Jonathan Sperber_State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New Edition of Reinhart Koselleck's "Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution"

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State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New Edition of Reinhart Koselleck's "Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution" Author(s): Jonathan Sperber Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 278-296Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877554Accessed: 17-05-2015 22:15 UTC

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Review Article

State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New Edition of Reinhart Koselleck's Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution1

Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri-Columbia

Reinhart Koselleck's Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution spans two periods of German historiography. The book's emphasis on the role of the Prussian bureaucracy in promoting economic development and social change takes up, albeit in a novel and sophisticated way, a theme first proposed in the classic accounts of Gustav Schmoller and Otto Hintze around the turn of the century, while its discussion of the social consequences of bureaucratic action was one of the first examples of a renewed interest in the study of social history in the Federal Republic of Germany. Since the work's first publication in 1967, this interest has produced an ever-increasing body of scholarly literature, and the appearance of a third edition of Koselleck's book in 1981, a remarkable feat for a lengthy scholarly monograph, provides an opportunity to compare his account with the conclusions of more recent work.

Briefly stated-and such a statement can hardly do justice to all the intri- cacies of a lengthy and complex study-Koselleck argues that the Prussian bureaucracy, a socially homogeneous and intellectually closely aligned group, possessing through its collegial organization a strong sense of collective identity, realized toward the end of the eighteenth century that the continued existence of the Prussian state required a series of deep-reaching reforms. Prussia would have to adopt by peaceful means many of the violent accom- plishments of the French Revolution: more liberal, self-governing political institutions, a more flexible and open social structure, and a growth-oriented capitalist economy. Following a not overly successful dry run in this direction, dominated by the judicial bureaucracy and culminating in the Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794, the crisis of the Prussian state after its defeat at the hands of Napoleon's armies in 1806 allowed reform-minded officials, this time primarily from the administrative bureaucracy, to carry out their program.

1 Unless otherwise indicated, page references are to Reinhart Koselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848, Industrielle Welt: Schriftenreihe des Arbeitskreises fur moderne Sozialgeschichte, Band 7, 3d. ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 739, DM 88.

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State and Civil Society in Prussia 279

Yet the results of the subsequent Reform Era-and this is a key point in Koselleck's work-showed the program's inherent contradictions. Socio- economic modernization and liberalization-abolition of serfdom, noble privilege, and feudal relations of production in agriculture; the creation of a free land market; the parallel creation of a free labor market by the abolition of compulsory guilds and of restrictions on the freedom of movement, set- tlement, and occupation; encouragement of industrial-capitalist enterprise- were vigorously resisted by the existing corporate social bodies, the estates (Stdnde). The nobility used the experimental representative institutions of the Reform Era to demand a return to serfdom, the urban master artisans a reinstatement of compulsory guilds. Seeing their socioeconomic program threatened by their political one, the reforming officials decided on the former's priority, and after 1815, rather than grant a constitution and representative parliamentary institutions, they set themselves up as the representatives of society. This "intraadministrative constitutionalism" (p. 264) was based on the collegial organization of the administration, with its constant debate and reexamination at different levels of proposed laws or decrees, allowing the bureaucracy to articulate the interests of different social groups and guide a still backward society on its journey toward modernity. The successful ap- plication of this program produced over several decades two new social groups: a capitalist bourgeoisie, conscious of its economic influence, impatient with bureaucratic tutelage, the leading element in an emancipatory liberalism, and a propertyless proletariat, unprotected by the abolished patriarchal rural social order or the urban guilds, ready for violent action. The opposition of these two social groups, culminating in the revolution of 1848, brought down the system of bureaucratic, authoritarian rule-"The state of the administrative bureaucracy succumbed to its own creation" (p. 587)-but the Prussian constitution emerging from the revolution sanctioned the results of the bu- reaucracy's reform program.2

I feel a certain reluctance to criticize such an elegantly dialectical thesis- within the book, Koselleck uses Hegel's ideas as a running commentary on his empirical research-but, allowing analytic interest to overcome aesthetic reserve, I would suggest three ways in which the work can fruitfully be considered. To start, it is an account of class formation, one which stresses the role of the state in shaping social structures. The book is also a social history of the Prussian bureaucracy, taking it up, as Koselleck notes (p. 16), from Hans Rosenberg's portrayal of the group's rise to power in the eighteenth century, and examining it at the height of its power and influence. Finally, the work can also be seen as an attempt to explain the unique nature of Prussia among the various German states and, more broadly, among the European

2 Besides his massive book, Koselleck has also provided a short sketch of his ideas, "Staat und Gesellschaft in Preussen 1815-1848," in Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormdrz 1815-1848, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 79-112. Any serious consideration of Koselleck's work must take into account Jurgen Kocka's critical review of the 1 st ed. of Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution, in Vierteljahrschrift far Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 57 (1970): 121-25.

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powers, emphasizing in its explanation the interrelationship between the state and the economy.

I

Seemingly one of the strongest points in Koselleck's argument concerns the relationship of bureaucracy to capitalism, as the role of the state in promoting economic development in Prussia, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing onward, has long been regarded as empirically well proved. More recent work, however, has cast the Prussian authorities' policies in quite a different light, emphasizing the obstacles they placed in the way of economic development. Senior bureaucrats opposed incorporation laws and refused to grant permission for the formation of joint stock companies. Patent legislation was neglected, and credit policies designed to funnel money into agriculture made mobilization of capital for industry difficult. State officials in the closely regulated mining industry consistently refused to allow innovations either in mining methods or in the utilization of the mined coal and ore. The authorities' policies toward railroad construction, the leading sector of the German in- dustrial revolution, was particularly burdensome. Alone among the German states, the Prussian government provided almost no assistance for the creation of a railroad network, and the authorities' skeptical and at times downright hostile attitude toward dealing in railroad company shares -their procras- tination over or refusal of requests for right-of-way-was no small obstacle to the task of raising the unprecedented amounts of capital needed to build the railroads.3

The very officials responsible for these policies simultaneously attempted to further the growth of industry. They used state-owned establishments to experiment with new industrial techniques and offered financial, administrative, and technical assistance to newly founded businesses-policies closely as- sociated with Peter Christian Beuth, for decades director of the Division of Trade and Industry, and Christian von Rother, president of the Seehandlung, the Prussian state bank. Such policies have often been described, but a certain skepticism about their success seems in order. State foundries built steam

3 A convenient summary of the older scholarship is in William Henderson, The State and the Industrial Revolution in Prussia, 1740-1870 (Liverpool, 1958). More critical voices include Richard Tilly, Financial Institutions and Industrialization in the Rhineland 1815-1870 (Madison, Wis., 1966), and "The Political Economy of Public Finance and the Industrialization of Prussia," Journal of Economic History 26 (1966): 484-97; Friedrich Zunkel, "Die Rolle der Bergbauburokratie beim industriellen Ausbau des Ruhrgebietes, 1815-1848," in Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift far Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Gottingen, 1974), pp. 130-47; Dietrich Eichholtz, Junker und Bourgeoisie vor 1848 in der preussischen Eisenbahngeschichte (East Berlin, 1962); Rainer Fremdling, Eisenbahnen und deutsches Wirtschaftswachstum 1840-1879 (Dortmund, 1975), esp. pp. 123-29; Paul Martin, "Die Entstehung des preussischen Aktiengesetzes von 1843," Vierteljahrschriftfiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 56 (1969): 499-542; Frank Tipton, Regional Vari- ations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Mid- dletown, Conn., 1976), pp. 68-72.

