Abstract
For Austin Harrington, the intellectual legacy of the Weimar period remains critical to the idea of Europe and the idea of the West today. The conflation of the two – the idea of Europe and the idea of the West – since 1945 is symptomatic of the reductive reading of the Weimar years solely in the light of Hitler’s rise to power. The scale of the European catastrophe lent a retrospective fatality to German history since 1848: Germany’s descent into barbarism could only be explained in terms of a fundamental ambivalence to the rapid industrial transformation that destroyed Gemeinschaft, an ambivalence shared by German intellectuals, the ‘mandarins’ of Kultur and Bildung (Fritz Ringer), who washed their hands of political engagement. In short, Weimar, the unhappy product of the First World War, has come to stand for ‘the crisis of classical modernity’ (Detlev Peukert), in which the European nihilism, prophesied by Carlyle, Nietzsche, Burckhardt and Dostoevsky, had finally come to fruition/triumphed.
Harrington will have none of this narrative, which has replaced the multiple contingencies of the 1920s with the supposed inevitability of the ‘return of the repressed’ in national socialism. Against Peukert’s influential ‘Weberian theorem of irrational societal dynamics’ (p. 301), released by modern rationalization processes, Harrington argues that it allows no place for the wide range of intellectual standpoints of the time. The apocalyptic tone of such readings of Weimar, whether from before or after the Second World War, exclude the defenders of the Republic, the voices of reason and compromise, who sought to defend the legitimacy of modernity against its determined enemies and for whom autonomy, self-legislation, and democracy were not simply compensations for the nihilistic void of a post-religious world.
It is time, says Harrington, to rescue these voices from Weimar of left-liberal democratic reason, above all, those major social theorists and founding figures of sociology, who spoke out for civic education and for democratic pluralism against the cult of the collective, the celebration of national destiny and of authentic being, not least because their thinking remains critical to the contemporary dilemmas of national and European self-understanding. In seeking to recover these cosmopolitan voices, Harrington is not just undertaking a recuperative history of ideas but proposing something far more challenging: to undo the caesura of 1945 that has functioned to divorce and safely separate the dangers and horrors of the first half of the century from the positive story of the second half, burying in the process the idea of Europe under the victorious idea of the West. Harrington’s revisionism takes the form of a thought experiment in search of ‘an alternative Germany and an alternative Europe’ (p. 11), for – as the history of the 20th and 21st centuries has shown us – we cannot think the one without the other. And so, in writing about the social thought of the 1920s, Harrington is also writing about Germany and Europe today.
Who are these social theorists, who represented the possibility of an alternative German and European history after the First World War, one that could have led to a synthesis of the idea of Europe and the idea of the West, could have helped bridge the gap between a defeated German and the victors, and whose thought could now help to overcome the gulf separating Germany from its own history? These are the questions and this is the alternative optic to the received image of Weimar that guides Harrington’s return to the writings of the sociologists Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max and Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim and the philosophers Max Scheler and Karl Jaspers. At the heart of this investigation, spanning the last hundred years, lies the problem of Germany in Europe and of Europe in Germany.
The case that Harrington assembles for German cosmopolitan social thought is compelling. His social theorists shared basic liberal beliefs in democratization and parliamentary democracy, underpinned by their personal connections in which Heidelberg with Max and Alfred Weber played a key role. By the end of the war they had become advocates of European peace and reconciliation. Peace and reconciliation did not mean, however, surrendering Germany’s historical-cultural difference to Western universalism but rather the challenge of combining the two. This for Harrington is the key to the importance of this cosmopolitan tradition: ‘German intellectual confrontation with the West in this period retains a complexity that is unmatched in its time’ (p. 6). In arguing for a universalism that recognizes cultural and civilizational diversity, that seeks to articulate a nationally progressive conjugation of the particular and the universal, cosmopolitanism retains its normative interest for contemporary debates about the West and Western civilization in world history. On the one hand, these thinkers offered a necessary corrective to Eurocentrism; on the other, they upheld the importance of universal history beyond the separate worlds of the great historical civilizations.
