German political thought is an equivocal concept that may be best understood in the way of a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance.” While the adjective German can be understood to refer to a core of works written in German, by Germans, and reflecting the institutional, social, and cultural context of Germany, the use of linguae francae and the fragmented history of Germany prevent unambiguous demarcations. Additionally, the domain of the “political” does not coincide with contingent disciplinary boundaries: next to the political thinkers, theologians, jurists, economists, sociologists, and others have made important contributions. Therefore, who does and does not belong to German political thought will always be controversial. With these reservations in mind, one may trace certain currents of German political thought in their historical development (e.g., idealism, romanticism, critical theory) and perhaps even identify something “typically German” in each author without succumbing to the illusion that the “typical” must be the same in all of them.
The Protestant Tradition
A suitable starting point is the man who shaped the modern German language with his translation of the Bible: Martin Luther (1483–1546). Of course, the great church reformer was first and foremost a theologian, but his quest for a purified theology entailed the breakup of the medieval unity of theology, philosophy, politics, and law. In the context of his fights with papal and imperial authority, his distinction between a temporal and a spiritual regiment and his affirmation of both in On Secular Authority (1523) ended up serving the rise of national particularism and the territorial state. Authoritarian elements in his thought are undeniable: Because all men are sinners, God has subjected them to the “law and sword” of worldly authority; they must not revolt, not even against a tyrannical government. At the same time, by limiting the worldly regiment to matters of life, limb, and property, by insisting on the Freedom of a Christian (1520), and by advocating the “priesthood of all believers,” Luther provided powerful figures of thought that could later be used to argue for freedom of conscience, the primacy of the moral law, and representative government. These achievements are derogated by the anti-Jewish diatribes in his last works, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), which are often cited in attempts to explain why Germans succumbed to the anti-Semitic Nazi regime 400 years later.
The effort to extricate politics from its entanglement with theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, while keeping it compatible with Protestant doctrine, also permeates the work of the Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638). In his Politica, Methodice Digesta (1614), he propagates the idea of a “symbiotic” commonwealth or “consociation” that Michael Lessnoff (1986) described as a “‘contractualized’ version of Aristotle. . . .”With this, Althusius originated the peculiar social contract theory of German natural law that the distinguished legal scholar Otto von Gierke (1841–1921) later tried to pass off as the standard version. Contrary to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte, this tradition posits not one social contract but (at least) two: a treaty of association (pactum unionis) and a treaty of subjugation (pactum subjectionis).
Natural Law
The German natural law tradition gained weight and widespread dissemination through Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), who produced the most influential natural law philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writing against the background of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and in critical appropriation of the ideas of Grotius and Hobbes, Pufendorf elaborated a system of rights and obligations pertaining to individuals and political associations under a secular natural law, emphasizing sociality as its basis: In order to be safe, humans must be sociable. In Germany, his work gave rise to an important natural law school that included Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff. Abroad, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Madison were among the authors who picked up some of his ideas.
GERMAN IDEALISM: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL
In terms of international impact, arguably no one rivals the main representatives of what became known as German idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Although these authors never thought of themselves as a group or movement, they explored roughly similar approaches to fundamental philosophical problems by asking how the thinking subject should conceive of itself, the external world, and the relation between them. Political matters are discussed within this comprehensive framework and with quite different results by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel (and not much at all by Schelling).
Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) contributions to political thought were undervalued for a long time, mostly because his groundbreaking treatises on theoretical and moral philosophy, including Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), drew so much attention. This has changed, not least because of the homage paid by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and others. Kant is the paradigmatic enlightenment thinker, believing in reason and progress. He viewed the social contract as an idea of reason, demanding that reason’s moral law of justice and right—related to, but not identical with, the famous “categorical imperative”—set the normative imperative for politics. Reason requires (1) a republican constitutional order within states, (2) a republican order between states, and (3) a rudimentary cosmopolitan order beyond the state. Among other things, these demands made Kant one of the progenitors of democratic peace theory.
