-
Corporatist Discourse and HeavyIndustry in Wilhelmine
Germany:Factory Culture and Employer Politics in the SaarDENNIS
SWEENEY
University of Alberta
During the decade before 1914, the central coordinates of
factory culture andemployer politics in the heavy industrial Saar
entered into a process of transfor-mation. In a marked departure
from the familial metaphors and representationslong associated with
the paternalist factory regime in this region of coal miningand
iron and steel production in southwest Germany, many Saar
industrialistsbegan to reimagine work identities and the social
relations of factory productionin distinctively corporatist terms.
In their industry newspaper, journal publica-tions, and internal
reports after the turn of the century, they increasingly referredto
a new social aristocracy of labor in the productive economy and a
har-monious community of work in the large-scale business
enterprise. They alsobegan to link these definitions of work and
occupational identity to a largersocial imaginary that articulated
a corporatist vision of a world composed ofoccupational estates
(Berufsstnde). In this new ideological idiom, Saar em-ployers began
to call for the political organization of a wider Occupational
Es-tate of Industry and Trade (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand) and the
formation ofa corporative state (Stndestaat). Accordingly, the
language of Saar employersduring the prewar years became
corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated aworldview in a
vocabulary that invoked forms of social address, natural
hier-archy, and community that seem reminiscent of the old regime
corporate order;and it formed the basis of programmatic political
aims calling for the direct rep-resentation of economic interests
in the realm of party politics and the state.
Until very recently, historians have interpreted the meaning of
nineteenth-and twentieth-century corporatist terminology in the
context of debates aboutGermanys lack of modernity and the
long-term origins of Nazism. Postwar in-
701
0010-4175/01/701735 $9.50 2001 Society for Comparative Study of
Society and History
I would like to thank several friends and colleagues who have
helped me develop the arguments inthis essay: Kathleen Canning,
Thomas Childers, David Crew, Geoff Eley, William H. Sewell,
Jr.,Margaret Somers, Steve Soper, Ron Suny, Markus Reisenleitner,
and the anonymous readers andthe editors of this journal.
-
tellectual historians Fritz Stern and George Mosse, for example,
trace corpo-ratist definitions of work and social order to a
specifically German tradition ofromantic anti-modernism, consisting
of various strains of racial thought,Germanic Christianity, and
Volkish nature mysticism: that is, to a much a larg-er
cultural-political climate that repudiated the core values of the
Enlighten-ment (i.e., reason, progress, freedom, and
individualism), rejected modern lib-eral, secular, and industrial
civilization, and ultimately helped pave the wayfor the archaic
barbarism of National Socialism.1 Similarly, the historical
social-science perspectives of the late 1960s and 1970s explain the
resonance ofcorporatist ideology well into the twentieth century in
terms of the so-calledGerman Sonderweg, or the divergence of German
socio-political developmentfrom the normal trajectories of the
Western capitalist democracies. In thisinterpretive framework,
corporatist representations of social order and calls forthe
creation of a Stndestaat are associated with pre-industrial,
pre-capitalist,and pre-bourgeois social groups, including
backward-looking elites (e.g. aris-tocratic landowners, civil
servants, and army officers), artisans, and shopkeep-ers, who were
out of step with, and largely hostile toward, the consequences
ofrapid economic change.2 In other words, corporatism is identified
with the ar-chaic ideological arsenal of the German right, which
failed rationally to corre-spond with economic modernization and
successfully blocked the advance ofmodern social and political
relationships and the healthy arrival of a liberal-democratic,
capitalist modernity in Wilhelmine Germany.3
Challenges to the Sonderweg thesis in the 1980s and the more
recent histo-riographical focus on the rapid onset of German
modernity, however, haveopened up new perspectives on the
relationship between economic structuresand right-wing ideology in
the early twentieth century. In their critique of theteleologies
embedded in the Sonderweg narrative, David Blackbourn and GeoffEley
argue that many of the late nineteenth-century authoritarian
ideologies inGermany (e.g., radical nationalism, imperialism, or
employer paternalism) werebourgeois phenomena, generated not in a
bygone feudal era but in the Wil-helmine period itself in response
to the very modern imperatives of popularlegitimation and capital
accumulation in a rapidly changing industrial society.4More
recently, Detlev Peukert has also challenged assumptions about the
lackof fit between economic changes and right-wing ideology in
Germany in his ef-forts to locate the origins of National Socialism
not in archaic cultural-politicaltraditions but in the
uncertainties and crisis-prone nature of the process
ofmodernization itself. The ensemble of socio-cultural changes
associated withthe arrival of modernity, Peukert argues, prompted
contemporary observers tosystematize all that was new and to
formulate plans for a rationally organizedsocial ordera response
inscribed in ideological formations as divergent associalism and
fascism.5 Thus, schemes for the rationalization of
industrialproduction during the 1920s, according to Peukert, could
be assimilated tosocial-democratic conceptions of economic
democracy, communist varieties
702 dennis sweeney
-
of Stakhanovism, or fascist designs for a corporatist works
community.6Similarly, Mary Nolans recent study of industrial
rationalization in Weimarheavy industry emphasizes not a singular
but rather competing visions of moder-nity. In this context, Nolan
argues, right-wing employers, engineers, and in-dustrial
sociologists associated with the Ruhr-based Dinta (German Institute
forTechnical Labor Training) articulated a vision of a rationalized
economy in arhetoric that combined the economic and the spiritual,
the modern and the ar-chaic and offered both an acceptance of
economic modernity and an admi-ration for right-wing militarism and
a conservative ideology of leadership.7
This focus on the compatibility of corporatist ideas with
industrial moderni-ty constitutes a major historiographical
achievement, not least for the way inwhich it challenges the
previous emphasis on the backwardness of employerideology in
Germany. Nevertheless, it shares with earlier history-of-ideas
andsocial-scientific approaches an important analytical convention
which mightlimit our understanding of corporatist discourse: the
presupposition that lan-guages or ideologies are relatively fixed
systems of meaning that (should) re-flect underlying or
extra-linguistic economic conditions or social structures.8In the
works of Peukert and Nolan, for example, the import of corporatist
ide-ology in heavy industry is defined by the extent to which it
corresponds withor facilitates the organizational, bureaucratic,
and technical imperatives of ad-vanced industrialization. A
residual teleology, therefore, remains at work inthese studies in
so far as they assume a generalizable social-structural
processtoward industrial modernity against which a variety of
ideological trajectoriescan be measured.9 This kind of normative
procedure tends to impute an intrin-sic logic to complex
socio-cultural formations (in this case German moderni-ty), which
then call forth cultural and ideological responses; according
toMargaret Somers, it thereby measures the behaviors and
expressions of histor-ical actors in specific social settings
against an endogenous directionality ora priori definition of
rational action.10 Implicitly, then, right-wing corporatismbecomes
modern or less modern, rational or less rational, and capitalist or
lesscapitalist to the extent that it reflects or responds to the
universal material andsocial imperatives intrinsic to the process
of capitalist modernization takingplace across western Europe and
the United States in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth
centuries.
While this essay embraces many of the challenges posed by this
recent work,it takes a very different approach to the study of
corporatist discourse. Draw-ing on the insights of recent work in
cultural studies, it examines Saar corpo-ratism neither as a
coherent system of ideas operating outside the realm of livedsocial
relations nor as an ideological reflection, however mediated, of
material-economic changes. Instead, corporatist terms and
representations are under-stood here as part of an ideological
discoursea historically secured and so-cially organized connotative
field of reference which defined a particularindustrial-social
order.11 This definition departs from the understandings men-
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 703
-
tioned above in at least two ways. First, it rests on theories
of articulation whichcall into question the assumed semantic
fixities and logical coherences of ide-ological discourses over
time. The dynamics of articulationunderstood herein the dual sense
of expression in language and connection (or linkage)
betweenlinguistic elementsinvolve an ongoing and contingent process
of struggleand repositioning which takes place within and between
discourses.12 Thismeans that ideological discourses cannot be read
in terms of a priori assump-tions about their necessary logics of
arrangement; rather they are best un-derstood as contingent
formations whose connotative references and principlesof
articulation are historically variable. In the words of Stuart
Hall, therefore,the so-called unity of a discourse is really the
articulation of different, dis-tinct elements which can be
rearticulated in different ways because they haveno necessary
belongingness. From this perspective, rather than identifyingfixed
discourses and their semantic unities over time, it makes more
sense toexplore how different linguistic elements come, under
certain conditions, tocohere together within a discourse and how
they do or do not become artic-ulated, at specific conjunctures, to
certain political subjects.13 Second, thisdefinition of corporatist
discourse draws on the radical contextualism of cul-tural studies
as a historical practice and thus presupposes that there are
nonecessary correspondences or entailed relationships in history
between dis-courses, practices, and social forces. Instead, it
posits that history is always theproduction of such connections or
correspondences.14 In this essay, therefore,the signifying power of
corporatist discourse is understood in terms of both itsconnotative
resonances and its contingent articulation in and with an
evolvingconfiguration of social practices, institutions, and
relations.15
This attempt to treat discourses as a socially articulated and
contingent fieldsof reference and to question assumptions about
entailed linkages between dis-courses and social forces permits a
very different understanding of both themeanings and generative
context of corporatism in the early twentieth-centurySaar. By
contrast with previous historical social-science analyses, which
em-phasize the non-correspondence and disjuncture between a
pre-modern irra-tional vocabulary and modern capitalist factory
relations, this essay stresses thevery fluid articulations between
what were novel corporatist terms and repre-sentations, on the one
hand, and modern industrial rationalities, institutions,and
relations on the other. Indeed, it reveals the simultaneous
emergence of, andconstitutive links between, corporatist
vocabulary, schemes for workplace ra-tionalization, and new labor
policies and occupational organizations in Ger-man heavy industry
and politics during the decade before 1914. By contrastwith recent
research which treats corporatist ideology as a response to the
ma-terial changes associated with industrial modernity, moreover,
this essay em-phasizes the productivity of ideological discourses:
that is, the ways in whichthe latter helped to constitute the real
relations and institutions of the factoryworkplace and became
important sites of social struggle. Corporatist discourse
704 dennis sweeney
-
reoriented factory labor and social policy and employer politics
in the Saar pri-marily in response to the class-centered industrial
actions and political com-mitments of the socialist and Christian
labor movements, which challengedthe familial discourses and
institutions of the paternalist factory regime dur-ing the prewar
decade. In this sense, Saar corporatism was articulated in
effortsto reestablish authoritative definitions of industrial work
and social relationsand their associated institutions and practices
in the evolving relations of classhegemony in early
twentieth-century Germany.16
corporatist discourse in german heavy industry
Corporatist categories and assumptions shaped the theoretical
reflection andsocial experience of a diverse range of philosophers,
social theorists, state of-ficials, and politicians in central
Europe and Germany in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries.