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engines and locomotives to encourage private industrialists and show them the proper techniques, but the steam engines produced no power and a lo- comotive ran for just twenty or thirty feet, and that only when workers pushed and shoved it. Large sums were offered entrepreneurs to open factories: one took the money and fled the country, while another proved a technical in- competent who went bankrupt several times. Elaborate plans were drawn up for state-sponsored industrial exhibitions which opened without any exhibitors. A Seehandlung steamboat service on the Elbe ran so slowly and erratically that it ended up with a 700,000 Thaler deficit. Totally extraneous matters, like a govemment wool warehouse, designed to rescue tenants on state domains from the collapse of wool prices during the 1820s, were put on the budget for the promotion of industry.4

Rather more successful were the Prussian govemment's industrial education policies. Some 800 industrial technicians were trained before 1850 at the Berlin Gewerbeinstitut (Industrial Institute), forerunner of today's Technische Hochschule in West Berlin. Of course, this establishment was not uniquely Prussian: The Technical Institute in Zurich and the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, to name just two of the more important of such institutions in Central Europe, also dated from the early years of the nineteenth century, and they, like their Prussian counterpart, were created as imitations of the pioneering example of technical education, the Paris Ecole Polytechnique, founded in 1795.5 The success of the Prussian government's efforts in technical education and in such related policies as financing trips abroad to gather information on the latest industrial techniques may well have reflected not a state-sponsored

4 All these examples are from Ilja Mieck, Preussische Gewerbepolitik in Berlin 1806-1844 (West Berlin, 1965), pp. 63-67, 126-32, 141-49, 164-69, 180-81, 186-93. It is a testimony to the weight of scholarly stereotypes that Mieck, after cataloging this long list of fiascos against a much smaller number of modest successes, notes the growth of Berlin industry and attributes it to state assistance (p. 225ff.). A more balanced judgment on these sorts of state policies can be found in the works of the GDR historians Horst Blumberg ("Manufaktur, Staat und beginnende Industri- alisierung in Deutschland," Jahrbuch far Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pt. 4 [1967], pp. 409-44) and Karl Larmer ("Maschinenbau in Preussen: Ein Beitrag zur Problematik Staat und Industrielle Revolution," ibid., pt. 2 [1975], pp. 13-32).

5 Peter Lundgreen's Techniker in Preussen wdhrend der friuhen Industrialisierung (West Berlin, 1975) is a detailed and insightful history of the origin and activities of the Berlin Gewerbeinstitut and the careers of its students. In spite of its title, it is not a history of engineers and industrial technicians in Prussia, because it has nothing to say about the still undetermined number of those trained outside the Gewerbeinstitut (a point made by Ulrich Troitzsch in his review of Lundgreen's book in Vierteljahrschrift far Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 64 [1977]: 243-45). For some very fragmentary figures on the training of engineers, see Lars Ulrich Scholl, Ingenieure in der Fruh- industrialisierung: Staatliche und private Techniker im Konigreich Hannover und an der Ruhr (1815-1873) (Gottingen, 1978), pp. 329, 363, 375, 393, 422. The lower- level and less successful Prussian provincial industrial schools are studied by Christiane Schiersmann, Zur Sozialgeschichte der preussischen Provinzial-Gewerbeschulen im 19. Jahrhundert (Weinheim and Basel, 1979). On industrial education outside Prussia, see Wolfram Fischer, Der Staat und die Anfdnge der Industrialisierung in Baden 1800-1850 (West Berlin, 1962), pp. 161-72.

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creation of industry, but a cooperation of official institutions and already existing capitalist enterprise. An important part of a student's education at the Gewerbeinstitut was a period spent gathering practical experience in a cooperating factory, and government assistance for information-gathering foreign travel encouraged entrepreneurs to continue something they were already doing on their own.6

Possibly the most important contribution of Prussian state policy to fostering economic growth, although still a surprisingly little-investigated one, was the authorities' stubborn insistence on retaining freedom of occupation, res- idence, and mobility, an adherence to laissez-faire unmatched by the other German states before 1850. Abolition of compulsory guilds, while best known, was probably not the most significant aspect of this policy. Differing legislation seems to have had virtually no effect on the social and economic development of the artisanate, and early industrial initiatives were almost exclusively in textiles and metalworking, two trades that were largely nonguilded by the eighteenth century. Rather, preservation of freedom of mobility gave early industrial entrepreneurs access to cheap labor, which could be attracted to industrial centers in boom times and let go back to the countryside during downturns in the business cycle. Master-artisan-dominated town councils in southern Germany, on the other hand, often exercised their legal power to refuse residence permits to factory workers, fearing that in slumps the workers might become a burden on municipal poor relief, and thus created problems for industrialists seeking to staff their factories.7

In discussing the effects of state policies on industrialization it is easy to forget the actual course of economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century. Industrialization in this period was sporadic, tentative, and regionally limited: most of Prussia's steam engines, factories, and railroads were located in the two western provinces, the Rhine province and, to a lesser extent, Westphalia. Capitalist industry in these -regions did not begin with their complete incorporation into the Prussian state in 1815 but dated back to the mid-eighteenth century and had developed, albeit erratically, in the intervening period, including especially the post- 1800 era of Napoleonic rule. Given the background to this key industrial area, it is difficult to perceive

6 Lundgreen, pp. 156-65; Martin Schumacher, Auslandsreisen deutscher Unter- nehmer 1750-1871 unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung von Rheinland und Westfalen (Cologne, 1968).

7 Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, "Die Einfiihrung der Gewerbefreiheit und ihre Aus- wirkungen auf das Handwerk in Deutschland," in Handwerksgeschichte in neuer Sicht, Wilhelm Abel et al. (Gottingen, 1970), pp. 142-72, shows that legislation concerning the guilds had little influence on either the development of the artisanate in different parts of Germany or on the process of industrialization. Jiirgen Bergmann, Das Berliner Handwerk in den Friihphasen der Industrialisierung (West Berlin, 1973), pp. 45-54, offers a useful local study of how little influence abolition of compulsory guilds had on the Berlin artisanate. Heilwig Schomerus, Die Arbeiter der Maschi- nenfabrik Esslingen (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 103-5, discusses the difficulties strictly enforced residence laws made for south German industrialists, while Steve Hochstadt, "Migration and Industrialization in Germany, 1815-1977," Social Science History 5 (1981): 445-68, points out the extraordinary population fluctuations in accordance with the business cycle in the early industrial Rhineland.

