THE PHILOSOPHERS AND GERMAN CORPORATISM

PART SEVEN: 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 this summary of Ralph Bowen’s intellectual history of German corporatism, I’ll primarily focus on the contributions of 20th century Social Catholicism. However, as a matter of foundational explanation, it is valuable to first examine the German philosophers who initially laid the groundwork – if often somewhat metaphysical in orientation – for the corporatist thinking which was to follow. This philosophical foundation, as will be seen, grew out of a national project to re-imagine the cultural foundations of a distinctive German people and culture in response to the assault and challenge of revolutionary French Enlightenment imperialism imposed under the banner of Napoleon.

First though, we begin with some general overview remarks from early in Bowen’s book. Ethically and politically Bowen points to observations that, in the nomenclature of my book (A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars), reveal the deep antipathy among the German corporatists to spatialism.

German corporatist doctrines have typically expressed antipathy to the individualism of the Enlightenment, to the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and to the Marxian theory of class conflict.

...according to the generic corporatist conception the nation is an "organic" union of many lesser communities or "estates" rather than a simple aggregation of interchangeable human "atoms."

...economic affairs have been unanimously acknowledged to be a social concern, and hence subject to some political regulation. A few theorists have advocated thoroughgoing governmental intervention in economic processes, but the great majority have laid stress upon the desirability of "economic federalism" and "self-government in industry," repudiating etatisme and bureaucratic, central control as inimical both to efficiency and to freedom

While Black had lamented the paucity of a corporatist theory of governance, Bowen emphasizes that for all that corporatism was as equally competitive a world view as Marxism and liberalism.

In the course of its development this corporatist tradition, like its hostile counterparts, the liberal and socialist traditions, has been intimately bound up with virtually the whole complex of modern political, economic, social and cultural problems. In formulating their own attitudes toward these problems German corporatist writers have found occasion to discuss almost every aspect of latter-day civilization, from ultimate moral values to minute practical details of political and economic organization

The appearance of corporatism in Germany as a distinct genus of political and economic speculation must be dated at least as early as 1800, and many elements of the corporatist Weltanschauung derive from sources as remote in time as the social teachings of Thomas Aquinas or Plato's Republic. The doctrine's recent evolution has been shaped in some fashion by virtually every important development in the nation's history since 1789; and its growth has been fostered by a vast assortment of individual contributions, each reflecting the peculiar antecedents and circumstances of the contributor

The "feudal socialist" Karl Marlo reflected the misgivings of craftsmen and small property owners with respect to their economic prospects in an era of developing capitalism, propounding a scheme of "economic federalism" designed to preserve many features of guild organization and crowned by a "social parliament" of occupational estates.

And the same point is emphasized in laying out the key schools of corporate pluralism which he addresses through the book:

Each of these types of corporatist doctrine figured as an integral element in one of the three most consequential anti-Marxian, anti-liberal programs of social reform advanced during the period 1870-1919. The first two of these movements—Social Catholicism and Monarchical Socialism—had their inception near the beginning of the period under review, elaborating and propagating their distinctive corporatist ideas most energetically during the two decades prior to 1890; while the third program—German Collective Economy—enjoyed only a brief span of active life during the years of war and revolution at the end of the period. Only one of these programs, Social Catholicism, sought and gained a popular following of any size or permanence.

From there Bowen returns to a more detailed dissection of the importance of the French Revolution and its Bonapartean imperialism to the originally Romantic assertion of German social organicism and corporatism:

Corporatism, as a conscious theoretical movement, made its first appearance in Germany immediately in the wake of the French Revolution, at a time when nationalist and conservative antipathy to the works of Robespierre and Bonaparte was calling forth strenuous intellectual efforts to defend the nation's traditional estates and corporations in opposition to the new scheme of political and economic organization that had just made a spectacular debut on the banks of the Seine.

The French Revolution figured in two major respects as a catalyst of corporatist thinking in Germany. Carrying forward the work begun by the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, it swept away the surviving remnants of medieval pluralism. At the same time it proclaimed legal equality and abolished the social distinctions embodied in the medieval regime of personal status. It sought to realize "the rights of man and of the citizen," and this use of the singular (de l'homme, du citoyen) was significant, for it served to put particular stress upon individual men rather than upon groups or categories of men. Only the extreme terms of political society—the citizen and the state—were recognized, the effect being to exclude all intermediate units like the family, the occupational or professional group, the religious community, or the economic, political and cultural entity exemplified by the feudal estate. The classic definition of this "atomistic" concept was contributed by Rousseau himself in his dictum that "the general will achieves its purest expression when all citizens confront the state as individuals and are not bound together in lesser associations [associations partielles]."

It is in response to these conditions that the Romantics first pushed back against French Revolutionary (and Enlightenment) modular individualism, on behalf of an enduring German culture of corporatism. Gottlieb Fichte, in his seminal book, The Closed Commercial State, laid out a core feature of the social theory that came to predominate within German corporatism. This was the organic notion of society. While Fichte had started his philosophical career with a more French Enlightenment informed worldview, it was this later shift to organicism which was to prove so influence in the German philosophy of corporatism.