We observe the same double stance in relation to German nationalism: the defence of German difference is tied to insistence on the universal values of liberalism and condemnation of the retreat into the moral relativism of difference and the romantic fundamentalism of the cult of origins and identity. In turn, their critique of the West is premised on the rejection of all those currents of anti-Westernism that drew their virulence from a cultural-pessimistic denunciation of modernity or from the revolutionary anti-capitalism of the Marxist left. In sum, the continuing relevance of German cosmopolitan tradition is justified by the rare combination of moral principle and intellectual probity, so lacking in the bitter partisan atmosphere of Weimar. These voices from Weimar epitomize for Harrington the missing centre, the central Europe that contained the possibility of another Germany and another Europe between East and West, between Russian collectivism and American individualism.
Given the wide ranging themes and complexity of the argument and its deep documentation, I can only indicate the focus of the individual chapters and note some of the salient issues. Chapter 1 sets out the grounds for rescuing the German ‘protest against the West’ and its ‘radicalism of the centre’ with special reference in Chapter 2 to the reflections of the social anthropologist Helmut Plessner on Germany and its intellectual legacy, delivered in 1935 in exile as a series of lectures at the University of Groningen, lectures that were finally published in 1959 under the title ‘The Belated Nation’ (Die verspätete Nation). The defining distinctiveness of German thought lies in this belatedness, for which Germany has paid a heavy political price. The German nation was ‘too late’ to solve the problems of internal disunity between the Catholic south and the Protestant north, and thus incapable of finding a way to live with its European neighbours.
This belatedness meant, however, that German thinkers were more acutely aware of the challenges of the present and of the non-European hostility to Europe’s imperial hubris. It made them more ready to recognize the Great War as a watershed that called for sustained analysis of the place of Europe in a new era of world history. After a brief presentation of the relevant works of his six social theorists in Chapter 3, Harrington explores their thinking in relation to the nation and nations in Europe (Chapter 4), the civilizational foundations of Europe (Chapter 5), and Europe’s place and role in world history (Chapter 6), followed by two chapters on the role and responsibility of intellectuals (Chapters 7, 8). For all these thinkers the question of the national opened up to the question of Europe in an ongoing dialectic of standpoints that refers beyond itself to world history. Thus Simmel saw in the ever expanding flows of money and communication a dialectic that links self-differentiation on the level of the nation, Europe, and the world to the ever wider web of ‘national individualities’, where identity rests on reciprocal recognition. Scheler argued that only a universalistic legal framework like that of the League on Nations could provide a basis for a cosmopolitan order that respected different national self-understandings and went beyond great power politics. Tönnies and Troeltsch engaged with the problem of developing a global moral and legal order capable of consolidating interest in world peace. For Troeltsch the revolt against modernity in Germany with its appeal to German exceptionalism denied Europe’s common tradition. In his Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912, English translation 1931) and in Protestantism and Progress (1906, English translation 1912), Troeltsch emphasized the deep continuities of European civilization with the classical and the Christian past. The modern ideas of freedom, rights, autonomy and responsibility of the individual have their roots in medieval religious teaching. We need to understand that the ongoing dialogue since the Reformation between Christian sources and the secular humanism of antiquity rests on the legacy of the Christian Middle Ages: ‘The theory of the rights of man…satisfies so many of the requirements of a true European ethos, that we cannot afford to neglect it; on the contrary we must incorporate it into our own ideas’ (p. 162). In a similar vein, Theodor Buddeberg in his essay ‘On the Sociology of European Thinking’ relates European political solidarity to an underlying communality of basic world views informing ethical life.
If the self-destructive tragedy of world war shook the foundations of the European order, it also highlighted the necessity of rethinking Western normative self-explications in the comparative context of world history, the enduring interest of Max Weber’s historical investigations. Weber recognized that the diverse developmental paths of world civilizations with their distinct values and cognitive patterns, enshrined in religious images of the world, could not be subsumed under evolutionary paradigms of social development. Thus when Weber claimed ‘universal significance and validity’ for Western developments he did not see them as prescriptively transferable but as historically specific. His brother identified culture and civilization as the two complementary dimensions of world-historical change – culture unified distinct spheres of social life and meaning (myth, religion, art, law) into a particular cultural style and intellectual orientation, whereas civilization signified evolutionary cognitive progress in technical control of the environment.