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State and Civil Society in Prussia 283

the growth of factory industry, a capitalist bourgeoisie, or an industrial pro- letariat in Prussia primarily as products of state initiative.8

Industrialization was not the dominant fact of the Prussian or German economy before 1850. Factory workers and machine-made products were still outnumbered by protoindustrial outworkers, nominally independent nonguild artisan producers, working under the direction and de facto control of merchant capitalists.9 This form of production was expanding from its previous strongholds in textiles and metalworking and moving into such previously guilded crafts as shoemaking, tailoring, and furniture making. There were some 21,000 workers in the Berlin garment industry in 1849, a trade organized along outworking lines, three times as many as were employed in machine and optical equipment manufacture, a center of factory production. Both critics and defenders of the Prussian bureaucracy's economic policies have focused their attention primarily on the early factories, as they were to be the dominant element in post-1850 developments, but to provide a more complete picture of the bureaucracy's relation to civil society in the first half of the nineteenth century more attention needs to be paid to protoindustry and other forms of outworking. 0

8Tilly, Financial Institutions, pp. 15-16; Herbert Kische, "From Monopoly to Laissez-Faire: The Early Growth of the Wupper Valley Textile Trades," Journal of European Economic History 1 (1972): 298-407; id., "Growth Deterrents of a Medieval Heritage: The Aachen-Area Woolens Trade before 1790," Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 517-37; id., "The Impact of the French Revolution on the Lower Rhine Textile Districts: Some Comments on Economic Development and Social Change," Economic History Review, 2d. ser., 15 (1962/63): 304-27; Max Barkhausen, "Staatliche Wirtschaftslenkung und freies Unternehmertum im westdeutschen und im nord- und siidniederliindischen Raum bei der Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Industrie," Viertel- jahrschriftfiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 45 (1958): 168-241; Karl Heinrich Kaufhold, Das Metallgewerbe der Grafschaft Mark im 18. undfriihen 19. Jahrhundert (Dortmund, 1976); id., Das Gewerbe in Preussen um 1800 (G6ttingen, 1978), p. 34ff. and passim. Parts of the Rhineland and Westphalia had been Prussian territory under the old regime, but there is no reason to think that Frederician economic policies helped the industry of the region and plausible grounds to think it had negative effects. Id., Metallgewerbe der Grafschaft Mark, pp. 68-71; Gewerbe in Preussen, pp. 447- 49; Herbert Kisch, Prussian Mercantilism and the Rise of the Krefeld Silk Industry: Variations on an Eighteenth Century Theme (Philadelphia, 1968).

9 On the concept of protoindustry, Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, Jiirgen Schlumbohm, Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung: Gewerbliche Warenproduktion auf dem Lande in der Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus (Gottingen, 1977) (now in English as Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, trans. Beate Schemp [Cambridge, 1982]). Kriedte et al. defended and elaborated on their views in "Die Proto-Industrialisierung auf dem Priifstand der historischen Zunft: Antwort auf einige Kritiker," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 87-105. An empirical regional study of the development of protoindustry is Wolfgang Mager, "Protoindustrialisierung und agrarischheimgewerbliche Verflechtung in Ravensberg wahrend der Fruhen Neuzeit. Studien zu einer Gesellschaftsformation im Ubergang," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8 (1982): 435-74. Koselleck's figures on the number of factory workers in Prussia in 1846 are exaggerated, as they include large numbers of journeymen millers and protoindustrial outworking spinners and weavers (p. 698).

10 Figures are from Otto Busch, "Das Gewerbe in der Wirtschaft des Raumes Berlin/ Brandenburg 1800-1850," in Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der friihen Industri- alisierung vornehmlich im Wirtschaftsraum Berlin/Brandenburg, ed. Otto Busch (Berlin,

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Gustav Schmoller's thesis of a state-directed development of industry in Prussia seems ever less convincing with the progress of historical investigation. The thesis fits the first half of the nineteenth century especially poorly, since the development of factory industry was not the main economic trend, and state efforts hampered such development that did occur as much as they helped it. A comprehensive reinvestigation of the problem would involve considering the strange blend of pro- and anti-industrial policies, often espoused by the same state officials. Did these reflect the conflicting pressures of different economic interest groups -Rhineland capitalists and East Elbian Junkers, for instance-or did they exemplify a conscious bureaucratic strategy whose goal, although called "industrialization," might have been something quite different from the industrial economy which emerged after 1850? The relationship between the motivations of official policy, copiously documented in the archives, and the effects of state action, often more obscure and hard to analyze, also need to be considered, especially in the light of the actual development of the economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it would be more helpful to stress the continuities with the years 1750-1800, both in state policy and in economic development, than to search for precursors of post-1850 trends.11

II

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, agriculture remained the most important branch of the Prussian economy: farm prices continued to dominate economic cycles, most investment was placed in the land, and a majority of the population continued to earn its living there. Socially decisive consequences of state action should be most apparent in the agrarian world, and the importance of the liberation of the peasantry from serfdom and the related agrarian reforms for future economic, social, and political developments long have been recognized. In spite of the enormous literature on the Prussian agrarian reforms, perfectly clear answers have not emerged to such crucial questions as the state of agriculture before the reforms, the motives of the authorities in planning the reforms, the attitudes of lords and peasants toward them, the way they were carried out, and their effects on agricultural pro- ductivity and the distribution of rural property. Published sources are con-

1971), pp. 4-105; on outworking, see Bergmann (n. 6 above), pp. 280-91; further information on outworking can be expected from Friedrich Lenger's forthcoming Dusseldorf dissertation on the Dusseldorf artisanate in the nineteenth century. On general trends in the first half of the nineteenth century, Karl Heinrich Kaufhold, "Handwerk und Industrie 1800-1850," in Handbuch der deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, ed. Hermann Aubin and Wolfgang Zorn, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1971- 76), 2:321-68.

" Different interpretations of official policies are discussed by Jiirgen Kocka in his illuminating essay, "Preussischer Staat und Modernisierung im Vormarz: Marxistisch- leninistische Interpretationen und ihre Probleme," in Sozialgeschichte Heute, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Gbttingen, 1974), pp. 211-27.

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State and Civil Society in Prussia 285

tradictory or unreliable; unpublished ones are not always easily accessible to historians from Western countries.12

Besides empirical problems, there are conceptual ones, for terms like "lib- eration of the peasantry" or "agrarian reforms" cover a variety of social and economic changes: (1) the liberation of the peasants from their feudal obli- gations, whether in cash, kind, or labor services, and the compensation paid the lords for this in money or land; (2) the division of the common lands and the cultivation of former wasteland; (3) the consolidation of formerly parcelized agricultural property; (4) the introduction of new crops and methods of cul- tivation and stock raising. These developments overlapped and influenced each other, but did not occur simultaneously. Separating out the strands of causality is a difficult task.

