The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Blackbourn, David; Eley, Geoff

doi:10.2307/25142836

Cited by 24 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…The institutional arrangements supported civil organisations engaging in art, literature, and sciences resulting in a civil society more liberal than any European at the beginning of the 20 th century (Gall 1991;Kocka 1989); aristocratic norms were probably more pronounced in France and the UK than in Germany (Blackbourn and Eley 1984;Kocka 1986;Peukert 1992;Raphael 2011). The thesis of the German Sonderweg (constructing a continuity from the late 19 th century to Nazi Germany based on a teleological concept of modernisation) has thus been moderated and even its defenders do no longer dispute the dominance of a liberal society in late 19 th century Germany (Kocka 1988;Hamerow 1983;Smith 2008).…”

Section: Imperial Germany: a Mature Lao At The Doorstep?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Weimar Germany: The first open access order that failed?

Reckendrees

2014

Const Polit Econ

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Section: Imperial Germany: a Mature Lao At The Doorstep?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Weimar Germany: The first open access order that failed?

Reckendrees

2014

Const Polit Econ

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“…Allowing the Jews to endanger a traditional mentality upon which modern industrial society still depends means playing with fire. Treitschke appears as a defender of the modernity that the Bismarck Reich represented (Blackbourn and Eley ), i.e. the modernity of the capitalist nation‐state that post‐1848 German liberals had fought for; at the same time, he is concerned with defending this modernity from its own excesses (exemplified by the ‘boom‐time mischief’).…”

Section: Treitschke On Jewish Materialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite differences in the trajectory of nation formation or the centrality of the state for processes of economic development, however, fundamental characteristics of large‐scale societal processes (‘modernisation’, modern state formation, the emergence of the capitalist mode of production) were common to most European countries, and the cultural, social and political problems encountered and responses to them, such as liberalism, shared many broadly similar features (cf. Blackbourn and Eley ). Liberalism, which emerged during the French Revolution as the politics of the Gironde and the upper bourgeoisie, was characterised as the struggle against royalist reaction on the one side, egalitarian popular movements on the other.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

German modernity, barbarous Slavs and profit‐seekingJews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

Stoetzler

Achinger

2013

Nations and Nationalism

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This paper examines emblematic texts by two important protagonists of post‐1848 liberalism in Germany, Gustav Freytag and Heinrich von Treitschke, focusing on their treatment of Jews and Poles. The paper analyses the social content of their statements and argues that the elements of anti‐Semitism and anti‐Slav racism that they contain were motivated by the specific kind of nationalist liberalism that frames their affirmation of the process of modernisation. This affirmation was directed against the Poles on the one hand, seen as backward Easterners who had to be pushed into civilisation by Prussian–German colonialism, and, on the other hand, the Jews, largely perceived as representing the wrong kind of modernity against which benign (supposedly German) modernity had to be protected. At the same time, the image of the Jew in Freytag and Treitschke also participates in that of the backward Easterner, permitting to see undesirable, allegedly Jewish aspects of modernity also as distortions resulting from an alien and ancient culture. This analysis has consequences for theorisations of both liberalism and nationalism: it suggests that the racism and anti‐Semitism of nationalist liberals were intrinsically related to core aspects of the liberal world‐view rather than being merely contingent opinions held by particular individuals. It also indicates that the nationalism of many German post‐1848 liberals was ethnic as well as liberal. In this way, the paper contributes to the growing body of literature discussing the illiberal aspects of liberalism as well as the shortcomings of the long‐established conceptual dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal nationalism.

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“…21. Comninel 1987Blackbourn and Eley 1984;Mayer 1981. treatment of the Tanzimat as an 'aberration' not only fails to capture 'the historical record of, and complexities involved in, the importation of capitalist sociality across the international milieu' but also hardly achieves to uncover the peculiarity of the Turkish route into modern world-historical development.22…”

Section: Non-capitalist Origins Of the Ottoman Modernisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey, Yıldız Atasoy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Duzgun

2012

Hist Mater

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Yıldız Atasoy's recent survey of state transformation in Turkey reiterates some of the most typical shortcomings of Marxian approaches to the Ottoman/Turkish modernisation. This involves an ahistorical conception of capitalism reduced to commercial expansion and a structuralist method that transhistoricises the historical diffferentiation of the economic from the political. Combined together in Atasoy's book, capitalism no longer exists in the shape of specifĳic social relations and particular juridical/political forms, but rather it precedes and determines them. Consequently, social struggles over production and reproduction are separated from and no longer implicated within struggles over the redefĳinition of citizenship, secularism and democracy. An implicit economic determinism eventually prevails, reproducing functionalist modes of argumentation. Based on a theoretical and historical critique of Atasoy's argument, this review seeks to provide new insights into Ottoman/Turkish modernity from a Political Marxist perspective.

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The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Weimar Germany: The first open access order that failed?

Weimar Germany: The first open access order that failed?

German modernity, barbarous Slavs and profit‐seekingJews: the cultural racism of nationalist liberals

Islam’s Marriage with Neoliberalism: State Transformation in Turkey, Yıldız Atasoy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

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