They may be found, for example, in the political phi-losophy of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Adam Mller, and Hegel in the early
nine-teenth century. In the period after 1830, Catholic social
theoristsincludingFranz von Baader, Bishop Ketteler, and Franz
Hitzeembraced corporatistideas about social and political
organization as a response to the problems as-sociated with
industrial growth. In addition, estatist representations of social
or-der were integral to the mid-century social theory of Wilhelm
Heinrich Riehl,the traditionalist conservatism of Ernst von Gerlach
in the 1860s and 1870s,the monarchical socialism of the prominent
economist Adolph Wagner, theChristian Socialism of Adolph Stoecker,
and the corporative experiments ofBismarck, who in 18801881
attempted to establish a National EconomicCouncil as a
counterweight to the Reichstag.17 Indeed, by the eve of 1914,
cor-poratist terms and premises shaped the ideological visions of a
range of politi-cal and economic interest groups, including the
Conservative Party, the Agrar-ian League, Mittelstand and peasant
organizations, and, to a certain extent,Catholic social reform
associations. Capable of accommodating a wide rangeof signifying
practices and programmatic aims, the language of corporatismwas not
the preserve of any single social group in Germany; nor did it
functionas a single, immutable discursive system. It was a
multiaccentual discoursewhich operated as a field of debate, marked
by shifts in register, subject todifferent kinds of appropriation
by a wide variety of historical actors.18
During the Wilhelmine period, perhaps the most important
articulation ofcorporatist discourse came in response to
intensifying labor conflict and the lan-guages of class in German
politics. The half-decade after the turn of the centu-ry marked a
pivotal moment in German labor and class relations, as it
witnessedthe dramatic rise of trade unions and labor militancy, the
formation of nation-wide employers anti-union organizations, and
the growing systematization ofthe weapons of struggle at the
workplace, in the form of coordinated measuressuch as region-wide
strikes, lockouts, blacklists, and labor exchanges.19 Thesenew
forms of labor conflictespecially the efforts of the unionswere
artic-
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 705
-
ulated in and with languages of class and were part of the wider
struggle overthe organization of work and the distribution of
wealth in Germany.20 Thiswas most obviously the case with the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD),which emerged as the second
largest party in the Reichstag after the electionsof 1903, and the
socialist-affiliated trade unions. The latter effectively
centeredtheir social and political identities around the
subordinate status of (male) wageearners at the workplace and the
inequalities and exploitation intrinsic to in-dustrial capitalism.
It was also the case, however, with the conservative andheavily
Catholic-influenced Christian labor movement, which, in
competitionwith the socialists, forged a class identity within a
religious-ecclesiasticalframework and pushed for more limited
schemes of social reform.21 Indeed,employers themselves recognized
the centrality of class identities and analysisto labor
organization and militancy: thus, the chairman of the Central
Associa-tion of German Industrialists (CVDI), Axel Bueck, routinely
identified allworkers combinations and even social reform
associations as class-politicalorganizations. In relation to the
labor contract and genuine worker questions,he maintained, there
were no differences between the liberal unions, the Chris-tians
Trade Unions, and Social Democracy.22
It was in attempts to dissolve the unifying appeals of class and
class lan-guages that industrialists and their allies began to
elaborate a new social imag-inary that emphasized the central role
of industrial-commercial occupations orestates (Berufsstnde) in the
life of the German nation. Thus, as early as 1906,editors of
various industry publications and important industry spokesmen
be-gan calling for protection of the economic interests of the
productive estatesas a response to the inroads made by the
class-political trade unions and theSPD into what were deemed
employer prerogatives at the workplace.23 And es-pecially after
1908, the growing popularity of corporatist vocabulary among
in-dustry publicists was unmistakable: key figures such as the
Hamburg factoryowner J. A. Menck, the Hamburg banker Max M.
Warburg, Chairman of theKrefeld Chamber of Commerce Otto Pieper,
Chairman of the DsseldorfChamber of Commerce Otto Brandt, and Saar
industry spokesman AlexanderTille began publishing articles and
pamphlets that explicitly referred to the im-perative of
occupational unity among German employers and elaborated plansfor
occupational-political (berufsstands-politische) organizations
capable ofrepresenting employer interests. Indeed, such
initiativesarticulated in corpo-ratist visions of a social order
composed of occupational estatesincreas-ingly came to define the
social policy orientation and political strategies of theCVDI from
1908 to 1914.
The most systematic and tireless exponent of corporatist social
theory with-in the ranks of German heavy industry was Tille.24 A
former university profes-sor of literature, Tille sat on the
governing board of the nationalist Pan-GermanLeague, worked as Axel
Buecks assistant and later served on the governingcouncil of the
CVDI, and became director of the main industrial organizations
706 dennis sweeney
-
of the Saar in 1903. In a series of essays and booksmost notably
his four-volume study of German political economy entitled The
Occupational Poli-tics of the Industrial and Commercial Estate (Die
Berufsstandspolitik desGewerbe- und Handelsstandes)Tille argued
that modern industrial societywas composed of three principle
groupings or occupational estates (Berufs-stnde): the estate of
agricultural producers, the estate of educated profession-als and
officials (Beamtenstand), and the estate of industrial and
commercialproducers (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand). These social
groups, organized bystrict internal hierarchy, included everyone
engaged in their respective areas ofeconomic activity (i.e.,
agriculture, intellectual labor, and industry and com-merce), from
the wealthiest landowner, government official, and employerdown to
the lowest paid farmhand, clerk, or wage laborer.25
This was not, however, an atavistic representation of the social
world, con-tinuous with pre-industrial schemes of social
classification. Most versions ofeighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century corporatist vocabulary in the Germanstates
articulated a vision of a legally and religiously sanctioned social
order offour hereditary estates, comprised of the nobility, clergy,
peasantry, and Brg-ertum. According to this scheme, an individuals
place in society was deter-mined by birth, official sanction, or
ecclesiastical ordination and was rela-tively fixed.26 By contrast,
Tilles proposed estates were consequences of recenteconomic growth,
ordered along the lines of industry and occupation, and con-stantly
evolving or dynamic (dynameokratisch) social forms. In his
words,The concept of estate had been transformed; the former
hereditary estates hadbeen superseded by the current occupational
estates, and the once horizon-tal arrangement of pre-industrial
estates (into upper, middle, and lower sociallayers) had given way
to vertically aligned Berufsstnde, each encompassingall levels of
social status. Indeed, by the Wilhelmine period the feudal
conno-tations of the word Stand had largely given way to an
entirely different under-standing of Berufsstand as an
occupation.27
The changed meanings of estate are particularly evident in the
way Tille ac-commodated his corporatist sociology to certain
principles of economic liber-alism. An ardent supporter of what he
called the liberal societal order, inwhich the freedom of the
individual was secured,28 Tille took pains to defendthe freedom of
trade and the freedom of the wage contract, by which hemeant the
right of employers to set the terms of employment in their
business-es without the involvement of the state, social reformers,
or independent tradeunions.29 Similarly, he staunchly defended the
central features of the liberaleconomy, including private ownership
of enterprise, private investment, andcapital accumulation. This
general liberal economic framework, according toTille, created the
conditions for a dynamic social meritocracy (dynameo-kratische
Gesellschaft) because it released the creative capacities of the
indi-vidual by offering free room for maneuver to all forces and
granted each theright to display his abilities . . . on the field
of play.30 Tille celebrated the role
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 707
-
of competition between individuals and individual achievement or
perfor-mance (Leistung) in the realm of productive labor as the
principle motor of in-dustrial growth and progress. It was
precisely this dynamic economic frame-work and the industrial
growth it fostered, he argued, that had created thepresent social
order of productive estates.31
In addition, Tilles corporatist social analysis derived from
biological theo-ries about human evolution and natural selection.