It does seem that rising agricultural prices in the late eighteenth century led to experiments in East Elbian Prussia with more productive forms of crop rotation, the cultivation of root crops, improved stock breeding, and the stall feeding of animals. Still far from determined are both the extent of these new practices and the identity of the rural social groups employing them. However widespread this new market-oriented, labor-intensive agriculture may have been, its further expansion was limited by the collective nature of three-field agriculture and the feudal relations of production-that is, the lord's obligation to provide his serfs with their own farms and the latter's extensive labor-services, which took up an enormous portion of their economic resources. 13

The changes initiated by the agrarian reforms, begun in 1807 after some preliminary initiatives and largely completed in Prussian East Elbia (except for Silesia) by the 1830s, created a more favorable environment for capitalist

12 East German historians have, with apparent justification, accused the Prussian authorities of manipulating official statistics to minimize the extent of peasant land loss. Hartmut Harnisch, "Statistische Untersuchungen zum Verlauf der kapitalistischen Agrarreformen in den preussischen Ostprovinzen (1811 bis 1865)," Jahrbuch fiur Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pt. 4 (1974), pp. 149-82. Contradictions in the official statistics are pointed out by Robert Dickler, "Organization and Change in Productivity in Eastern Prussia," in European Peasants and Their Markets, ed. William Parker and Eric Jones (Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 269-92. The recent attempt of Hanna Schissler, Preussische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel (Gottingen, 1978), to offer a synthetic account of the Prussian agrarian reforms runs into problems precisely because the author had to rely on unclear secondary literature and published sources.

13 A leading student of eighteenth-century East Elbian agriculture is Hans-Heinrich Muller (see his Markische Landwirtschaft vor der Agrarreform in 1807: Entwick- lungstendenzen des Ackerbaues in der zweiten Hdlfte des 18. Jahrhunderts [Potsdam, 1967], and among his many articles, "Das Bodennutzungssystem und die Separation in Brandenburg vor den Agrarreformen in 1807," Jahrbuchfiir Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pt. 3 [1965], pp. 82-126; "Entwicklungstendenzen der Viehzucht in Brandenburg vor den Agrarreformen von 1807," ibid., pt. 2 [1966], pp. 137-89; and "Bauern, Piichter und Adel im alten Preussen," ibid., pt. 1 [1966], pp. 259-77). Schissler, pp. 59-74, provides a summary of the literature on eighteenth-century East Elbian agri- culture. On the (overwhelming) extent of feudal burdens on the peasantry, there is the important study of Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, Dienste und Abgaben der Bauern im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1969).

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agriculture as serf labor was abolished, the commons divided, rural property in part deparcelized, and collective cultivation ended. However, these changes included a major redistribution of rural property: Junker landowners received sizable amounts of land from the peasantry as compensation for abolished feudal obligations. Larger peasants' holdings declined slightly, in numbers as well as land owned, but peasants were in part compensated for their losses to the nobility by gains from the division of the commons. And the number of both landless laborers and smallholders possessing plots insufficient to support a family, and thus dependent on income from working for estate owners and larger peasants, increased sharply. Capitalist agriculture had triumphed and agricultural output grew, although it is still debatable whether this increase reflected a growth in productivity or just in the area under cultivation, but this triumph was also one of the landed nobility. 14

From Stein's October Edict of 1807 to the supplementary provincial decrees of the 1820s and 1830s, the bureaucracy vigorously pursued these reforms against the embittered opposition of noble landowners. Given the favorable outcomes of the reforms for the landed nobility, it seems worth pondering how this result came about. Did the authorities, in planning and executing the reforms, intend to strengthen the position of the large landowners? And if they did, why were the nobles so hostile to measures taken in their behalf?

Koselleck's insistence that Chancellor Hardenberg and his leading coworkers saw the introduction of a capitalist economic order in the countryside as a basic necessity for the survival of the state has recently been supported in an impressive essay by Barbara Vogel.15 Yet supporting procapitalist agrarian reform-abolition of feudal obligations, division of the commons, consol- idation of parceled property-did not necessarily imply supporting policies in favor of noble large landowners. There were officials who saw peasant farmers as the most efficient producers; even some who did not agree with this estimation looked to reforms as a way of improving peasant productivity

14 The two best-known studies of rural property redistribution in the wake of the reforms, Gunter Ipsen, "Die preussische Bauernbefreiung als Landesausbau" (Zeit- schriftfiir Agrargeschichte undAgrarsoziologie 2 [1954]: 29-54) and Dietrich Saalfeld, "Zur Frage des biuerlichen Landesverlustes im Zusammenhang mit der preussischen Agrarreform" (ibid., 9 [1963]: 163-71), the former rather more sanguine than the latter about the effects on the peasantry, have been superseded by Harnisch. A detailed regional study can be found in Rudolf Berthold, "Der sozial6konomische Differen- zierungsprozess der Bauernwirtschaft in der Provinz Brandenburg wahrend der in- dustriellen Revolution (1816 bis 1878/82)," Jahrbuchfiir Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pt. 2 (1974), pp. 13-50. All this subsequent research has fully confirmed Koselleck's account of the transformation of East Elbian rural society (p. 487ff.) and it remains one of the most impressive aspects of his book. Schissler, pp. 153-59, offers a summary of research results on the growth of agricultural output.

15 Barbara Vogel, "Die 'allgemeine Gewerbefreiheit' als biirokratische Moderni- sierungsstrategie in Preussen," in Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System, ed. Dirk Stegmann, Bernd-Jiirgen Wendt, and Peter-Christian Witt (Bonn, 1978), pp. 59-78. See also her introductory essay, "Die preussischen Reformen als Gegenstand und Problem der Forschung," in Preussische Reformen 1807-1820, ed. Barbara Vogel (K6nigstein, 1980), pp. 1-27.

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State and Civil Society in Prussia 287

and strengthening the peasantry's position on the land. Internal differences within the bureaucracy, of which the exact nature is not well understood, combined with actions of the nobility to create the specific outcome of the Prussian agrarian reforms.16

The attitude of the landowning Junkers toward the agrarian reforms has long been understood as purely negative and reactionary, a stubborn insistence on the retention of feudal-patriarchal institutions, and a denunciation of bu- reaucratic reform efforts as the result of a conspiracy of Jews and subversives. However, the East German historian Klaus Vetter has shown that the nobility of the Mark Brandenburg was by no means hostile to the economic reform program. Most nobles were quite willing to free their serfs, provided they received the maximum possible compensation. To secure their economic position in the transition to capitalist productive relations, they bitterly opposed any attempts to weaken their political position, successfully maintaining their patrimonial judicial and police powers, as well as their control over the office of the Landrat. The gendarmerie edict of 1812, which would have placed the countryside under the direct control of the central Berlin bureau- cracy, remained a dead letter. 17 Brandenburg nobles had, in the Berlin consumer market, a major incentive to engage in capitalist agriculture. It remains to be seen how typical was their position among the East Elbian Junkers -the Silesian nobility, by contrast, stubbornly clung to their feudal rights until the revolution of 1848-but the attitudes and activities of the Brandenburg nobility provide an important clue to understanding the outcome of the Prussian agrarian reforms.18

A look at the agrarian reforms elsewhere in Germany may help elucidate features of the Prussian development. Unlike their Prussian counterparts, eighteenth-century West Elbian nobles (as well as most of the nobility of East Elbian Saxony) were a rentier class, receiving cash and kind payments from their peasants rather than running their own large estates with serf

16 A striking example of a propeasant official is provided by Bogdan Wachowniak, "Die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft Hinterprommerns in den Reiseberichten des Regierungsrates Haese aus den Jahren 1835 und 1837," Jahrbuch fulr Wirtschafts- geschichte, pt. 4 (1977), pp. 127-37. See also Schissler, pp. 115-23, although her attribution of differences of opinion within the reform bureaucracy to personal rivalries, intrigue, and confusion seems insufficient.