Like Kant, whom he admired, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) built an impressive philosophical system of which the legal and political philosophy forms an important but sometimes neglected part. In a characteristic “idealist” move, the fundamental principles of law and justice (Recht) that are to govern the analysis and practice of politics are deduced from the axiom that a finite reasonable being cannot comprehend itself without ascribing itself a free will. Fichte’s attempt to show how the state ought to be reformed to conform ever more to reason’s ideal results in the model of a “closed commercial state” where freedom is maximized by a socialist order and command economy.
The attempts to capture the world’s totality in a single philosophical system find their climax in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Fichte’s successor at the University of Berlin. Convinced that he is living in a time of world-historical transformation (and not modest about his own role in it), Hegel aims for a philosophical system that gives truth its genuine form. His Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) is a classic of political thought in its own right, but his lasting influence has to be attributed equally to philosophical ideas developed elsewhere, especially the concept of Geist (“spirit” or “mind”), the dialectic as a logical and ontological principle, and the philosophy of history informed by these concepts. Hegel portrays history as the rational/reasonable process of Geist coming to realize itself by becoming ever more self-conscious, objectifying itself in particular forms of social, political, and cultural life (e.g., the “rational” modern nation-state), and creating the external world, all in a series of dialectical moves. The intriguing breadth and depth of Hegel’s philosophy—and its notorious complexity—continue to inspire and provoke. Diverse thinkers and movements owe it great debts, among them the Frankfurt school and communitarianism.
Marx And Engels
Hegel’s most influential disciple and critic, however, was Karl Marx (1818–1883). If judged by his own statement in Theses on Feuerbach (1845) that philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways while the point is to change it, Marx has been vindicated. Even though one must not confuse Marx’s ideas with Marxist ideology (Marxism), the works of Marx and his lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) were fundamental for the socialist and communist movements that came to dominate the fate of so many.
The crucial shift in Marx’s thinking occurred when he parted company with the “Young Hegelians” like Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach and turned the critique of religion and philosophy into a critique of the socioeconomic conditions of human life. Drawing on German idealism, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, Marx and Engels then fashioned a view of history, society, economy, and politics that puts labor, the “conditions of production,” and the concomitant class system at the center. For them, the “forces of production” define the relations of power and constitute the economic base of society, on which rises a political and legal superstructure that codifies and reinforces the domination of one class over the other. History is seen as a sequence of class struggles driven by material factors (dialectical materialism, historical materialism) that will find resolution only in a world revolution, the transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the final stage of a classless and stateless society. Today, scientific socialism, Marx’s and Engels’s theoretical edifice, has been largely torn apart, but many of its building blocks are still in use, be it in the general political dictionary (alienation, surplus value, class, expropriation, bourgeoisie, etc.), or in the methodological toolkit of sociology and history, or in the ant globalization movement that builds on Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
German Romanticism
Marx was not the first to step out of German idealism’s shadow. Right on idealism’s heels, a movement formed that shares pride of place with it among German contributions to the world of thought and culture: romanticism. While customarily regarded as a movement in literature and the arts, the romantics’ insistence on the importance of individual feelings and the needs of the soul naturally led to political ideas of prime importance, most notably an organic conception of society that sought to combine the values of individual self-realization and community life.
From a political perspective, the pivotal members of the Romantic circle were the author Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and the poets Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis (1772–1801). As much as romanticism was a reaction against idealism, the former was beholden to the latter, which is why Fichte and Schelling are usually mentioned in treatises on either one. Likewise, the romantics yearned to go beyond the classicism personified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759– 1805), and Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813). On the periphery of their movement, one finds the fourth member of the quadrumvirate of “Weimar Classicism”: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who is customarily credited with creating nationalism and historicism as political theories.