Accordingly, his vision of adynamic society of occupational estates
rested on a social Darwinian para-digm that conceived of human
relations in terms of an ongoing struggle forexistence, governed by
the law of natural selection. Social relations within
theoccupational estates, he argued, were determined by the
competition betweenbiologically privileged or capable individuals,
on the one hand, and thoseless capable, on the other.32 Work was
central to this design because it wason the terrain of productive
labor that individuals could realize their differentinnate
capacities and abilities. The hierarchy between employers and
workersin the world of production, therefore, reflected the
natural, biological in-equality among individuals. A factory owner,
according to Tille, simply pos-sessed more evolved innate
capacitiesespecially intellectual facultiesthana day laborer. Under
these conditions, therefore, the leading elements in the so-cial
order constituted a biologically determined (male) social
aristocracy ofability and achievement in the realm of work.33
Tille also framed his understanding of the social aristocracy of
work in theproductive economy of occupational estates with
reference to contemporaryconcerns and fears about the sexual
division of labor and social and biologicalreproduction of the body
of the nation (Volkskrper). In his theory of a socialorder of
productive estates, Tille counterposed the masculine realm of
compe-tition in the productive economy with the male-headed (though
largely female)household savings economy, in which the natural
meritocracy of mental andphysical attributes arranges itself . . .
in a way that subordinates the woman tothe will of the man and the
children to the will of both parents. According tothis scheme, the
appropriate interaction between the savings economy and
theproductive economy would secure the biological reproduction of
future labor-ers and promote austere household efficiencies that
would produce biological-ly fit husband-fathers capable of
competing in the realm of productive la-bor.34 It provided the
framework for a meritocratic productive and biologicalorder that
would secure favorable conditions for industrial growth and
thehealth of the German Volkskrper. In this way, the maintenance of
the healthand the cultivation of the innate capabilities of
biologically superior male indi-viduals, who comprised the new
social aristocracy of work in the social or-der of productive
estates, would allegedly improve the economic and biologi-cal
prospects of the German Volkskrper in the growing struggle for
existencebetween nation-races.35
708 dennis sweeney
-
industrial work and the social aristocracy in the modern
factory
This particular vision of a social order comprised of vertical
strata of occupa-tional groupings was closely linked to debates
over the organization of work inthe large-scale factory
(Grossbetrieb) after the 1890s. It was forged in a
largerideological struggle between a wide range of political
economists, social re-formers, academic practitioners of the new
science of work (Arbeitswis-senschaft), politicians, government
officials, industrialists, and trade unionleaders. In particular,
Tille drew on the ideas of an emerging cohort of conser-vative
economists and academically trained publicists for the capital
goods andextractive industries most closely associated with the
CVDI.36 Despite theirsometimes divergent methods and theoretical
concerns, these right-wing intel-lectuals attempted to reorient the
science of political economy (National-konomie) away from what they
regarded as the politicized and moralisticclaims about work
relations and Sozialpolitikranging from calls for arbitra-tion
bodies to official recognition of trade unions to more fully
developed so-cial insurance schemesput forward by academic social
reformers (the so-called socialists of the chair), socialists, and
Christian trade unionists. In theprocess, they turned not to
nostalgic visions of a pre-industrial past but to thelatest
objective methods and discoveries of the modern social and
naturalsciences.37
In the Saar, this new scientific orientation was part of a novel
set of responsesto the threat of labor organization and militancy.
The longstanding paternalistorganization of work and public life in
the region, dominated by the influentialsteel industrialist and
Free Conservative politician Karl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, had
successfully blocked reform efforts and the formation of
tradeunions since the 1870s. But in 1903, socialist organizers
renewed their attemptsto break into the Kingdom of Stumm: for the
first time since 1877, theylaunched a recruitment drive, created a
workers secretariat (1904), and beganpublishing their own
newspaper, Saarwacht (after 1905). The Christian TradeUnions
engineered an even more successful organizing campaign, winning
re-cruits among steelworkers for a brief period from 1904 to 1906
and buildinglonger-lasting foundations among the Saar miners. By
1910, 14,007 out of50,802 Saar miners working in the Prussian
state-owned coal fields were mem-bers of the Christian Miners
Union.38 Private employers in the rest of localheavy industry
responded with the formation of the Employers League ofSaar
industry in 1904, an anti-strike organization that shared
information aboutunion activities, created a spy system to
infiltrate union meetings, and circulat-ed blacklists among its
members. In addition to these coercive measures, theyresponded with
a series of other ideological initiatives. After his arrival in
1903in the wake of Stumms death, Tille built up an impressive
public relations ap-
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 709
-
paratus, including a redesigned industry newspaper, a pamphlet
series that pro-vided newspapers with information about Saar
industry, two journal series, a li-brary, a newspaper archive, and
a Southwest German Business Archive. Theaim of this activity was to
represent the interests of Saar employers in the pub-lic sphere
and, as part of the national debate, to elaborate a scientific and
the-oretical response to the spread of socialism in all its
forms.39
This public engagement of local employers and their scientific
response tothe class-political claims of the Christian and
socialist labor movements andsocial reformers resulted in a
fundamental redefinition of work and the factoryworkplace. In an
attempt to reject demands for workplace bargaining rights,
ar-bitration bodies, and worker control over the conditions of
employment, Saaremployers turned to scientific and bio-racial
discourse in order to devalue thecontribution of manual laborers,
to exalt the position of employer and entre-preneur, and to
elaborate a vision of natural inequality in the factory. Depart-ing
from previous paternalist claims about the ennobling and moralizing
qual-ities of work, therefore, they embraced a new definition of
labor after 1900 asthe product of the expenditure and deployment of
energy, the physical force(Kraft) variously expressed in nature,
machines, and the human body. Univer-salized as a product of energy
and inscribed in a scientific discourse concernedwith the physical
economy of labor power (Arbeitskraft), however, work wasnot to be
confused with mute natural forces on their own: indeed it was
deemedpresent only with the creative intervention of the employer
or entrepreneur,who gave direction to such simple operations of
manual energy, performedby machines, animals, and men.40 In this
scheme, the employer was the trulycreative force in the workplace
and in society, and the contribution of manu-al workers was
becoming increasingly less significant.
This new interest in the physical economy of labor power and the
scientificmanagement of bodies signaled the gradual dissolution of
the paternalist fac-tory family as a framework for labor policy.
The authority of the employer-father as master of the house (Herr
im Hause), secured by means of an im-mediate and personal
relationship between employer and employee and adisciplinary regime
that penalized workers for inappropriate behavior on andoff the
job, gave way to a new managerial rationality that defined the
industri-al workplace and tasks of the employer in terms of an
economic and biologicalcalculus of efficiency.41 The Saar factory
after 1900 was increasingly viewedin functional-technocratic terms
as the site at which machines and men cameunder direction of the
employer. Accordingly, the employers principal task wasnow to
assess the physical and mental capacities of workers (Handkrfte)
froma productive-economic standpoint. In this way, Saar employers
began to em-phasize the functional fit of workers with their
assigned tasks in the productionprocess and the role of wages and
benefits as incentives in generating produc-tive efficiencies at
work. By contrast, therefore, with the work rules of the
pa-ternalist model of Stummwhich penalized workers for civil
infractions, il-
710 dennis sweeney
-
licit (i.e., non-marital) cohabitation, and excessive drinking
off the jobSaar employers increasingly embraced a logic of
efficiency that emphasized thecontractual aspects of
employer-employee relations, limited the direct contrac-tual
authority of the employer to the workplace, and reconfigured the
work re-lationship, wages, and benefits in accordance with the
interaction betweeneconomic laws and the function, use and
performance of labor power (Hand-kraft).42
This rationality also transformed the moralizing ambitions of
paternalist so-cial policy in the leading Saar factories. Previous
concerns about the moral andintellectual elevation of the workers
estate that were central to the social pro-vision of the
paternalist regime (ranging from housing loans to the use of
recre-ational facilities), gave way to an abiding interest in the
cultivation and preser-vation of the physical capacities of the
worker and the physical health andbiological reproduction of the
working-class family.43 In order to maintain ahealthy and
work-capable (arbeitsfhig) core of employees, therefore, Saarfirms
began to provide new health care programs and institutions for
employ-ees in the factories, including a wide array of nutritional
offerings (canteens,cafeterias, and special dispensaries for
mineral water, coffee, tea, milk and di-luted beer), recreational
outlets (especially swimming pools), and medical fa-cilities (e.g.,
medicinal baths, hospitals, and convalescent homes for workers ina
condition of reduced labor power).44 Moreover, new programs for
wivesand children of workers were createdand existing programs
reconfiguredfor the purposes of social hygiene. After 1900, pre-
and postnatal medical carefor mothers, household assistance and
advice for the wives of workers, sepa-rate factory schools for boys
and girls, and recreational programs for childrenall aimed to
cultivate the strength of the future generation by attending to
thephysical health of the working-class family and by rationalizing
and normaliz-ing the gender roles of private life in ways that
served the interests of social andbiological reproduction.45
This new scientific-technocratic turn in the discourse of Saar
employers wasclosely associated with a particular theory about the
nature of occupational for-mation (Stndebildung) and job
performance in the modern factory. In an ar-ticle published in the
local industry newspaper in 1901, Tille argued that rapidindustrial
growth and the attendant use of expensive production methods
andcomplicated machinery in German factories since the 1890s had
dramaticallyincreased demand for (male) workers of high value
(hochwertige Arbeits-krfte). As a result, the dregs of society
(i.e., primarily unskilled women andchildren), who worked in
factories during the early industrial period, had beenreplaced. Yet
this marked only the first stage in a constantly evolving processof
social change in the factory. Industrial growth continually
fostered demandfor more valued workers and reduced the demand for
workers of lesser value(Minderwertige); the attendant rise in wages
for the more skilled workers in-creased their opportunities for
greater job performance, while the reduction in
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 711
-
wages for lesser skilled workers continually forced them below
the wage ex-istence minimum. The resulting process of occupational
evolution, therefore,had produced two distinct categories of manual
labor: the skilled industrialworker and the Handlanger (or
unskilled day laborer), each caught up in anongoing process of
economic and biological competition for survival.46
Accordingly, the new scientific calculus of labor and social
policy was de-signed to facilitate this process and to accommodate
the needs of the superiorworkers or the social aristocracy among
wage earners. It was meant to takeadvantage of the restless dynamic
of economic and biological forces and com-petition between workers
in order to produce the most efficient and productiveworkers. Thus,
in a clear departure from the moralizing ambitions of previousforms
of company social provision, Saar employers sought the
reformulationof the function of factory welfare institutions as
compensation in return forsuperior performance as early as 1908.