17 Klaus Vetter, Kurmdrkischer Adel und preussische Reformen (Weimer, 1979); a summary of the conventional view of the nobility is in Schissler, pp. 123-30. One Brandenburg nobleman, Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz, was such an uncompromising opponent of the agrarian reforms that a frustrated Chancellor Har- denberg had him imprisoned in a fortress. Von der Marwitz's papers, published by a descendant, have become a prime source for historians studying noble attitudes (see Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe [Princeton, N.J., 1978], p. 401, where he appears as the spokesman of the entire Prussian nobility), but as Vetter can show from unpublished sources, von der Marwitz's extreme attitudes were not shared by the majority of his fellow Brandenburg Junkers.

18 On the situation in Silesia, see Helmut Bleiber, Zwischen Reform und Revolution: Lage und K2mpfe der schlesischen Bauern und Landarbeiter im Vormarz 1840-1847 (East Berlin, 1960).

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labor. Such a group had little interest in the dissolution of feudal obligations: lacking both their own large estates and easy access to urban markets, either domestic or in Western Europe, they had no incentive to engage in capitalist agriculture. Consequently, the agrarian reforms in Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, Wiurttemberg, and the Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Berg and Kingdom of West- phalia were carried out slowly and reluctantly. Attempts by reform-minded bureaucrats to abolish feudal obligations were quickly halted, both by the hostility of the nobles and by official reluctance to undermine the economic position of the nobility. Whether abolishing or preserving feudal obligations, encouraging or hindering market agriculture, agrarian reform in almost all of Germany was shaped by the interests and influence of the landowning nobility and usually occurred to the disadvantage of the peasantry. 19

More than in industry, the Prussian bureaucracy played a leading role in the creation of capitalist productive relations in agriculture, initiating the agrarian reforms and determining their legal forms. The social and economic content of the reforms, in Prussia as well as elsewhere in Germany, was decided less by bureaucratic initiative than by the power and influence of the affected social groups. Even when they wanted to-and at least sometimes they did not-officials were unable to protect peasant interests in the process of providing compensation for abolished feudal obligations. Peasant interests were best protected by peasant actions, and the rustic uprisings of 1830 in Saxony or 1848 in Wurttemberg broke a legal and administrative paralysis, leading to the redemption of feudal obligations on terms relatively favorable to the peasantry.20

Although there were repeated agrarian disorders in some parts of Prussia, the absence of a widespread rural uprising meant that the Prussian agrarian reform was shaped by the interaction of bureaucratic intentions and noble interests. Researchers have concentrated on portraying the effects of these interactions on the decision-making process at the ministerial level, and

19 On agrarian reforms outside of Prussia, see the monographic studies of Reiner Gross, Die burgerliche Agrarreform in Sachsen in der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1968); Friederike Hausmann, Die Agrarpolitik der Regierung Montgelas (Frankfurt am Main, 1975); Wolfgang von Hippel, Die Bauernbefreiung im Konigreich Wurttemberg, 2 vols. (Boppard, 1977); Helmut Berding, Napoleonische Herrschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik im Konigreich Westfalen (Gottingen, 1973), esp. p. 76ff.; and Elisabeth Fehrenbach, Traditionelle Gesellschaft und revolutionares Recht: Die Einfuhrung der Code Napoleon in den Rheinbundstaaten (Gottingen, 1974), esp. p. 79ff. The contrast between the Prussian and West Elbian agrarian reforms is well brought out in id., "Verfassungs- und sozialpolitische Reformen und Reformprojekte in Deutschland unter dem Einfluss des napoleonischen Frankreichs," Historische Zeit- schrift 228 (1979): 288-316. Christof Dipper, Die Bauernbefreiung in Deutschland 1790-1850 (Stuttgart, 1980), is a useful synthesis of much recent work which points out the need for further study of the relationship among liberation from feudal obli- gations, other agrarian reforms (division of the commons, deparcelization), and the development of agricultural productivity outside of East Elbian Prussia.

20 See the works of von Hippel and Gross cited in the previous note. The two earliest and most radical agrarian reforms in Germany, those in Schleswig-Holstein and on the left bank of the Rhine, carried out under very different political auspices and from equally different socioeconomic starting points, have still not been well studied.

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although much remains to be learned there, it might also be useful to see how these centrally determined policies were executed. The Generalkom- missionen, special state agencies which fixed compensation rates for feudal obligations and directed the division of the commons and the consolidation of parcelized property, have yet to find their historian, and a study of their activities might well provide a new insight into the extent and nature of the bureaucracy's role in reshaping rural society.21

III

More than his account of the bureaucracy's influence on social and economic developments, Koselleck's discussion of its political role has been subject to critical scrutiny. One important object of criticism has been his explanation of the Prussian central authorities' refusal to grant a promised constitution in the decade after 1815. Herbert Obenaus has shown that it was not liberal officials motivated by fear of a possible dismantling of their socioeconomic reform program who sabotaged a constitution, but a reactionary group of nobles and senior bureaucrats who enjoyed the king's confidence and saw their restorationist political program as a means of increasing the power of the Stdnde and limiting the effects of liberal social and economic reform. Obenaus has also cast doubt on the notion of an intra-administrative consti- tutionalism by pointing out that the reactionary clique was able to set up a special commission-the Immediatkommission fur die stindischen Angele- genheiten-which, as its name implies, reported directly to the king and simply ignored all the memoranda and proposals in favor of a constitution and representative assembly so carefully gathered by the liberal authorities. Like other versions of constitutionalism existing in Prussia later in the nine- teenth century, intra-administrative constitutionalism was a pseudoconsti- tutionalism, in politically decisive questions limited by the final authority of a monarch prompted by his aristocratic close advisers.22

As was noted above, developments in Prussia's western provinces fit Ko- selleck's thesis poorly, and this is especially true of constitutional questions. From 1815 onward, a considerable body of middle-class public opinion in the Rhineland-representing merchants and industrialists as well as lawyers and notaries, experts in the still legally valid Napoleonic Code, and rentier purchasers of church property secularized in the revolutionary era-was strongly in favor of both a constitution with statewide representative institutions and a liberal social and economic system. The Rhinelanders' wishes, expressed

21 Koselleck has some suggestive comments on these institutions, esp. pp. 493- 98.

22 Herbert Obenaus, review of Koselleck's Preussen zwischen und Revolution, Got- tingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 222 (1970): 55-67, and "Die Immediatkommission fur die standischen Angelegenheiten als Instrument der Preussischen Reaktion im Vormarz," Festschriftifur Hermann H,eimpel, ed. Mitarbeiter des Max-Planck-Instituts fur Ge- schichte, 3 vols. (Gottingen, 1971), 1:410-46. Koselleck acknowledged Obenaus's criticisms in the preface to the 2d ed. of his book, which appears as an unpaginated introduction in the 3d ed.