During the first years of the new century…and especially during the struggle against Napoleon, Fichte progressively abandoned the rationalistic, individualistic political ideal of his youth and early manhood, evolving in its place an organic conception of the state that eventually became almost theocratic in spirit.

Also, approximately contemporaneous was the contribution of Johann Gottfried Herder to a kind of anthropological pluralism:

For the generation that had grown to maturity under the spell of Herder, moreover, the unique genius of the German nation stood above all single personalities. That nation itself was not only endowed with an individuality of its own; it was an organic union of many lesser and contributory "personalities" — families, communes, corporations, guilds, estates, religious communities, universities and a host of others.

These earlier Romantics (including others not elaborated upon here, e.g., Schelling and Schleiermacher), building on the insights of Burke, contributed to the idea of the German nation being as evolutionary as it was organic. This led them to the obvious rejection of the rationalist Rousseauean (and Hobbesian) social contract theory. Again, all this, had an intuition of pluralism implicit in its understated anthropology:

The phenomenon of a nation, they held, could not be explained simply as the product of a deliberate contract arising out of the rationally calculated self-interest of individual citizens; they followed Burke in concluding that such a union of infinitely varied component parts could only be the product of a slow growth during many generations of common experience and feeling.

Bowen identifies Adam Muller as the only member of the German "Romantic school" to occupy himself exclusively with political speculation. Muller was particularly noteworthy as a philosopher who took up this philosophy of organic sociality, specifically applying it to a theory of the Ständestaat (i.e., corporative state).

The organic conception of state and society as it had been developed by Fichte, Schelling and Schleiermacher furnished Muller with the major premises for his out-and-out assault upon the individualistic political ideal of the Enlightenment and Revolution.

"Nothing," he maintained, "can be more opposed to freedom.., than the notion of external equality." The French egalitarians were, he felt, destroying freedom by setting aside "all the individuality, all the variety, of the nation," for true freedom was "nothing else but the universal striving of extremely diverse natures after growth and life."

Each estate was endowed with its own characteristic form of property—the clergy held theirs as corporate property, the nobles as entailed family property, and the commoners as individual private property

The four basic occupations of economic life—agriculture, urban production, commerce and intellectual production—corresponded, Muller thought, to the four main elements in the wealth of a nation—land, labor, money and culture—and also to the four elements of the family, in which "creative nature is represented by the wife, labor by the husband, the exploitation of physical capital by the young people and that of spiritual capital by the elders

In such an analysis one sees perhaps the notion of social organicity carried to its extreme. Regardless of what one thinks of these correlations of Muller, they clearly indicate why organicity and integration was so central to these Romantic ways of thinking and social models. Clearly, though, the undisputed master of the German Romantic philosophers in this marriage of social organicity and corporate pluralism was Frederick Hegel. We finish off this installment to the Guilds series with a review of Bowen’s treatment of Hegel:

Hegel [constructed] in the early years of the Restoration a monolithic intellectual synthesis out of the heterogeneous assortment of vague and often incoherent notions critical of "atomistic" individualism that had been steadily accumulating in German political speculation since the turn of the century. An integral part of the Hegelian system was a classic statement of the philosophic grounds underlying many a subsequent expression of the generic corporatist ideal.

The insertion of "civil society” as an intermediate factor between the two extreme terms, "individual" and "state," which the preceding age had so perilously set face to face, was one of Hegel's most momentous contributions to nineteenth-century political theory.

Parenthetically, here: I’ll concede to Bowen if he has grounds to claim the philosophical originality of this juxtaposition, but as we’ve seen throughout our exploration of heterarchical pluralism, this notion of the intermediary institution has been the lifeblood of that pluralism, certainly stretching back through the medieval constitution.¹

Hegel's "civil society” individuals were neither "self-sufficient" nor "autonomous," for social life, taking its departure from the family, implied a whole series of progressively broadening associations to give adequate expression to its many specific forms and manifestation.

While Hegel's state was thoroughly monistic in conception, his "civil society" was a pluralistic structure, embracing a multitude of families, geographical communities, corporations, estates and similar subsidiary groups.

Hegel distinguished three estates in civil society, each corresponding to one main sphere of human activity. A "substantial, natural estate" occupied itself with agriculture and depended directly upon the soil for its livelihood. The estate of industry found its vocation in manufacturing and commerce. The third or "general" estate included the educated, professional classes of the nation, and its business was primarily to look after the interests of society at large in carrying on the actual work of government

This is a distinctly different conception of the estates than found in Muller, or of course the French Revolution. And as we’ll see momentarily, it becomes the foundation for Hegel’s conception of the organic corporatism of daily German life. Though, worth noting, it’s also amazing how clearly this description of Hegel's third estate reveals it as the managerial class—and indeed the description manifests that class's ideological legitimization. There is a straight conceptual and historical line from this third estate of Hegel’s to Weber’s rational authority of the bureaucracy. (The ideological legitimation of the managerial class is discussed at length in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial; that topic as well as the central role of Weber’s rational authority of the bureaucracy within the larger context of the phenotype wars is discussed in my most recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.)