Increasingly framed within a rhetoricof racial economy, company
benefits and welfare programs were redescribedas special advantages
offered to the select group of loyal, capable, and pro-ductive
(leistungsfhig) workers in an effort to improve their job
perfor-mance.47 In this new rationality, company benefits and
workplace incentivesbecame the principal means of promoting the
prospects of the social aristocra-cy of work in the factory: of
cultivating select workers special physical capa-bilities and
superior job performance (Leistung), their bodily
strength(Krperkraft), stamina, conscientiousness, and their
capacity and willingness. . . to subordinate themselves to the
larger factory organization.48
In view of its importance to the factory regime, Saar employers
set out ac-tively to define and represent the new social
aristocracy of industrial labor bymeans of statistical surveys and
quantitative measures. In July and November1903, the leading Saar
employer organizationsthe League for the Protectionof the Common
Economic Interests of the Saar Region, the Southwest
GermanAssociation of German Iron and Steel Industrialists, and the
Chamber of Com-mercebegan to formulate petitions to the state
insurance agency and to cir-culate surveys among their members
designed to create a statistical basis forevaluating the different
social position of skilled industrial workers and un-skilled day
laborers.49 In this way, they constructed a new scheme of
classifi-cation which defined the social aristocracy of labor not
in terms of a work-ers specific job skills or function in the
factory, but rather on the basis of thenumber of years of training
(usually one or more years), wage level (1,200 to1,600 marks per
year), status in the institutions of company welfare, and a
vagueset of physical and mental qualities, such as endurance,
attentiveness, consci-entiousness, dexterity, deftness, presence of
mind, and consideration.50
In addition, Saar employers began to publicize the new category
of an ele-vated social aristocrat and to invent its symbolic forms.
In their newspaperand in company brochures, they claimed that the
superior skilled workers couldbe distinguished from less capable
class of manual workers on the basis of
712 dennis sweeney
-
their own occupational identity, an occupational consciousness
(Standesbe-wusstsein) that was visible in their patterns of social
interaction and in their ownself-image. According to local
employers, skilled workers tended to socializewith each other in
certain clubs, taverns, and community festivities, and
theydistinguished themselves from unskilled workers in the choice
of occupation-al title. In the steel industry, for example, skilled
laborers allegedly preferredthe title foundry man (Httenmann) over
worker (Arbeiter). Foundryman, according to the Saar industry
newspaper, was a name of honor; it sig-nified pride in work,
competence, and respectability and separated the skilledfrom the
unskilled laborer, who usually works with a shovel and lacked
themoral qualities ascribed to the social aristocrat.51 Moreover,
the contrast be-tween the Httenmann and a simple worker was part of
an attempt to de-fine a proud consciousness of occupational estate
(Berufsstandsbewusstsein)among industrial workers, by invoking the
terms and symbols associated withthe traditions of the local mining
industry.52 These included newly designeduniforms for the upper
stratum of skilled workersmodeled after the minersuniforms and
consisting of the familiar black tunic, factory cap with plume,
andleather apronwhich were introduced at the Burbach steelworks,
the Rchlingsteelworks, and at the Fenner glassworks in 1905, and
designed to signify thenewly emergent consciousness of the social
aristocrat: When the laborer wearshis work smock with pride, he
clings to his occupation and job with a differentkind of passion
than he would were he only a member of an
undifferentiatedmultitude.53 They also included the new factory
festival in Malstatt-Burbach,which was introduced by the Burbach
steelworks in 1905 and provided the firstoccasion for the public
display of the steelworkers new uniforms.54
Finally, Saar employers centered the exalted identity of the
social aristocrataround masculinist conceptions of industrial work
and the factory worker. Inthe Saar, nearly all large industrial
concerns excluded women from employ-mentexcept for certain glass
and ceramics firmsand employers insistedfrom the start that the
category of skilled industrial worker could only be ap-plied to
adult male workers. Yet because skill in this context was not
directlylinked to a particular set of tasks, they constructed this
new work identity bylinking assumptions about masculinity with the
physicality of industrial work,superior performance, discipline,
and obedient behavior. Industrial laborplaced significant physical
demands on workers, they maintained; conse-quently only physically
strong people can be taken on. The result was that theoutward
appearance of the foundry man is very impressive, and the mass
ap-pearance of foundry men is considerably different from the
starving battal-ions,with which Socialism parades.55 In this
rendering, the skilled social aris-tocrat was consciously linked to
a masculine image, revealed in the manlylips of disciplined,
martial formations of uniformed foundry men. And im-plicitly his
masculine qualitiesphysical strength, dexterity, discipline,
andobedience to workplace superiorswere counterposed to the
femininity of
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 713
-
the trade unionist, who was physically weak, unskilled,
obstreperous, and sus-ceptible to socialism.
company unions and the community of work in the saar factory
The most sustained attempts to cultivate new work identities
came with theformation of yellow or company unions (Werkvereine) in
the Saar beginningin 1906. Like employers in other German
industrial regions after 1905, Saarfactory owners and loyal
employees created company unions in order toorganize workers who
would agree to reject strikes and membership in strikeorganizations
(i.e. socialist, Christian, and liberal unions). The first such
or-ganization, the Burbacher Httenverein, was created in late May
1906 at theBurbach steelworks in response to the organizational
efforts of the ChristianMetalworkers Union at the plant.56 After
the latter launched a strike involving3,000 to 4,000 workersnearly
the entire labor force of the steelworksinJune and began to extend
their recruitment efforts to other industrial towns, of-ficials at
other large factories began to follow suit: company unions were
sub-sequently created in 1907 at the Halberg steelworks in Brebach,
the Rchlingsteelworks in Vlklingen, the Rchling coking plant in
Altenwald, the Vopeliusglassworks in Sulzbach, and finally in 1912
at the Stumm steelworks in Neun-kirchen. By means of coercive
measures and incentivesmost notably by link-ing all company
benefits and social provision to membership in the unionSaar
employers were very effective in organizing their workers in the
new anti-strike unions. In 1912, for example, the Burbacher
Httenverein numbered4,671 members or 86.5 percent of the total
labor force of 5,400 workers. In ad-dition, they created an
impressive region-wide movement by linking the unionstogether in
the District League of Saar Company Unions in March 1912,
whichimmediately became a corporate member of the national League
of GermanCompany Unions (Bund deutscher Werkvereine).57
In German historiography, these unions, modeled after similar
organizationsin the Ruhr and in Augsburg, are generally understood
as paternalist strategiesfor controlling labor, but in the Saar
this turn to company unions was part of thegrowing crisis of
paternalist hegemony in the regionthe incipient dissolutionof the
institutional and discursive coordinates of the Stumm model of work
re-lations after 1900.58 This crisis was manifested in the
formation of trade unionsand the Employers League of Saar Industry,
and thus the centrality of whatcompany union organizer Dr. Karl
Rchling called class cleavages at workall of which had rendered the
paternalist vision of a familial and personal re-lationship between
employer and employee no longer convincing to a major-ity of Saar
industrial workers.59 Accordingly, Saar factory owners viewed
theWerkvereine as a new organizational and ideological means by
which to countersocialist images of the exploited wage earner and
the factory as an arena of classstruggle. The principal aim of the
company unions was not simply to coerce the
714 dennis sweeney
-
loyalty and compliance of workers or to seduce them with
material advan-tages but to win their active consent to relations
of inequality by offering theman alternative conception of the
nature of work relations in the modern factory.Referred to as the
inner conquest of the labor force by officials of the Rch-ling
Steelworks, this project was part of a newly emergent ideological
forma-tion which began to displace the paternalist model of work
relations.60
Under the leadership of Hermann Rchling, son of the founding
director ofthe Rchling steelworks in Vlklingen, Saar company unions
set out to forge anew solidaristic unity of entrepreneurship,
capital, and labor: that is, a com-munity of work
(Arbeitsgemeinschaft or Werksgemeinschaft) in the factory.61The
notion of a community of work in the factory was most commonly
identi-fied with the research and theoretical writings of Rostock
economist RichardEhrenberg, who, along with his student Erich
Sperler, helped to create the pro-totypical company unions at the
Siemens electro-technical firm in Berlin andthe Krupp steelworks in
Essen and to train leaders of the Werkverein movement.The idea of a
community of work was based not on the paternalist vision of
afactory family, nor on preindustrial understandings of
Gemeinschaft, but ratheron scientific and empirical observations of
the nature of work and indus-trial organization in the age of
machine technology and the large-scale factory.Thus, according to
Ehrenberg, the increasingly complex division of labor andthe vast
differences in skill, income, and status in the modern industrial
enter-prise had given rise to a community of work in which
employers and work-ers shared the same interestthe business
interest (Geschftsinteresse) ofthe firmrather than to an arena of
conflicting or competing interests. Yet, themodern factory, unlike
previous forms of craft production, had evolved to meeta vast array
of local, regional, and global needs, and therefore demanded
farmore complex organization (e.g., in terms of the division of
labor and use ofmachine technology) and direction. Consequently,
the managerial skills or theintellectual labor of the employer
became the decisive motor of factory pro-duction, and strict labor
hierarchy became an existential imperative in thecommunity of work
of the modern factory.62
By contrast with the paternalist emphasis on the familial
relations of the fac-tory family and the employer as provider,
therefore, the rhetoric of Saar yel-low union leaders emphasized
both the associational and the hierarchical as-pects of a community
of work in the factory. Local employers increasinglybegan to
address their workers, through the yellow unions, as comrades
withshared interests, and the company union movement as a whole
embraced quasi-egalitarian self-definitions and forms of address.63
In his speech before a meet-ing of the Rchling yellow unions in
August 1908, for example, the foremanLober stressed both the
equality and hierarchy among employer and workers:No matter what
conditions we are born into, whether of high or modest rank, we are
allmen and we are all workers. The worker who gives us employment,
however, especial-ly deserves our highest respect, owing to his
education and knowledge. To him often fall
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 715
-
the difficult tasks that command very intense efforts and a
great deal of knowledge. Forthis he earns our complete trust. We
want to work with himwork with him to try toimprove the situation
of each individual.64
Company union leaders and functionaries, therefore, defined the
legitimacy oftheir activities in distinctly populist terms,
claiming that the new unions derivedtheir authority from the
support and desires of their wage-earning membersrather than the
paternalist benevolence of the employer or the state. In the
wordsof Rchling machinist Latz, We need no government saviors, like
state secre-taries or Obergenossen, to bring us good fortune.