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in newspapers, magazines, and a lively pamphlet literature, were often, if not always, supported by the provincial authorities, but with the triumph of reaction in the 1820s, the whole political debate was stifled by imposition of a rigid censorship. Rhineland liberalism, by the 1840s the leading element in the liberal movement in Prussia, was, like the Rhineland capitalism with which it was closely connected, an outgrowth of the development of regional society, not the product of bureaucratic initiative. Although elements within the bureaucracy were sometimes allied with their movement, must of the impetus of the Rhinelanders' liberalism, from its very beginnings in 1815- 20, stemmed from its efforts to defend the area's political institutions, products of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic rule, against the Prussian au- thorities' attempts to abolish them.23

The workings of another Rhineland institution call into question the picture of a bureaucracy articulating the interests of society. Rhineland businessmen could, through their chambers of commerce, collectively voice their opinions and deal with the authorities and were thus in no way dependent on the latter to express their interests. Whereas the Rhineland chambers of commerce were a legacy of the Napoleonic era, the Prussian reformers had created a similar institution in the Merchants' Corporations of Berlin and other large East Elbian cities. These latter seem to have taken a less aggressive stance toward the authorities during the Vormarz, but it is unclear whether this reflected a greater respect for the authorities' ability to represent capitalists' interests than was present in the Rhineland, or simply the lesser willingness of the East Elbian officials to listen to the opinions of businessmen.24

In some ways Koselleck's picture of a bureaucratically led civil society is less appropriate to Prussia than to the south German states Bavaria, Wiirt- temberg, Baden, Hessen-Darmstadt, and Hessen-Kassel. South German bu- reaucracies were more likely to be a closed, self-recruiting group than their Prussian counterparts, and the effects of this greater internal cohesion were

23 On Rhineland politics, see the important work of Karl-Georg Faber, Die Rheinlande zwischen Restauration und Revolution (Wiesbaden, 1966), esp. pp. 110-304. The more recent study of Rudiger Schutz, Preussen und die Rheinlande: Studien zur preuss- ischen Integrationspolitik im Vormdrz (Wiesbaden, 1979), adds little to Faber's account. Koselleck's argument that western industrialists' demands for protective tariffs were comparable to demands for a reinstatement of serfdom or compulsory guilds and hence an additional reason for liberal bureaucrats to oppose a constitution in the 1820s (p. 323) is unconvincing, especially as the bureaucracy itself was then coming to recognize the economic importance of protective tariffs. Takeo Ohnishi, Zolltarifpolitik Preussens bis zur Grundung des deutschen Zollvereins (Gottingen, 1973), p. 229.

24 Jeffry Diefendorf, Businessmen and Politics in the Rhineland 1789-1834 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 289-333; Hartmut Kaelble, Berliner Unternehmer wahrend derfruhen Industrialisierung (Berlin, 1972), pp. 197-216, 236-78. Kaelble argues, supporting Koselleck's thesis, that until the 1840s Berlin businessmen accepted the authorities' claim to speak on their behalf, but his own account shows the Merchants' Corporation offering suggestions on economic questions and doubting the authorities' competence in this area as early as the 1820s (p. 253ff.). It would be interesting to know more about the Merchants' Corporations in Magdeburg, Stettin, Breslau, or Konigsberg (see Eichholtz [n. 3 above], pp. 27-29).

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complemented by the different social structures existing in southern and southwestern Germany. Neither the numerous industrial bourgeois of Rhine- land-Westphalia nor the affluent merchant class of Berlin and other large East Elbian cities could be found there. While the south German nobles were certainly accomplished frondeurs who fought tenaciously to retain their priv- ileges, they lacked both the economic influence provided by the Prussian Junkers' large estates and the latter's monopoly of political power at the local level in the countryside. Smallholding peasants and small-town master artisans, major features of the southern and southwestern German social landscape, were able to resist or sabotage bureaucratic initiatives but could not offer an alternative social policy.25

Officials played a major role in the political life of the region, leading in the 1820s and 1830s both progovernmental and oppositional groups. Baden, the German state most famed for its liberal bureaucracy, seems to fit Koselleck's political schema best. Measures taken by the administrative authorities during the 1820s and 1830s to encourage the growth of an independent bourgeoisie resulted by the 1840s in the creation of an antibureaucratic, liberal opposition.26

Administrative efforts to shape social and economic developments took different political forms in southern Germany from those in Prussia. Organized along bureaucratic-hierarchical lines, south German state administrations did not engage in the same internal debates as characterized the collegial Prussian bureaucracy. They did, however, possess another political arena lacking in Prussia, namely, statewide parliaments, a majority of whose deputies during the Vormdrz were usually state officials. A statewide parliament and consti- tution outlining its powers was seen in southern Germany as a complement to a reorganized bureaucracy, a means of increasing its influence, and a weapon against particularist and stdndisch interests. Although Prussian officials did not have to worry about obtaining voter approval for their actions, they

25 On society and economy in southern and southwestern Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1684-1871 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), pp. 185-353; Heinz Gollwitzer, Die Standesherren (Gottingen, 1964) (a study of a largely, but not exclusively, south German noble group); Wolfgang von Hippel, "Bev6lkerungsentwicklung und Wirt- schaftsstruktur im K6nigreich Wurttemberg 1815/65," in Soziale Bewegung undpol- itische Verfassung, ed. Ulrich Engelhardt, Volker Sellen, and Horst Stuke (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 270-371; Manfred Bulik, Staat und Gesellschaft im hessischen Vormdrz (Cologne and Vienna, 1972), pp. 18-42 (disappointing); Fischer (n. 5 above); Wolfgang Zorn, "Gesellschaft und Staat in Bayern des Vormairz," in Staat und Gesellschaft, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 113-42. Statistics on the social origins of state officials are not easy to come by, but compare the over 80 percent of pre-1850 Badenese higher officials who were sons of state officials with the fewer than 50 percent of their Prussian counterparts. Figures from Loyd E. Lee, The Politics of Harmony: Civil Service, Liberalism and Social Reform in Baden 1800-1850 (Newark, Del., 1980), p. 251; John Gillis, The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis, 1840-1860 (Stanford, Calif., 1971), p. 26. On the origins of the south German bureaucracy as a social group, there is the detailed work of Bernd Wunder, Privilegierung und Diszi- plinierung: Die Entstehung des Berufsbeamtentums in Bayern und Wurttemberg (1780 bis 1815) (Munich and Vienna, 1978).