Bowen goes on to further flesh out the implications of Hegel’s civil society and its estates, and how this fleshing out leads inevitably to the necessity of something like corporate guilds:

Both the agricultural estate and the general estate were by their nature sufficiently imbued with a sense of universality, but the industrial estate was too much preoccupied with the particular; that is, with individual interests and concerns.

Therefore its members required to be directed toward the universal, and this could happen only when they acquired some principle of cohesion which would be for them what the family was for the cultivators and what the public interest was for the general estate. Such a principle of cohesion Hegel discovered in the Korporation...

He noted with regret that "in modern times the corporation has been superseded, the intention being that every individual should look after himself.”

It is of course standard commentary on Hegel to recognize him as the master dialectician, not merely promoting the historical cunning of the dialectic, but in presuming within his own philosophical works to have dialectically resolved the divides which had plagued the history of philosophy preceding him. Perhaps most famous in this regard was his attempt to work out the contradictions between materialism and idealism, by way of his positing of “Absolute idealism.” A position, perhaps not well served by the label, that actually rejects the earlier versions of idealism, which dismissed the existence of a mind-independent reality. And, in a kindred spirit, no less a dialectical aspiration lay in Hegel’s gesture to resolve the contradictions of French rationalism and German romanticism. This is a wrinkle in the story which Bowen doesn’t sufficiently emphasize, but one that we need to keep in the back of our minds as we continue with his assessment of Hegel’s contribution to German corporatism. Bowen quotes Hegel:

“It is needful…to provide the ethical man with a universal activity that can stand above his private ends. This universal aim, which the modern state does not always furnish, is supplied by the corporation." In the corporation "the particular, self-seeking purpose becomes part of something truly universal.”

As Hegel conceived of the corporation, it would be the means not only of assuring to each member a secure livelihood appropriate to his station in life (a just wage), but also of conferring upon him a sense of social worth, a consciousness of full membership in society, and of fulfilling some purpose larger than that of his own personal advancement.

Like Fichte, Hegel had difficulty in deciding whether or not individuals should have full freedom to choose their occupations. In principle, he declared for unabridged free choice (Par. 262 and Zusatz), but he felt that once a choice had been made it should be binding for life (Par. 207), and he made some occupations—that of the land-owner, for example—hereditary

Bowen also notes, though, where Hegel focuses more on the particularities of corporatism, the more his fascination with the rational and universal seems to give way to what we saw Grossi calling reicentrism (a belief in the centrality of the material facts of the world):

Social organization as he described it was an order in which the landed nobility, the learned professions and the urban guilds were arranged in an ordered hierarchy which, for all its pretensions to eternal and universal significance, bore a strong medieval and feudal stamp.

...it would scarcely be permissible to describe the Hegelian synthesis as an uncritical exaltation of the existing political and social order, and it would be still less legitimate to characterize it (as Muller's ideal might well be characterized) as the product of a nostalgic yearning for the glories of a bygone day

Hegel was too much a child of the rational, humanitarian Enlightenment and too keenly aware of the forces making for change in modern society to embrace a completely rigid, static scheme of social differentiations or to endorse a wholly authoritarian political order. He was keenly disturbed by the rise of what he regarded as a potentially anti-social spirit of individualism, but he did not regard this new spirit as reprehensible in itself, fearing only that if one-sidedly emphasized at the expense of the community it could become a highly destructive, disintegrating force. His corporatist ideal was thus essentially the expression of his attempt to harmonize the demands of the individual with the principle of social cohesion.

This then is the legacy left to the later, more explicitly political corporatists of Germany. Corporatism is conceived as a means of providing an identity to those outside of the agrarian and scholarly world, which allows them to better integrate into the naturally organic flow of society. In the process, corporatism provides the means to advance the material and spiritual interests of guild members, facilitating conditions for economic justice. And thanks to Muller, there are too some rough ideas of how this integration into the organic society, and pursuit of justice, might be structured toward a re-imagining of the state. As Bowen moves forward with his intellectual history of German corporatism, though, he notes a distinctive change away from the metaphysics of Fichte, Muller, and Hegel.

Later theorists, who were much less metaphysical and much more conversant with the vocabulary of the rapidly growing sciences of biology and psychology, tended to place more stress upon other "organic" attributes—chiefly upon the specialization of members according to function, and up on the "automatic" or "autonomous" action of various organs. This shift of emphasis ran roughly parallel with the revival of interest in pluralism and federalism, both of which were critical of the developments that occurred—most strikingly in the latter half of the [19th] century—in the direction of monistic state sovereignty, secularism and centralization.

While Bowen explores a wide range of German corporatist thought, directed at unpacking all this intellectual history, in this series I’ll focus primarily upon his dissection of the role of what we saw him identify above as the most influential agent of German corporate pluralism: Social Catholicism. The next two installment will be dedicated to key thinkers among the Social Catholics, and the political movements that entailed them. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you someone who you think would find these discussions of interest, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Though since initially writing this installment, my reading of Levy has alerted me to the role of Montesquieu in theorizing this ancient constitution long before Hegel does so.