Indeed, company welfareschemes were vigorously redescribed: no
longer deemed the product of em-ployer charity (i.e., alms or
beggars money), they were regarded by the in-dividual Werkvereinler
as the legitimate fruits of his labor, the just rewardsfor superior
job performance. In this self-image, company union members
weredeemed independently minded architects of their own fate, who
had con-sciously decided to subordinate themselves to their
employers.65
Saar Werkvereine also developed organizational structures and
activities thatwere designed to accommodate the everyday living
conditions (Lebensver-hltnisse) of their members and to cultivate
the masculine and nationalist ethosof the factory community. Most
created administrative bodies and representa-tive procedures
characteristic of the voluntary association, including a govern-ing
council, a directorate comprising representatives from different
factory sec-tions, a general assembly of all members, and courts
for settling disputes.66Beyond the formal meetings and
administrative tasks, moreover, lay a muchwider field of
sociability that served to cultivate a good comradery and thespirit
of unity among all employees and employers of a firm. The
yellowunions sponsored a broad range of educational and athletic
activitiesinclud-ing libraries, lectures, musical and theatrical
groups, sports clubs, and youthsectionsas well as numerous social
events (e.g., festivities and family out-ings), which were designed
to provide for the leisure-time needs of workers andtheir
families.67 In addition, the Saar company unions attempted to
nourish thefeeling of brotherly community among their members and
to forge com-radely bonds with other male industrial workers within
the dense local net-work of nationalist associations. These ranged
from choral societies and gym-nastics clubs to the organizations
more directly committed to propagandizingon behalf of German
nationalism, Weltpolitik, and anti-socialism.68 Their directlinks
with the local National Liberal party, the only viable
nationally-mindedparty in the region after 1900, and their
membership in the League of GermanCompany Unions and the Council of
National Workers and OccupationalLeagues of Germany (Hauptauschuss
nationaler Arbeiter- und BerufsverbndeDeutschlands) placed the Saar
organizations squarely within the milieu of na-tionalist pressure
groups on the German right during the prewar decade.69
Finally, Saar employers, under Tilles direction, linked the
community ofwork in the factory with efforts to build a larger
occupational-estate con-
716 dennis sweeney
-
sciousness: accordingly, the company union was deemed the best
means ofcultivating among workers the attitudes and values that
would foster a feelingof occupational community within the entire
estate of industry and trade.70They viewed the yellow union as the
ideal form of occupational association(Berufsverein), since it
schooled its members in the laws of (corporatist) polit-ical
economy and economic peace. In the course of its meetings,
education-al lectures, and classes the company union provided the
necessary technicaltraining for specific occupations in the
factory, a certain technical under-standing for the enterprise and
its operations, and a more general and scien-tific economic
knowledge of the natural functioning and requirements of
theindustrial economy. Indeed, Tille himself was actively involved
in organizingand delivering lectures on economic and social
questions to the companyunions.71 In view of the strike threat and
class conflict posed by socialist andChristian unions, these
activities were deemed crucial to the ideological laborof
imprinting in the mind of every reasonably talented company union
mem-ber a mental picture of the world of the economy as it really
is today, easilygrasped in a conceptual system and slogans
(Stichworte) which would ef-fectively counter the dangerous
economic theory and thieves argot of so-cialism.72 Much more modern
than the class-political trade unions, thecompany unions were
designed to convince each individual member of the needto master
the masculine skills necessary for superior job performance and
forovercoming the risks of liferisks which were conditioned by his
health,his labor power, and his capabilities and the workings of an
industrial econo-my driven by large-scale factory production,
productive occupations (Berufs-stnde), and the laws of
racial-biological competition.73
saar employers, BERUFSSTANDSPOLITIK, and the corporative
state
The corporatist social theory of Tille, the scientific and
bio-racial reconstruc-tion of work and factory organization, and
attempts to define skilled male work-ers as part of a collective
occupational estate of industry in the company unionswere related
to the changing relations between state and society in Germanysince
the 1890sa set of more general structural realignments in European
po-litical economy which a number of historians and political
scientists have la-beled corporatist.74 In this interpretive
framework, the term corporatism refersto the formation of a new
system of interest representation in the advancedindustrial
countries during the twentieth century, involving
state-sanctionedand regulated bargaining between non-competitive
and hierarchically consti-tuted economic and social interest
groups. In opposition to theories of plural-ism, this definition of
corporatism points both to the ways in which states havegranted to
various organized interest groups a representational monopolyover
their specific fields of economic-social activity and to the
displacement ofdecision-making power away from the parliamentary
arena and toward the bu-
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 717
-
reaucratized bargaining between state officials and non-elected
leaders of large-scale interest organizations.75 Yet this
social-scientific approach to corporatismgenerally seeks to
describe a universal or transhistorical axis of develop-ment in
modern industrial societies rather than a historically secured set
ofpolitical-ideological relationships; it therefore downplays the
variety of corpo-ratist tendencies and the very dynamics of
ideological struggle that producedcorporatist projects in Germany
and Europe in the early twentieth century.76Only more recent
attempts to explain the political-economic transition fromFordism
to post-Fordism from the perspective of regulation theory have
moreself-consciously begun to treat twentieth-century economies as
historicallycontingent formations. This important new approach,
with its interest in chang-ing regimes of accumulation, modalities
of governance, and their associateddiscourses, pays much more
attention to the role of social struggle and repre-sentational
practices in the elaboration of capitalist political
economies.77
It is precisely this emphasis on language that points to a more
fruitful frame-work for reading the complex historical productivity
of corporatist discoursesin this case, the specific and varied ways
in which their meanings were con-densed and reverberated off other
discourses and found institutional expressionin the changing
economic and political context of Wilhelmine Germany.78 Thus,by the
1890s, a broad array of overlapping and often divergent reform and
in-terventionist projectsincluding liberal social reform,
state-directed and in-dustrial paternalism, social Catholicism,
social and racial hygiene, and SocialDemocratic reformismgave
impetus to increasing state regulation of theworkplace and the
creation of welfare schemes in the interests of social stabil-ity.
Until the 1890s, leading sectors of German heavy industry supported
muchof this intervention, since it was largely framed within the
Bismarckian modelof state-mandated social insurance coupled with
repressive labor and anti-socialist laws. After 1900, however,
heavy industrialists began to criticizethe increasing volume of
state welfare commitments, attempts at regulation ofworkplace
safety and work time, and the growing presence of trade
unionistsand Social Democrats in the governing bodies of the
social-insurance schemes,introduced by Bismarck in the 1880s. They
also disparaged the labor concilia-tion bodies, especially the
sickness insurance boards and industrial courts, re-configured in
the New Course legislation of Chancellor Caprivi from 1890to 1894.