Nietzsche
If Marx was the revolutionary who upended the great systematic constructions of German idealism by “standing Hegel on his feet,” his near-contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the subversive free spirit who tried to undermine its very foundations. Nietzsche casts into doubt the metaphysical certainties at the heart of Western civilization: “God is dead,” Platonist philosophy and Christianity’s “slave morality” have corrupted the entire culture, and nihilism reigns. What is called for is a heroic “reevaluation of all values” that acknowledges the inextricable uniqueness of individual human experience and the resulting “perspectiveness” of all judgments about right and wrong, true and false.
Nietzsche’s style was antisystematic, epigrammatic, often puzzling, and sometimes disturbing. Racists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) and the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) took his talk about the “Übermensch” and the “blond beast” as grist to their mills. Still, Nietzsche has become a fixture of political and social thought in democratic circles. One main reason is that he was the archetype of the radical critic. His unrelenting questioning and unmasking of the powers that be—established concepts, norms, social structures—provoked and inspired modern moral philosophy, the philosophy of language (e.g., Wittgenstein), postmodernism, poststructuralism (e.g., Foucault), cultural theory, and other streams of thought. German poets and thinkers of all stripes have been influenced by him, including Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno.
The Early Twentieth Century: Max Weber And Carl Schmitt
Max Weber (1864–1920) is often named as one of the founders of sociology, along with Marx, Comte, and Durkheim. Actually, his methodological and substantive contributions have enriched the entire field of the social sciences and humanities. One key to Weber’s methodological legacy is the term Verstehen (understanding). For Weber, sociology is a “science which wants to understand social action interpretatively and thereby to explain it causally in its course and consequences” (Economy and Society, 1922, 1). It can achieve this by identifying the rationale of actions as instrumental (zwec krational), value-rational (wer trational), affectional/emotional, or traditional. These distinctions—which display Weber’s debts to Kant and neo-Kantianism—also inform many of his substantive contributions, notably his interpretation of Western history as a process of progressive “rationalization”; his thesis that Protestantism promoted capitalism (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904); his “ideal types” of traditional, legal, and charismatic authority; his ubiquitous definition of the state as a “legitimate monopoly on the use of force”; and, last but not least, his ethical instructions for scientists and politicians.
In the interwar period, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) established himself as one of the leading legal theorists of Germany. His alliance with the Nazi party and ideology has made him a deeply problematic author but could not overshadow the fecundity of his ideas on sovereignty and the concept of the political, as the attention of even post-Marxist feminist thinkers like Chantal Mouffe in On the Political (2005) demonstrates.
Living Through And After World War II (1939–1945)
Entangled in the tragedy of Germany in the twentieth century are the life and work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). Raised in a liberal German-Jewish environment in Kant’s hometown of Königsberg, Arendt was influenced as a student by the brand of German existentialism developed by her teachers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. She was forced to flee the Nazis and deprived of her German citizenship in 1937, yet the Nazi ideology and crimes provided her with the material for two of her best-known books: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traces the intellectual and social origins of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which was based on her trial reports for the New Yorker. She became an American citizen in 1951 but cherished the intellectual heritage of her native Germany. She translated some of her own works from English into German, including her philosophical magnum opus The Human Condition (1958), a neo-Aristotelian attempt to identify the practical human activity “action” as the basis of a true understanding of political life.
Arendt’s fate of being forced to flee her homeland was shared by a group of German-Jewish social philosophers whose careers were conjoined by the Institute for Social Research, which was established at the University of Frankfurt in 1923, transferred to New York in the 1930s, and reestablished in Frankfurt in 1950: Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Erich Fromm (1900–1980), and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), today collectively known as the Frankfurt school. While Fromm advanced the psychological analysis of society, and Marcuse became an icon of the student revolutions of the 1960s, the lasting impact of the Frankfurt school must be attributed to the “critical theory” developed chiefly by Horkheimer (who coined the term in a 1937 essay on “Traditional and Critical Theory”) and Adorno.
