Geoff Eley

The peculiarities of German history: bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany

This book investigates the role of bourgeoisie society and the political developments of the nineteenth century in the peculiarities of German history. Most historians attribute German exceptionalism to the failure or absence of bourgeois revolution in German history and the failure of the bourgeoisie to conquer the pre-industrial traditions of authoritarianism. However, this study finds that there was a bourgeois revolution in Germany, though not the traditional type. This so-called silent bourgeois revolution brought about the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist system based on the sanctity and disposability of private property and on production to meet individual needs through a system of exchange dominated by the market. In this connection, this book proposes a redefinition of the concept of bourgeois revolution to denote a broader pattern of material, institutional, legal, and intellectual changes whose cumulative effect was all the more powerful for coming to be seen as natural.

Nationalism and social history

Keith Hitchens, Orthodoxy and Nationality. Andrieu Saguna and the Rumanians of Transylvania, 1846–1873 (1977), ix+372 (Harvard University Press, £14.70) Gerasimos Augustinos, Consciousness and History: Nationalist Critics of Greek Society 1897—1914 (1977), v +182 (Columbia University Press, £16.90) Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity. Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848–1948 (1978), xiii+640 (Harvard University Press, £17.50) Hans Mommsen, Arbeiterbewegung und Nationale Frage. Ausgewahlte Aufsatze (1979), 429 (Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, DM 78)

Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere

When I rashly agreed to contribute a commentary to this collection, I knew that Iwould learn farmore than I could ever hope to add. But the limitations of my European expertise and modest comparative abilities leave me all the more reticent now that I am actually faced with the scholarly brilliance and quiet authority of these essays. So in pulling a few thoughts together, Iwould like to reflect briefly on some of the forms taken by the contemporary reception of Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which provides the main referent for this collection’s shared if only partially explicated problematic.1 In so doing, I hope to suggest ways in which the existing discussion might be further developed. For some three decades after its original German edition in 1962, Habermas’s book had virtually no impact on historians in any language or national field. Indeed, the international resonance of its author’s other works among social scientists proceeded largely independently of the standing of this earlier book. In the English-speaking world his reception was defined

Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the English-speaking World 1957-82

The Gramsci reception in the English-speaking world is one of the more remarkable intellectual phenomena of the 1970s. At the time of writing (summer 1982) we seem to have reached some sort of staging-post in the seemingly never-ending stream of publication. A veritable explosion of books and essays has just taken place, but for almost a year there has been no new major intervention, and to my knowledge none has been announced.’ Now may be a good time to take stock. There are innumerable Gramsc

History with the Politics Left Out-Again?

chances for the kind of experimentation with new methods and approaches that proved so exciting elsewhere. On the one hand, the power of an established problematic (a particular approach to the origins of Nazism in the one case, the totalitarian model in the other) tended to block social-historical work; on the other hand, the professional power structure (the West German historical Zunft, the American Sovietological establishment) limited access to resources and deprived innovation of its necessary material base in the shape of research centers, funding, and a supportive environment of collective discussion. In the German case, this situation was dramatically turned around between the late 1960s and mid-1970s in a process initiated by the famous Fischer Controversy, which also coincided with a more general fracturing of postwar intellectual orthodoxies in the Federal Republic. Those developments resonated powerfully in the English-speaking world, and while the so-called Tendenzwende of the late 1970s has produced a depressingly successful conservative restoration in Germany itself, the new departures have fortunately been sustained by an international community of discourse linking West German scholars to those in Britain and the United States. During the last ten years German historical studies have been radically transformed, with a continuing proliferation of monographic research on the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, the growth of cohesive national and international networks, and often bitterly contested disputes over methodology, concepts, and long-run interpretation. This notable vitality has been imparted in large part under the banner of social history.1