26 Lee.

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also lacked the support of potential allies from civil society provided by a parliamentary system and found it more difficult to avoid becoming the tools of a reactionary-aristocratic clique dominating the highest levels of government.

Neither south German nor Prussian officials could, in the end, do much against noble privileges and influence, but they directed their efforts in opposite directions. In Prussia, the authorities were sometimes able to dissolve feudal and seigneurial relations in agriculture but could do nothing to shake the nobles' hold on local government, while in southern Germany, the state authorities were sometimes victorious in their countless battles with the nobility for local political power in the countryside, but had enormous difficulties before 1848 in arranging for the redemption of feudal obligations. South German officials, although theoretically in favor of laissez-faire, hesitated to engage in a broadside attack against guild privileges or residence and marriage restrictions, so threatening to the numerous class of master artisans. Prussian officials simply decreed laissez-faire and the master craftsmen lacked both the numbers and the political influence to reverse this decision.27

Just as forms of bureaucratic rule differed in the German states during the Vormdrz, so did the nature of oppositional liberalism. Opposition to bu- reaucratic tutelage in political life was a major feature of at least one important strand of south German liberalism, but such opposition was frequently com- bined with a hostility toward or at least suspicion of laissez-faire and industrial capitalism, both regarded as socially retrograde products of bureaucratic interference with the natural workings of society. Rhenish and Westphalian liberalism, although equally hostile to bureaucratic political domination, saw its negative socioeconomic effects precisely in its actions against the natural order of laissez-faire capitalism.28 It certainly seems ironic that the south German bureaucrats, so careful and gradual in their approach to guild privileges and restrictions on freedom of movement and settlement, should have been denounced as rabidly procapitalist while their Prussian counterparts, who gave the guilds short shrift, were condemned for their hostility to business interests. These varying forms of antibureaucratic liberalism, however, re- flected the more autonomous position of the bureaucracy in Vormdrz southern

27 This comparison is based on the important essay of Fehrenbach, "Verfassungs- und sozialpolitische Reformen."

28 James Sheehan, "Liberalism and Society in Germany, 1815-48," Journal of Modern History 45 (1973): 583-604; id., "Partei, Volk and Staat: Some Reflections on the Relationship between Liberal Thought and Action in the Vormarz," in Sozial- geschichte Heute, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Gottingen, 1974), pp. 162-74; id., German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978), pp. 19-50; Lothar Gall, "Lib- eralismus und 'burgerliche Gesellschaft': Zu Charakter und Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland," Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324-56; Helmut Sedatis, Liberalismus und Handwerk in Sudwestdeutschland (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 9-118. Much of this recent work was anticipated in the remarkable and still not fully appreciated study of Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom (Chicago, 1957), pp. 280- 325. The perception of liberalism as exclusively a laissez-faire movement of the capitalist bourgeoisie found in Theodore Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany 1815-1871 (Princeton, N.J., 1958), pp. 63-64, seems insufficient to grasp the complexities of Vormarz politics and society.

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State and Civil Society in Prussia 293

Germany than it possessed in Prussia. Even the modest steps taken toward occupational freedom by the south German authorities appeared shocking in a social environment largely lacking in capitalist entrepreneurs, while Rhenish- Westphalian liberals opposed the Prussian authorities because their actions seemed to discriminate against business interests, notjust out of bureaucratic arbitrariness, but for the profit of another social group-namely, East Elbian large landowners.

By the 1840s, liberalism in Prussia was by no means restricted to its western provinces, but had strongholds in Berlin, Silesia, and East Prussia as well. It would be of interest to ascertain whether these liberals held a "Rhenish- Westphalian" or "south German" opinion of the relationship between state and society, or whether a third and different pattern prevailed. An investigation of this question might help to elucidate further the political role played by the Prussian bureaucracy.

IV

The general tenor of much recent research has been to break many of the links suggested by Koselleck: those between bureaucratic intention or or- ganization and bureaucratic action, between such action and socioeconomic or political change, or between the development of the Prussian state and the growth of a capitalist social and economic order. I make no pretensions of being able to reforge these broken links in a new alignment, but I would like to conclude by discussing some avenues of current research which have the potential for leading to a new understanding of the interaction between state and civil society in Prussia and Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century.

One possibility involves a reorientation of historical periodization. The first half of the nineteenth century is often studied as a precursor to the social and economic forms of the second, with historians straining, for instance, to analyze every early form of factory industry. In doing so, they often neglect the continuities with the preceding fifty years: the breakdown of precapitalist forms of production and their replacement not by factory industry but by outworking, an increasingly proletarianized artisanate, a commercial agriculture, and a growing rural lower class. These processes played themselves out against a very different political background between 1800 and 1850, however, from that of 1750-1800. In such a context, the bureaucratic political initiatives of the first decades of the nineteenth century may be seen as an intervention in an ongoing process of social change rather than as the origination of a new socioeconomic order. Such a perspective, if not necessarily this particular periodization, is a familiar one in English history, given its post- 1688 political continuity, but it has been applied to the study of the French Revolution as well, suggesting its application to the history of the German response to that event.29

29 This point of view, implicit in the Annales school critique of the Marxist inter- pretation of the French revolution (e.g., Frangois Furet, "Le catechisme revolution- naire," Annales ESC 26 [1971]: 255-89; or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "Revoltes

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Moving from temporal to spatial orientation, the importance of region in the study of early nineteenth-century Germany might also be fruitfully con- sidered. Given the still considerable limitations on transportation, commu- nications, and the market, as well as the very different historical experiences of the areas united in a large German state like Prussia, a statewide bureaucratic initiative could produce widely varying results.30 Studies of provincial social structure or of regional elites, a staple of French historiography, are desiderata for Prussia and elsewhere in Germany.31

Related to regional particularity is the question of ethnic and confessional differences. Koselleck explicitly excluded a study of these differences from his book, quite justifiably seeking to set limits on an already massive work, but conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, Germans and Poles, or over the emancipation of the Jews were not just separate political questions. They intersected with other social issues in ways relevant to the relationship between state administration and society. According to Hartmut Kaelble, half of Berlin's early industrial entrepreneurs were Jews. Perhaps this group's relatively def- erent attitude toward the state authorities did not stem from economic back- wardness but from their cultural isolation and inferior legal position. The disproportionately Protestant class of industrialists in the predominantly Roman Catholic Rhineland and Westphalia may also have had noneconomic reasons for cooperating with the bureaucracy.32 Confessional and ethnic differences also seem to have played a role in the administration of the agrarian reforms,

et contestations rurales en France de 1675 a 1788," ibid. 29 [1974]: 6-22), is explicitly stated but not systematically explored by Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Re'gime, 2 vols. (Paris, 1969-73), 1:23-26; 2:242-52. A fascinating pioneering venture in the explo- ration of breaks and continuities across the revolutionary divide is William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). For a similar perspective from a Marxist viewpoint, E. P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978), pp. 245-301, esp. p. 257. Some of the essays in Helmut Berding and Hans-Peter Ullmann, eds., Deutschland zwischen Revolution und Restauration (Konigstein, 1981), suggest the possibilities of such an approach for German history; the remarkable monograph of Heinz Reif, Westfalischer Adel 1770- 1860: Von Herrschaftsstand zu regionaler Elite (Gottingen, 1979), shows just how fruitful it can be.