The writings of Troeltsch, the Webers through to Karl Jaspers after 1945, together with the analysis of world views (Dilthey, Scheler) and comparative historical sociology (Elias), all fed into the new fields of cultural sociology and civilization theory, complemented, Harrington suggests, by Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge with its emphasis on the situatedness and perspectivity of knowledge that gave epistemic parity to societies and civilizations globally. Mannheim and Jaspers both set out in the context of Weimar to define and defend modern intellectuals not as the ideologists of group or class interests but as the proponents of civic reason, whose task lay in mediating between competing positions and upholding negotiation and compromise against terrible simplifications. All these thinkers sought answers to the conundrums of the absolute and the particular, the universal and the relative. They recognized the need to conceptualize separate developmental histories and civilizational differences within the framework of a totality that made the task of theorizing globalization the inheritor and continuation of philosophy of history.
How does the European Union compare today to Harrington’s ‘alternative Europe’? The Union is, he says, no longer a politically or intellectually cohesive project. On the contrary, it has turned into an ever expanding zone of free trade that has failed to deliver growth and shared prosperity and is collapsing from within, having squandered the historic opportunity ‘to realise a genuinely social-democratic and inclusive project of trans-national collective determination’, that is, the opportunity ‘to enable European nations to shape their own future under circumstances of their own choosing’ (p. 382). Apart from diehard EU loyalists few would disagree with Harrington’s judgement. Less persuasive, however, is his charge that the West has been engaged since 1919 in destroying the ‘resources of pan-European solidarity’, whose end product is the EU and NATO, instruments of the sacrifice of a European idea of Europe to an American idea of the West (p. 383). At this point at the latest it becomes clear that the terminological equivocations in relation to Europe, the West and ‘the West’ imply a separation that is difficult to maintain.
Did Europe have no role in the destruction of pan-European solidarity before, during, and after the First World War? Was and is Europe not a part of the West? And what distinguishes the West from ‘The West’ other than the optic of ‘Occidentalism’? Conversely, are the Atlantic nations – Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal – not part of Europe? Does the idea of Europe reside only on the other, German side of the Rhine? And does a radicalism of the centre coincide with the central position of Germany in Europe? And should we applaud or tremble if Germany casts off its post-45 ‘Western’ identity? All of these questions converge on the power-political question for Europe since 1914: Germany’s place in Europe; moreover, in a Europe over which Russia’s shadow once again looms large. It is this question of course that makes the present book so relevant and important: Harrington’s re-vision of German social thought is embedded in a geopolitical constellation that makes intellectual history, as he puts it, a ‘living medium of contemporary collective self-reflection’ (p. 11). The rescue he undertakes of ‘Europe in Weimar’ from the fear of ‘Weimar in Europe’ that became a founding narrative of the European Union since 1945 has the great merit of bringing the enormously rich and fascinating legacy of German social theory after 1900 back into focus. This rescue highlights at the same time the many ideological blinkers that until now have stood in the way of a more adequate historical account of the challenging diversity and complexity of intellectual positions during the Weimar years, not least among which is the reading of Weimar as the exemplar of the construction of modernity as crisis, even if Harrington is himself tempted to relate the ‘crisis and catastrophe of the 1930s’ to the present European crisis in terms of the pathologies and contradictions of modern capitalism (p. 386).
One final point: the distinction between the idea of Europe and the idea of the West is open to another reading that draws on Alfred Weber’s distinction between culture and civilization. In the light of this distinction the ‘Westernization’ of Europe reflects the supersession (not suppression) of Europe’s cultural and civilizational identity – as of the other world civilizations – by the global spread of the science-based technological civilization of modernity that had its origins in Europe. Harrington himself notes that ‘global diversity of ancient religious affiliations seems unlikely to exert any kind of credibly transformative effect over dominant orthodoxies of economic organisation’ (p. 365). The fascinating question of the relation of the great historical civilizations to the dominant technological civilization of global modernity mirrors now as in the 1920s the question that Harrington has placed at the centre of his radical revisionism: the co-existence between conflict and conjunction of the idea of Europe and the idea of the West. These are not historical questions. They remain as unresolved as ever as the EU struggles to give meaning and purpose to Europe after Weimar.