German colonialism in a global age

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction. German Colonialism Made Simple / Bradley Naranch 1. Empire by Land or Sea? Germanys Imperial Imaginary, 1840-1945 / Geoff Eley 2. Scientific Autonomy and Empire, 1880-1945: Four German Sociologists / George Steinmetz 3. Science and Civilizing Missions: Germans and the Transnational Community of Tropical Medicine / Deborah J. Neill 4. Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath / Andrew Zimmerman 5. Who Is the Master Colony? Propriety, Honor, and Manliness in German East Africa / Heike I. Schmidt 6. A New Imperial Vision? The Limits of German Colonialism in China / Klaus Muhlhahn 7. Experts, Migrants, Refugees: Making of the German Colony in Iran, 1900-1934 / Jennifer Jenkins 8. Classroom Colonialism: Race, Pedagogy, and Patriotism in Imperial Germany / Jeff Bowersox 9. Mass-Marketing the Empire: Colonial Fantasies and Advertising Visions / David Ciarlo 10. Colonialism, War, and the German Working Class: Popular Mobilization in the 1907 Reichstag Elections / John Phillip Short 11. Colonialism and the Anti-Semitic Movement in Imperial Germany / Christian S. Davis 12. Internal Colonialism in Germany: Culture Wars, Germanification of the Soil, and the Global Market Imaginary / Sebastian Conrad 13. Pan-German Conceptions of Colonial Empire / Dennis Sweeney 14. Maritme Force and the Limits of Empire: Warfare, Commerce, and Law in Germany and the United States before the First World War / Dirk Bonker 15. The Rhineland Controversy and Weimer Postcolonialism / Brett M. Van Hoesen 16. Colonialism, Imperialism, National Socialism: How Imperial Was the Third Reich? / Birthe Kundrus Bibliography List of Contributors Index

The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary

This article seeks to explore some particularities of history writing in the present. It considers in turn the meanings of the contemporary interest in memory, the different ways in which ideas about and images of the past circulate through the mass-mediated public sphere of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the complexities of publicness and the public sphere, and the shifting boundaries between popular ideas of the past and changes in the discipline of history. It then turns to the example of (West) Germany between the 1960s and now. The article concludes with some reflections on changing perceptions of the overall character of the twentieth century.

The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History

With this issue, the Journal of Modern European History opens a debate on the significance of the 1970s (and 1980s) for the history of Europe. Historians, economists and political scientists largely agree that these two decades saw a major political shift from the Keynesian consensus on state intervention, which simply could not be financed any more, to a new consensus based on neo-liberal austerity policies. The Journal of Modern European History aims at discussing these problems from a comparative point of view. In order to reach such a point of view, results of empirical research will be combined with a systematic evaluation. The Journal’s next issue will contain five case studies dealing with Great Britain, Italy and France, Sweden, West Germany and, as a comparative example from late-communist Europe, Hungary. Even if these case studies deal with different aspects and formulate different questions, they all tend to agree that the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s constituted a turning point in European history. In the current issue the debate will be opened by the editor, who will concentrate on the role of life course changes, and four more experts who were kind enough to address the problem in a short statement. All of these authors have recently published important monographs on European post-war history.1 In their contributions to this issue they turn their attention to different aspects of the period. Göran Therborn and Geoff Eley hint at the surprisingly strong revival of capitalism during the 1980s and at its profound social repercussions ever since. Others, like Philippe Chassaigne, focus on the cultural elements of change or they underline, as does Hartmut Kaelble, the «unique character» of the period. For Kaelble, the 1970s were a «soft turning point» equalling a «silent revolution». The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?

Dilemmas and Challenges of Social History since the 1960s: What Comes after the Cultural Turn?

Abstract Since the 1960s historians in the English-speaking world have experienced two major waves of innovation, each leading to substantial broadening of the disciplines range of topics, methodologies, and theoretical approaches, linked to particular modes of interdisciplinarity, and energised by the politics of their respective times. Each was moved by a desire for greater democratic inclusiveness, whether in terms of recruitment into the profession, a questioning of older hierarchies of knowledge and institutional structures, or the recognition of previously hidden or marginalised histories. The first of these waves, extending from the 1960s into the early 1980s, involved the popularity and eventual dominance of social history. Beginning at the turn of the 1980s and achieving equivalent influence by the end of the 1990s, a new movement then emerged as the ‘new cultural history’, registering the emergent influence of cultural studies across the humanities and parts of the social sciences, settling increasingly around new histories of gender, race, and sexuality, and responding further to the challenges of postcoloniality. Though marked for some years by great intellectual divisiveness, the lasting impact of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ now allows us usefully to take stock. While taking its stand firmly on the resulting new ground, this article seeks to explore what may have been lost as well as what has been gained.

The social history of indstrialization: ‘proto-indstry’ and the

This articl attempts to review the discussion of proto-industrialization set in motion by certain convergences of economic history and historical demography in the early 1970s. It focuses on the collaborative work of Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jurgen Schulmbohm (originally published in Germany in 1977 and reissed in English in 1982) and the critical reactions is has produced. Aside from the relevance of this discussion to the analysis of industrialization and its origins in the stricter sense, it has also significantly broadened the agenda of acceptable question to include many of the perspectives pioneered by social historions to include two decades. In this sense the intervention of Kriedte, Medick and Schulmbohm helped convene a number of previously separate and frequently untheorized literatures on ground provided by the proto- industrial concept. This has brought the problem of a social history of industrialization more sharply into focus.