They located the cause of these developments variously in the
imperialgovernments reluctance to crack down on Social Democracy
and the unions,the failure of the existing parties to defend
employer prerogatives, and the uni-versal male suffrage of the
Reichstag. In short, employers began to criticize theentire
party-political and constitutional system of imperial Germany,
whichthey believed had subverted the vital interests of heavy
industry.
In the Saar, these changes were decried as threats to the
existential inter-ests of the industrial and commercial estate. The
accumulation of financialand regulatory burdens and the failure to
curb the extortion of the trade
718 dennis sweeney
-
unions, local employers maintained, had reduced productive
employers (gewerbliche Unternehmer) to citizens with lesser rights.
According to thiscritique, German employers had increasingly become
victims of trade unionand social-moralist excess, ideologically
construed claims for rights whichfailed to comprehend the actual
forces that sustained economic and sociallife in Germany. The
social-moralists (i.e., social reformers, union leaders,and Social
Democrats) ignored the central position of the employer as the
su-perior social aristocrat, the bearer of the productive economy,
who provid-ed work, promoted technological innovation, and mastered
the challenges ofcompetition in the expanding industrial order,
namely, harnessing the availableeconomic forces, productive forces,
intellectual power, and labor power. Theunbounded claims of social
moralists, therefore, allegedly threatened themost important branch
of German economic lifethe productive work-shops, factories, and
businesses of the industrial and commercial estateandthe
competitive prospects of German manufacturing in the international
econ-omy.79
Moreover, these attacks on state Sozialpolitik and attempts to
regulate thefactory workplace were framed within a discourse of
racial economy. Tille crit-icized reform measures ranging from
state-sponsored workers insurance, pen-sions, and unemployment
insurance to workplace advisory bodies, collectivewage agreements,
and legalized trade unions as forms of economic moral-ismthat is,
as dangerous attempts to apply ethical and egalitarian ideals toan
industrial workplace structured by natural hierarchy and governed
by thelaws of race and biology. In addition to increasing financial
burdens and threatsto German manufacturing, they allegedly
subverted the mechanisms of wagecompetition in the productive
economy and the law of natural selection in thebio-racial economy.
According to Tille, they served artificially to sustain theunfit
(i.e., improvident and lazy workers) at the expense of the fit
produc-ers (i.e., entrepreneurs and skilled wage earners) of
society. In this scheme, con-tinued state Sozialpolitik and attacks
on employer prerogative threatened thedynamic meritocracy of the
liberal social order and the very health of thenational body, since
the latter depended on the law of natural selection inthe
competition over the means of existence.80
These concerns fueled criticism not just of the dominance of the
parties ofreform (the SPD, the Center, and the left liberals) in
the Reichstag, but also ofthe National Liberal Party, long an
important bastion of industrial interests. Inthe years after 1900,
the left wing of the National Liberals and, to a lesser ex-tent,
its party chairman Ernst Bassermann began to show sympathy for a
pop-ulist program of social reform and progressive taxation.81
Consequently, as ear-ly as December 1907, Axel Bueck, general
secretary of the CVDI, had advisedmembers of the Association of
German Iron and Steel Industrialists (VDESI )to reexamine heavy
industrys relationship to the National Liberal party. Twomonths
later he warned of the leftward drift noticeable in the social
policy of
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 719
-
the National Liberal Reichstag fraction which in many ways
contradicted theinterests of industry and employers.82 At the same
time, leading industry pe-riodicals such as the Deutsche
Arbeitgeber-Zeitung were increasingly com-plaining about
insufficient representation of industrial interests and aboutparty
delegates elected to the Reichstag whose understanding of
politicaleconomy amounted to nothing.83 From the Saar, Tille
accused the liberal par-ties of being so strongly infused with
egalitarian ideas, indeed even commu-nistic tendencies, that they
have left the former ideals of political freedom inthe background.
The National Liberal Partys descent into the arena of socialreform,
he claimed, was simply part of a strategy to curry favor with the
mass-es: Out of National Liberalism has grown a National Equalism,
a NationalSocialism which will obviously transform one day into a
National Commu-nism.84
These concerns, coupled with the declining numbers of employers
servingas delegates in the Reichstag, prompted a series of
discussions about the polit-ical organization of German employers
in the years after 1908. In the spring ofthat year, the Hamburg
manufacturer J. A. Menck offered the first widely dis-cussed plan
for a more effective employers organization in the pages of
theDeutsche Arbeitgeber-Zeitung, a proposed League of Productive
Employ-erscomprised of all industrialists, artisans, and small
shopkeepersthatcould provide the lobbying strength employers needed
to curb the social legis-lation of the Reichstag. Subsequent
proposals for an employers party, electoralorganizations, and
direct financing of campaigns were aired by numerous oth-er
representatives of heavy industry.85 In addition, Tille called for
the forma-tion of a League of Employers that would include
producers in all branchesof heavy and light industry, as well as
large- and small-scale commercial, re-tail, and artisanal trades.
Such an organization was needed, he maintained, inorder to overcome
the divisive sectarian dispositions among German pro-ducersthat is,
to create the conditions in which no one any longer thinks
ofhimself as a member of a particular branch [of industry] but
rather . . . as a com-rade within an occupational estate. Rather
than focus only on Sozialpolitik andlimit itself to influencing the
existing parties like most of the other proposals,Tilles league was
conceived most explicitly as a corporatist
(berufsstands-politische) organization that would replace the
obsolete parties and representemployer interests directly in the
organs of the state.86
Plans for a political organization of employers were finally
realized with thecreation of the Hansabund (Hansa League) in the
summer of 1909. Accordingto many German historians, the Hansabund
marked the first comprehensiveanti-agrarian coalition of German
capital before 1914, and thus embodied lib-eral aspirations for a
politically active bourgeoisie ready to protect commerce,trade and
industry against attacks from a one-sided agrarian demagogueryand
to challenge the feudal power holders of the German state.87 Yet
manyindustrialists associated with the CVDI were interested in the
Hansabund as a
720 dennis sweeney
-
corporatist form of representation. They conceived of it as the
commercial-industrial version of the Agrarian League: that is, as
an association that wouldrepresent the concerns of German industry
during elections, in the parties, andat all levels of parliamentary
government.88 In the Saar, this corporatist ambi-tion was central
to the self-understanding of the Hansabunds local branch.
Fororganizers such as Burbach steelworks director Edmund Weisdorff
and theSaarbrcken builder Arthur Olle, the Hansabund represented
the estate ofproductive industry and the common occupational estate
of producers whowere united by a solidarity of interests.89 As the
managing director of the Saarbranch, which by November 1909 could
claim 1,100 members from light andheavy industry, retailing, and
the artisanal trades throughout the region, Tilledeveloped these
ideas even further. He insisted that the Hansabund was not
apolitical party but an occupational association, similar to those
uniting agri-cultural producers, white collar professionals, civil
servants, and wage earners.It reflected the growing recognition of
a shared ethos and community of inter-esta consciousness of
estateamong producers in the construction andartisanal trades, the
commercial and transportation industries, and mining
andmanufacturing.90 And he pursued these corporatist themes during
regular meet-ings of the local Hansabund organization and during a
series of evening courses,for which his four-volume work Die
Berufsstandspolitik des Gewerbe- undHandelstandes served as the
textbook.91
Indeed, it was the failure of the Hansabund to conform to this
corporatist vi-sion that generated local opposition to its national
directorate. Saar employersaccused the national organization of
failing to represent the occupational inter-ests of the industrial
and commercial estate. This was evident in its neglectof the
latters economic concerns, particularly strategies to reduce the
amountof social legislation and to enact legal measures to curb
trade union activity, andalso in its pandering to political parties
of the left.92 Moreover, the Hansabundwas conceived in the Saar as
a political-occupational organization of the es-tate of industry
and commerce rather than a political party or an economic
as-sociation with political aims. As such, it was supposed to
represent the eco-nomic interests of the entire estate of industry
and trade in the parliamentaryrealm. According to Tille, the
Hansabund failed to do this in two ways: it ne-glected the economic
interests of the productive Brgertum, and it failed to em-brace all
members of the occupational estate, namely the white collar and
in-dustrial workers who rejected the class-political aims of the
labor movementand the native (bodenstndig) and patriotic workers of
the yellow unions.93For these reasons, Saar employers, along with
other representatives of heavyindustry, withdrew their support for
the Hansabund in the summer of 1911.