Well versed in the German idealism of Hegel and Kant, inspired above all by Marx, and spurred on by Nietzsche’s nihilistic conclusion of enlightenment, Weber’s gloomy analysis of the “iron cage of modernity,” and Sigmund Freud’s insights into the repressive nature of civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno expounded critical theory by exposing the self-destructive tendency of enlightenment. In Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944), they aim to show how enlightenment’s aspiration to create a rational system of value-free, objective, and noncontingent knowledge leads to totalitarian claims in both science (where positivism “reduces the world to the blindness and muteness of data,” p. 174) and society (where capitalism administers persons as things). The purpose of critical theory, instead, is to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. Sometimes, it seems to be this emancipatory attitude rather than any specific theoretical insight that has secured the Frankfurt school a place in the genealogical lineage of present-day academic movements like feminist theory, multicultural theory, theories of deliberative democracy, and the antiglobalization movement.
Political Thought In Western Germany
In German political thought, the obvious heir to Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory is Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), a member of the “second generation” of the Frankfurt school who worked as Adorno’s assistant from 1956 to 1959 but left the Institute of Social Research because of conflicts with Horkheimer. But Haber mas’s impact extends far beyond that. Works including The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981), and Between Facts and Norms (1992) have established Haber mas as one of the leading social philosophers in the Western world.
Despite the stupendous scope of his treatises, one can argue that a single powerful idea constitutes the gravitational center that holds them together: the idea that the pragmatics of language exact and reveal a “communicative rationality,” which, first, conditions the ways in which one can talk about scientific, moral, legal, and political claims; and which can therefore, second, be used to construct a critical social theory that integrates systems theories with action-oriented theories. “Discourse ethics” and “deliberative democracy” are the logical corollaries of this idea.
In his attempt to develop a fundamental and comprehensive theory of social action that has something to say about matters of knowledge, ethics, politics, and (lately) faith, Habermas ingeniously incorporates ideas of tremendously diverse lineage: He borrows from the great systematic thinkers in the history of German thought, Kant, Hegel, and Marx; from the Frankfurt school; from sociological classics like Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons; from American pragmatism (especially George Herbert Mead) and the philosophy of language—all to create a system of thought that is unmistakably his own.
Habermas’s main rival for the title of most influential German theorist after World War II and one of his productive interlocutors has been Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). A student of Talcott Parsons, Luhmann devoted his life to the elaboration of an all-encompassing systems theory of social life in which the primary units of analysis are not people or groups but the structures and operations (especially communications) of the diverse systems that constitute the overall system of society.
Among the younger generations of political thinkers in Germany, no one has so far matched the breadth and depth, let alone the international impact, of Habermas. This does not belittle the quality and originality of their writings. It simply means that the next chapter in the history of German political thought has yet to be written.
Bibliography:
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 2004.
- Beiser, Frederick C. The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Foundations of Natural Right: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Edited by Frederick Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Habermas, Jürgen. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. 4th edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994.Translated by William Rehq as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Edited by Allen W.Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2006.Translated by Edmund Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
- Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. 2nd ed., enlarged ed., reprint (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Edited by Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Lessnoff, Michael. Social Contract: Issues in Political Theory. Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1986.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Edited by Adrian DelCaro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Pufendorf, Samuel von. The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf. Edited by Craig L. Carr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
- Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Expanded ed. Chicago: University. of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Tucker, Robert C. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978.
- Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie. 5th ed., rev. Edited by Johannes Winckelmann.Tübingen, Germamy: Mohr, 1990. Originally published 1921.
- Edited and translated by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich as Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
- Weber, Max. Wissenschaft als Beruf. Politik als Beruf (Max Weber Studienausgabe 17) [Politics as a Vocation. Science as a Vocation (Max Weber Study Issue)]. Edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter.Tübingen, Germany: Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1994. Originally published 1919.
- Edited and translated by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.
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