The discursive social action model of governance is one in which the primary mode of legitimacy lies in what people say (and how they say it).

Even in the German hometowns, within both the Inner and Outer Councils, people were talking, making decisions. There is no doubt that there is some discursive social action taking place within this model. This model though is a world apart from the models of liberalism or democracy, the marketplace of ideas or the court of public opinion – in which political power as a daily routine is rooted in the power of the word, persuasion, and rationalist appeals to formal rules of argument. As we’ve established, this is the domain of the managerial class, with their verbal dexterity and insidious ventriloquism (see my earlier book, The Managerial Class on Trial).

Discursive social action is the power domain of the spatials, spearheaded by today’s managerial class. So, it might be reasonably asked: given their reliance, to at least some degree, on discursive social action, as we’ve just acknowledged, how were the temporals of the German hometowns able to maintain their temporalist values, defend their gemeinschaft and concrete institutions against the onslaught of spatialism for all those centuries? The answer is that whatever discursive social action they relied upon, it was secondary to the real exercise of power within the hometowns, which was rooted in the daily routines of recursive social action. Some passages from Walker illustrate what was at work in such recursive social action.

In ordinary circumstances the citizenry had no formal participatory power to legislate, directly and freely to elect, or demand an accounting. As for informal ways: what the citizens had to say about politics to their joint uncles that governed the community was rarely severe, though there was grumbling sometimes, and occasionally a crisis. They had to get along at birthday parties, weddings, and funerals, and then there was the disposition of the family bakery to think of, and the master's certificate that went with it. Similarly the uncles were bound to observe the ties of family, trade, and friendship.

…there were far more effective ways to influence leadership than elective machinery could have offered. They were different ways. Anybody might have a pretty daughter or an energetic son to bargain with, for example. A leader's business could drop off; he could be slandered and ignored; his children could be ridiculed and bullied by their fellows.

For one Bürger to say to another, "We do not go to the Stag any more," or "I think I shall start buying my meat from Krautlein" – these are serious statements in a small German town nowadays, seriously received and silently digested as the wary hearers think out what postures they will adopt to this phenomenon; and I am confident that they were even more serious in the circumscribed world of the home town of two centuries ago. To be sure the speaker risked (and risks) retaliation. But where leaders were men whose family made shoes, who gossiped and drank at a regular tavern, and whose children grew up with the children of the rest of the citizenry, that kind of influence from the citizenry penetrated the leadership even as patronage and administrative power from the leadership penetrated the citizenry.

No doubt, to some readers, thoroughly inculcated in the presumptive virtuousness of discursive social action, such prospects seem mean, petty, parochial, and yes even irrational. Such recursive social action, as the history of the German hometowns demonstrate, though, is precisely how popular power, and relative communal autonomy, is maintained in the absence of resorting to the “popular sovereignty” guises of democracy, elections, marketplaces of ideas, and all those other discursive tropes that provide the sock puppet of managerial class ventriloquism.

A craftsman, and probably even your average shopkeeper or merchant, is not likely to out-talk or out-conceptualize the verbally dexterous agents — e.g., jurists, academics, bureaucrats — of the managerial class. What they can do, very effectively, though, is leverage the recursive processes of daily life to exert pressure on the local elites to ensure their policy is not violating the communal norms within which their governance position is rooted.

And of course, a centrally important such norm is that the elite, or ruling class (if that term entirely makes sense within a gemeinschaft), must remain rooted in the community. Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, among others, has observed the deleterious impact of elites from different jurisdictions making alliances with each other, providing a collective bulwark against their own local people. Once elites start horizontal cross fertilization, they become alienated from the localities out of which their status initially emerged and start feeling greater loyalty to their allied elites than to the people upon whom their elite status originally depended. It’s at this point that the most extreme forms of resource extraction and casual indifference to the people’s suffering can be expected.

So, one of the most important norms to maintain through recursive social action is the one that maintains the effectiveness of recursive social action. As Walker explains, we see the fruits of this in the German hometowns.

Any and all relations with the outside were implicit threats to communal mutuality; and if they were monopolized by a special group independent of the commonality, they underlined an actual break in its integrity.

Patrician families married among themselves, or with other patrician families from other places, and rarely with the lower elements of their own cities (although this happened). By contrast, hometown leadership, however stabilized and influential at home, rarely intermarried with similar leading elements from other towns. Sometimes a hometown leader had married outside, but apparently no more often than other citizens had, and I suspect in fact less often; commonly his children married members of other Bürger families of the community.

The sustainability of such municipal pluralism depended upon keeping the ruling elite firmly rooted in the town. Inter-town elite alliance gave rise to institutions that would ultimately serve to insulate the leadership class from local control.

So, Walker’s remarkable story of the phenotype wars fought out over centuries through the control of the German hometowns gets right down into the gritty reality of how such temporalist communities ultimately defended their gemeinschaft through the power of recursive social action. My wider argument, in A Plea for time in the Phenotype Wars, of course, is that there is an historical inevitability to the spirals of the phenotype wars. I have conceded, though, that it is possible for temporals today to generate a temporalist foundation, which may provide an institutional cushion, allowing for a softer landing, when the “collapse” of the hegemonic spatialist arc does come. I proposed in the book that one – though by no means the only – means to generate the organic communities which could serve as that institutional cushion is through a project of what I’ve called pluralist federal populism.

Of the many intriguing insights and lessons from Walker’s history of the German hometowns, maybe the most important is this insight into the basis of popular governance, through so many centuries, being rooted in what I’m calling recursive social action. Likewise, for those today who’d take up my prospect of a project for pluralist federal populism: the fact that such people would have to dispense with spatialist/managerial class ideologies of democracy, electoralism, liberalism, marketplaces of ideas, etc., does not mean that the role of popular governance need be sacrificed.

Indeed, as long as a community keeps its own elite deeply rooted in their gemeinschaft, reliance upon recursive social action is probably a vastly more effective form of popular governance than those discursive forms of governance, which inevitably are coopted as veils for the ventriloquism, colonization, dominance, and resource extraction of the managerial class and its spatialist phenotypes. And though it wasn’t within Walker’s domain of consideration, I’d also point out that it would be this same recursive social action form of popular governance that could maintain local autonomy and control within a federation.

As long as federal representatives are constrained as delegates of the community, rooted in the community, required to primarily live there, and so prevented from creating their own “capital” — as was so gratingly evident during Canada’s trucker convoy protest when Ottawa managerial class bureaucrats complained about “their city” being invaded, and of course is endemic to the “swamp” characterization of Washington — this same recursive form of popular governance could effectively ground a genuinely centrifugal federalism. This is the temporalist promise of the potential leveraging of recursive social action as core instrument in a non-discursive, post-democratic, form of popular governance, and for me is the key takeaway lesson from Walker’s impressive book.

This series has been a long ride. I hope you found it as fascinating and illustrative as I did. And if you want to be the first to know what else along these lines I get up to over here, be sure to…

And if you know anyone else interested in these kinds of topics and analyses, please…

Meanwhile: be seeing you!