In the final years before 1914, these frustrated
ambitionscompounded bythe results of the Reichstag elections of
1912 from which the SPD emerged asthe largest party in
Germanyprompted German industrialists to pursue theircorporatist
commitments in other ways. Within the occupational estate of
in-
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 721
-
dustrial producers itself, the leaders of German heavy industry
began to helpforge nationwide organizational links between the CVDI
and the yellow unionmovement. In 1910, the latter created the
aforementioned League of GermanCompany Unions, and shortly
thereafter joined with the League of PatrioticWorkers Associationsa
national confederation of non-industry and non-company-specific
workers organizationsin the Council of National Work-ers and
Occupational Associations. The Council eventually organized
laborersfrom a variety of trades and industries, including factory
workers, artisans, re-tail workers, and sailors, in an
anti-socialist alliance.94 In order to strengthenthis bulwark
against the red danger, the CVDI established official ties to
theCouncil in December 1912, lending considerable publicistic and
financial sup-port to the company and patriotic unions in the final
prewar years. In the Saar,similar ties were established between the
Employers League of Saar Industryand the regional company union
federation. These were aimed at forging acloser union among all
employers, managers and clerical workers, and wage la-borers of the
productive economy which would help foster the feeling of
oc-cupational consciousness within the entire industrial and
commercial estate.95
At the same time, the CVDI began reinvigorating its efforts to
win the sup-port of the Mittelstand of small producers. In the
summer of 1911, CVDI lead-ers joined with representatives from the
Agrarian League to assist in the cre-ation of the nationalist
Imperial-German Mittelstand League. Promoting thealliance of
Handwerk and industry, according to CVDI chairman Max Roet-ger, was
necessary to halt the steady advance of Social Democracy and
sociallegislation that subverted employer interests. Tille, the
leading advocate of Mit-telstandspolitik within heavy industry,
cast this initiative in distinctly corpo-ratist terms. In his
programmatic article entitled The Industrial League andin his
speeches before the Mittelstand League in 1912, he stressed the
impor-tance of small business to the unity of the industrial
estate. Small workshopsand commercial businesses, he argued, were
equally burdened by the social leg-islation that privileged wage
earners. Much more serious, however, was thegrowing power of
Marxist prejudices widespread within the small businesscommunity
itself. These included moralistic criticisms of entrepreneurs
asrobber barons and hostility toward capitalist forms of
investment, profit-making, and managerial-entrepreneurial (or
non-physical) labor. A broad-ranging coalition or Industrial League
involving producers from the mining,manufacturing, commercial,
transportation, housing, retailing, and artisanal sec-tors,
therefore, would help root out socialist ideas in the Mittelstand,
consoli-date the occupational unity of the entire estate of
industry and trade, and defendthe capitalist industrial
order.96
These corporatist initiatives were central to the wider process
of ideologicalrealignment taking place on the German right. During
the final prewar years,representatives from German heavy industry
and agriculture for the first timeattempted to forge a genuinely
populist coalition, by actively appealing to the
722 dennis sweeney
-
interests of small-scale producers of the Mittelstand and the
peasant classes onthe basis of a radical-nationalist appeal.97 By
the spring of 1913, a wide rangeof groups were actively pursuing
organizational contacts, including the CVDI,the Agrarian League,
the Christian Union of PeasantsAssociations, the Imperial-German
Mittelstand League, and several nationalist pressure groups. Their
goalwas to forge a common political alliance organized around
commitments toanti-union legislation (especially laws against
picketing), a cessation of stateSozialpolitik, anti-socialism, and
German imperialism. Finally, representativesof these interest
groups, along with leaders of the Pan-German League and theImperial
League against Social Democracy, met in Leipzig to announce the
for-mation of the Cartel of Productive Estates in August 1913. As
its programsuggested, the Cartel was conceived as an alliance of
the main productive es-tates or occupations whose principle task
was to unify industrialists, agrarians,and Mittelstndler in defense
of their economic interests, to maintain author-ity in all economic
enterprises, to secure price guarantees and the protectionof those
willing to work (strike-breakers), and to defend against Social
Democ-racy and socialist heresy.98
In addition, the Cartels call for the formation of an economic
parliamentwith decision-making powers in the areas of economic and
social policy re-vealed the growing interest of key sectors of
heavy industry in new strategiesfor bypassing the existing
parliamentary and constitutional order altogether.The strongest
public signal for this commitment within heavy industry camefrom
Max Schlenker, who replaced Tille as head of the Saar Chamber of
Com-merce after the latters sudden death in 1912. In his essay
entitled Revision ofthe Reichstag Suffrage or the Creation of an
Imperial Upper House? of June1913, Schlenker criticized recent
debates in the Reichstag over the Army bill,which proposed direct
taxation in the form of business and property taxes. Hewarned that
the Reichstag had embarked on a path that must fill the
[produc-tive] estates with the utmost concern about the future. In
response to this mostrecent invasion of the Reichstag into the
realm of private property and the deep-er problem of the dearth of
businessmen-delegates in the Reichstag, Schlenkerproposed two
possible constitutional solutions: (1) changes in the electoral
lawsthat would guarantee the number of businessmen delegates in the
Reichstag(e.g., property qualifications and residency
requirements); and (2) the creationof an imperial upper house
composed of representatives of the occupational es-tates
(Berufsstnde). According to Schlenker, only constitutional change
couldprevent legislation from restricting further the discretionary
power of the em-ployer in his factory and shield this aristocracy
of labor from the tyranny ofthe unpropertied majority.99
Schlenkers call for an imperial upper house and electoral
reforms foundgrowing support among German industrialists. Indeed,
growing hostility towardmass politics spawned a number of possible
schemes for constitutional revisionin 1913, emanating from the Ruhr
and Saar in particular and published in the
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 723
-
leading press organs of heavy industry.100 Yet demands for
property qualifica-tions to existing imperial and Prussian suffrage
laws and designs for the creationof an upper chamber that would act
as a countervailing force to the Reichstagfound a growing audience
among even wider sectors of German heavy industry.They were raised
in the context of discussions within the CVDI, in the
DeutscheHandelstag (the collective forum of the chambers of
commerce), and, in morelimited forms, were winning adherents from
the ranks of the export-oriented andliberal free-trading firms of
the Hansabund, the Association of Saxon Industri-alists (Verband
sschischer Industrieller), and the League of German Industri-alists
(Bund der Industriellen) by 1913.101
* * *
This reading of Saar factory culture suggests neither that the
turn to corporatistdiscourse was common to all industrial regions
across Germany nor that cor-poratist terms and imperatives entirely
displaced paternalist understandings ofwork organization in the
Saar. Nevertheless, it does point to a much broaderideological
transformation which took place in German heavy industry duringthe
pre- and postwar decades. It identifies the ways in which notions
of bio-logical aptitude and race became increasingly common motifs
in the languageof employers throughout Germany in the final prewar
years; references to thecommunity of work in the large-scale
factory became a staple of the grow-ing yellow union movement; and
constitutional change that would protect theinterests of the
productive occupational estates became a persistent aim ofGerman
industrialists associated with the CVDI. Finally, despite (or
becauseof) the challenges and disruptions of the war years, the
postwar revolution, andthe institutional gains of the trade unions
during the early Weimar years, thiscorporatist orientation of
right-wing employers was revived and rearticulatedin the late 1920s
and early 1930s. In this form, it provided the ideological
foun-dation for newly created schools of industrial sociology and
labor policy (espe-cially the Ruhr-based Dinta), shaped the
anti-parliamentary and anti-democraticaims of employers during the
crisis of the early 1930s, and established commonideological ground
between key fractions of German heavy industry and Na-tional
Socialism by 1933.102
Yet this corporatist discourse had little to do with the
persistence of pre-industrial, anti-modernist, irrational, and
anti-capitalist traditions and values.As this essay argues, Saar
corporatism condensed within its connotative frame-work references
to the social aristocracy of labor, the community of workin the
factory, and the social estate of industry and trade; a schema of
ratio-nal workplace management, which embraced a bio-medical
calculus of theeconomy of labor power, a scientific-technocratic
redefinition of factory orga-nization, and a productivist vision of
the industrial capitalist economy; theeconomically liberal values
of individual competition, job performance, theprofit motive, and
capital accumulation; the modernist celebration of large-scale
industry, technology, and progress; and newly emergent
authoritarian am-
724 dennis sweeney
-
bitions grounded in racial and gender hierarchies. This
corporatist discourse,therefore, framed an entirely new modernist
project which aimed to redesignthe early twentieth-century
industrial-social order.
In addition, rather than being a subjective response to the
autonomouseconomic or social logic of modernization, Saar
corporatism emerged as theproduct of the ideological struggle to
shape the industrial, social, and politicalrelations of the
late-Wilhelmine period. Indeed, corporatist discourse emergedduring
a specific historical moment in the Saar: in the midst of an
incipientcrisis of paternalist hegemony throughout the region. In
this context, it repre-sented a complex discursive formation
composed of elements derived fromdiverse sources which were
actively combined, dismantled, bricolaged inefforts to produce a
new politically effective coalition among Saar employ-ers.103 This
coalition was actively constructed in opposition to the
egalitarianand class-collectivist orientation of socialism and
trade unionism and to thegrowing intervention of the state,
political parties, and social reformers into theprivate concerns of
employers.