30 Koselleck raises this question in his introduction (p. 18) but a specifically regional perspective gets lost in the body of his work. His discussion of the strength of the liberal movement during the 1840s in the Rhineland, Silesia, and East Prussia, in a section entitled "revolt of the peripheral provinces" (p. 366ff.), attributes this strength, somewhat mysteriously, to the success of the bureaucracy in creating an integrated state administration.

31 To mention, virtually at random, a few French studies: Maurice Agulhon, La vie sociale en Provence interieure au lendemain de la re'volution (Paris, 1970); Alain Corbin, Archaisme et modernite' en Limousin au XIXe siecle 1845-1880, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975); or Andre Tudesq, Les grands notables en France 1840-1849, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964). Reif's work on the Westphalian nobility (n. 29 above) is a fine example of such a study for Germany; other regions and elites, the East Elbian landed nobility, for instance, call out for emulation.

32 Kaelble, p. 79; Friedrich Zunkel, Der rheinisch-westfalische Unternehmer 1815- 1879 (Cologne and Opladen, 1962), pp. 29-33.

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as bureaucratic opposition to noble landowners and concern for peasant interests were apparently most pronounced in dealings with the Catholic nobility of Westphalia and the Polish nobility of Poznan.33

While Hegel's notion of the bureaucracy as "universal estate" (allgemeiner Stand) may have accurately described bureaucratic self-perception, it is not a particularly helpful characterization of this group's actual social position. Two contrasting alternatives to this notion have been applied to the study of German state officials. One viewpoint has been to describe the bureaucracy as a social class, an autonomous element in the ruling elite whose actions are directed toward increasing its own power, and to describe the claim to act in the general interest as an ideological veil for group self-aggrandizement. Conversely, the bureaucracy can be seen as an instrument at the disposal of ruling groups (or one fought over by opposing elites) and the administrative reforms of the early nineteenth century as leading not to the consolidation of a socially independent bureaucratic class but to the creation of a new instrument through which the absolute monarch and traditional noble elites could rule more effectively. Jiirgen Kocka has compared these two viewpoints in considering actions of the Prussian bureaucracy which hampered indus- trialization. Both East German Marxist-Leninist and liberal American his- torians, he points out, have regarded suph policies as proof that the state apparatus was controlled by antibourgeois East Elbian Junkers, but he suggests they should be understood as expressions of a bureaucratic striving for social power, a desire by the authorities to keep the pace and nature of industrial development under control. Although certainly quite different in intent, these two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since the political and social position of officialdom may have differed in different German states with different social structures or in the same state at different points in its social and political development.34

A study of the bureaucracy in action might provide a way of testing these theses, or at least of specifying them more concretely. Although there is a large literature on the activities of the state administration, most of it consists, in effect, of transcriptions of interoffice memos preserved in the archives, a singularly unimaginative recapitulation of official correspondence, with no attempt made to pose any critical questions of the sources. Two welcome exceptions to this trend are Alf Luidtke's study of Vormdrz Prussian police policy and Werner Blessing's account of state and church in nineteenth- century Bavaria. While Blessing presents Bavarian officialdom as an auton- omous group and an important agent of social change, Liidtke's Prussian bureaucrats act to preserve noble privilege against bourgeois challenge and

33 Reif, pp. 383-91, 561 n. 74; Koselleck, p. 543. 34 In terms of the works considered in this essay, Kocka ("Preussischer Staat und

Modernisierung"), Vogel, and Lee argue for the first approach, while Wunder, Feh- renbach ("Verfassungs- und sozialpolitische Reformen"), Obenaus ("Die Imme- diatkommission"), Gall, Tilly (Financial Institutions), and Eichholtz take the second. Gillis (n. 25 above) suggests that the Prussian bureaucracy, a relatively autonomous ruling group in the 1 840s, developed by the 1 860s into a pliant instrument in the hands of the monarchy and reactionary agrarian interests.

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to protect all propertied groups against the unruly lower classes, the general social interests the authorities imagine they are serving turning out on closer examination to be those of the possessors of property and privilege. Both authors develop explicit and detailed theoretical frameworks -Ludtke's de- rived from French structuralist Marxism, Blessing's from a variant of mod- ernization theory-which at times threaten to overwhelm the results of their empirical research, but both works offer important insights into bureaucratic action and have the virtue of discussing institutions, the church in Blessing's case, the army in Liudtke's, not often considered in this context.35

An additional virtue of Ludtke's work is his explicit comparison of Prussian policies with those of England and France, although regrettably not with other German states. The reader may well be weary by now of historians' constant calls for comparative studies, but the relationship between state and society is an area particularly well suited to this, and possibilities abound for discovering unexpected parallels or significant differences.36 A less prac- ticed form of comparison, applying the method used by historians of one country to study a similar topic in another, is also worthy of consideration. French historians in studying state officialdom have emphasized the analysis of bureaucratic career patterns, the everyday life of the administration, and the forms of interaction between state servants and society- all issues which could profitably be considered for Germany; conversely, the German emphasis on the bureaucracy as a separate social group and a leading element of civil society could be usefully applied to the study of French history.37

In all these avenues of investigation the questions posed by Reinhart Ko- selleck about the relationship between state and civil society or the role of the bureaucracy in the creation of a capitalist socioeconomic and political order remain dominant considerations. It is rare to find a book which can synthesize the results of a long historiographical tradition yet also provide a point of departure for new work. Even if at times it provokes different answers, this ability to set the questions is a measure of the lasting importance of Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution.

35 Alf Ludtke, "Gemeinwohl," Polizei und "Festungspraxis": Staatliche Gewalt- samkeit und innere Verwaltung in Preussen 1815-1850 (Gottingen, 1982); Werner Blessing, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft: Institutionelle Autoritat und mentaler Wandel in Bayern wdhrend des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, 1982).

36 Richardson's description of the Restoration subprefect-a provincial noble, chosen with the advice of large landowners, "as much local figures as government officials"- sounds suspiciously like the Prussian Landrat (Nicholas Richardson, The French Prefectoral Corps, 1814-1830 [Cambridge, 1966], esp. pp. 92-93, 127-28).

37 Among examples of work on French bureaucracy, see Guy Thuillier, Bureaucratie et Bureaucrates en France au XIXe siecle (Geneva, 1980); Clive Church, Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy 1770-1850 (Oxford, 1981); Bernard Le Clere and Vincent Wright, Les Pre'fets du Second Empire (Paris, 1973). German historians seeking cross-national comparisons have often turned to England, but for the first half of the nineteenth century, comparisons with France, a country whose socioeconomic and political structures were then much closer to Germany's than England's were, might prove more fruitful.

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