This essay, therefore, breaks with the dominant theoretical
frameworks andanalytical conventions of German historiography on
the relationship betweeneconomic practices, work relations, and
right-wing ideology. Most German his-torians interpret right-wing
ideological discourses (e.g., paternalism, radicalnationalism,
corporatism, and fascism) about economic and social relationswith
reference to a rather fixed epistemological-ontological
relationship in thepast between a normative, objective rationality
of workplace organization andeconomic interest, on the one hand,
and an irrational and/or subjective politi-cal ideology, on the
other. For the most part, they treat discourses as
semanticstructures whose meanings are defined extrinsicallythat is,
by the degree towhich they reflect or respond to the real relations
and institutions of economyand society. Moreover, they interpret
the meaning of past ideological discoursesin terms of a priori
assumptions about semantic coherence and rationality, es-pecially
categorical distinctions between the rational and irrational,
capitalistand anti-capitalist, liberal and illiberal, and modern
and anti-modern. By con-trast, this essay has focused on the
politics of significationthe struggle thattook place between
workers and employers within discourse over definitions ofwork and
social relations. It has presupposed that the meaning of
corporatistdiscourse in the Saar did not depend on how things were
but on how thingswere signified in a dynamic and institutionally
embedded process of meaningconstruction.104 In this way, this essay
has identified important and often over-looked aspects of
corporatist discourse: its capacity to assemble a disparate ar-ray
of linguistic resources into a new ideological configuration, to
effect (atleast partial) changes to the social relations of the
industrial workplace, andto articulate a set of forward-looking
political demands for the creation of anauthoritarian-capitalist
order of productive estates. Arguably, it is to these ca-pacities
that we must turn if we are fully to appreciate the ideological
appeal
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 725
-
and the subsequent revival and rearticulation of corporatist
discourse withinGerman heavy industry during the late 1920s and
under National Socialism dur-ing the 1930s.
notes
1. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1961),pp. xvixvii, 58, 23031, and 258; George Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology (NewYork, 1964), pp. 13ff., 28291,
and 31216; and Kurt Sontheimer, AntidemokratischesDenken in der
Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1962), pp. 24952, passim.
2. See, for example, Jrgen Kocka, Vorindustrielle Faktoren in
der deutschen In-dustrialisierung. Industriebrokratie und neuer
Mittelstand, in Michael Strmer (ed.),Das kaiserliche Deutschland.
Politik und Gesellschaft 18701918 (Dsseldorf, 1970),pp. 27879; and
Heinrich August Winkler, Mittelstand, Demokratie und
Nationalismus(Cologne, 1972), p. 114.
3. Hans Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 18711918 (Leamington
Spa, 1985),p. 245; Winkler, Unternehmerverbnde zwischen
Stndeideologie und Nationalsozial-ismus, Vierteljahrshefte fr
Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969):369; and Ralph Dahrendorf, So-ciety and
Democracy in Germany (New York, 1965).
4. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of
German History:Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Germany (Oxford, 1984); and,more recently, G. Eley, German History
and the Contradictions of Modernity: TheBourgeoisie, the State, and
the Mastery of Reform, in G. Eley (ed.), Society, Culture,and State
in Germany 18701930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 67103. The quote is from
G.Eley, Capitalism and the Wilhelmine State, in G. Eley, From
Unification to Nazism:Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston,
1986), p. 50.
5. Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical
Modernity (NewYork, 1989), pp. 82, 245; and D. Peukert, Max Webers
Diagnose der Moderne (Gttin-gen, 1989), pp. 6163, 66.
6. D. Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne, p. 75.7. Mary
Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the
Modernization of
Germany (New York, 1994), pp. 190, 192.8. This point is made
also in Thomas Childers, The Social Language of Politics in
Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar
Republic, American His-torical Review 95 (1990):33158.
9. Thus, despite the extraordinary richness of Peukerts work,
his approach is markedby a tendency to analyze modernity in terms
of large-scale structures, tendencies, andlogics. See his The
Weimar Republic, p. 281.
10. Margaret Somers, Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social
Action: RethinkingEnglish Working-Class Formation, Social Science
History 16 (1992):60911. See alsoGeorge Steinmetz, German
Exceptionalism and the Origins of Nazism: The Career ofa Concept,
in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism:
Dictator-ships in Comparison (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 26869.
11. Stuart Hall, The Rediscovery of Ideology: Return of the
Repressed in Me-dia Studies, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett,
James Curran and Janet Woollacott(eds.), Culture, Society and the
Media (London and New York, 1982), p. 79. See thediscussions of
culture, ideology, and language in Raymond Williams, Marxism
andLiterature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 21 44; S. Hall, The Problem of
Ideology: Marxismwithout Guarantees, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing
Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Crit-ical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
(London and New York, 1996), pp. 25 46; andDick Hebdige, Staking
Out the Posts, in Hiding in the Light (London, 1988),pp.
101207.
726 dennis sweeney
-
12. On articulation, see Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology
in Marxist Theory(London, 1977); Stuart Hall, On Postmodernism and
Articulation: An Interview withStuart Hall, in Morley and Chen
(eds.), Stuart Hall, pp. 13150; S. Hall, The Redis-covery of
Ideology; and Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place:
Pop-ular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York and London,
1992), pp. 5256.
13. S. Hall, On Postmodernism and Articulation, pp. 14142; and
S. Hall, TheProblem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees, p.
40.
14. See L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place, pp. 5253;
and L. Grossberg,Cultural Studies: Whats in a Name? in Bringing it
All Back Home: Essays on Cul-tural Studies (Durham and London,
1997), pp. 24571.
15. Thus, this essay presupposes that corporatist terms became
effective to the extentthat they were articulated to the field of
political and social forces in late-WilhemineGermany. See S. Hall,
The Problem of Ideology, pp. 4243; S. Hall, Culture, the Me-dia,
and the Ideological Effect, p. 327; and L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get
out of thisPlace, pp. 52ff.
16. On the Gramscian notion of hegemony, see especially Antonio
Gramsci, Selec-tions from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quinton Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (NewYork, 1971), pp. 1213, 161ff., 18082,
and 210; and Raymond Williams, Marxism andLiterature, pp.
10814.
17. Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State
(New York, 1947).18. See Stuart Halls discussion of language via
the work of Russian theorist
Volosinov/Bakhtin in The Problem of Ideology, pp. 4041; and
Robert Gray, TheDeconstructing of the English Working Class, Social
History 11 (October 1986):370.
19. For data on the rise of industrial organization and
militancy during this period,see G. Hohorst, J. Kocka, G. A. Ritter
(eds.), Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Mate-rialien zur
Statistik des Kaiserreichs 18701914 ( Munich 1975), pp. 13235.
20. Klaus Saul, Staat, Industrie, Arbeiterbewegung im
Kaiserreich. Zur Innen- undAussenpolitik des Wilhelminischen
Deutschland 19031914 (Dsseldorf, 1974), esp.pp. 98115; and
Hans-Peter Ullmann, Unternehmerschaft, Arbeitgeberverbnde
undStreikbewegung 18901914, in Streik. Zur Geschichte des
Arbeitskampfes in Deutsch-land whrend der Industrialisierung, eds.
Klaus Tenfelde and Heinrich Volkmann (Mu-nich, 1981), pp.
194208.
21. Willfried Spohn, Religion and Working-Class Formation in
Imperial Germany,Politics and Society 119 (1991):10932.
22. Alex Bueck, Protokoll, Verein Deutscher Eisen- und
Stahlindustrieller, Gener-alversammlung, 27 Oct. 1904,
Bundesarchiv, R. 131, Nr. 163. For the Saar, see Alexan-der Tille,
Die Berufsstandspolitik des Handel- und Gewerbestandes, Vol. IV
(Berlin,1910), p. 101; and Alexander Tille, Der Soziale
Ultramontanismus und seine katho-lische Arbeitervereine (Berlin,
1905).
23. See, for example, the demands put forward by the Deutsche
Arbeitgeber-zeitungin 1906 and the pamphlet, entitled zur Reform
des preussischen Wahlrechts, written in1907 by the Hamburg
machine-factory owner and National Liberal delegate J. A.Menck.
Both are in Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben, pp. 124ff.
24. Dieter Lindenlaub, Firmengeschichte und Sozialpolitik, p.
279, agrees withthis assessment. See also D. Stegmann, Die Erben,
pp. 125, 335.
25. Tilles estate of industry and trade was comprised of
producers from sometwenty-one different branches of manufacturing
and service industries, including all fac-tory owners, managers,
white collar clerks, and manual laborers, along with all
bankers,traders, export manufacturers, retailers, artisans, etc.,
and their employees. See Alexan-der Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik
des Gewerbe- und Handelsstandes. Die politischeNotwehr des Gewerbe-
und Handelsstandes, Vol. IV (Berlin, 1910), pp. 131.
26. Quoted from the Brockhaus Lexikon published in 1817 and
cited in Rudolf
corporatist discourse and heavy industry in germany 727
-
Walther, Stand, Klasse, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
Historisches Lexikon zurpolitisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland
Vol. VI (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 277.
27. Quotes are from Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik,
Vol. IV, pp. 9, 8. Onthe changing meanings of the term Berufsstand,
see Rudolf Walther, Stand, Klasse,Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,
Vol. 6, pp. 27779.
28. Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik, Vol. II, pp. 2829;
Alexander Tille,Die Arbeitgeberpartei und die politische Vertretung
der deutschen Industrie, Sd-westdeutsche Flugschriften, 5
(1908):1112.
29. See his lecture entitled Menschenrechte, delivered in
Saarbrcken on 18 Apr.1907, and reprinted in Sdwestdeutsche
Wirtschaftszeitung (hereafter SWDWZ), 26 Apr.1907, No. 17, pp.
11115; and SWDWZ, 3 May 1907, No. 18, pp. 12425. Indeed, thepages
of the employersweekly, SWDWZ, began carrying a regular column
entitled TheLiberal Social Order (Liberale Gesellschaftsordnung)
during this period, designed todefend employer liberties and to
catalogue the various threats to employers rights.
30. Alexander Tille, Die Berufsstandspolitik, Vol. IV, p. 7.31.
See the explicit call for the reformulatio