The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and political institutions in twentieth-century Europe

Journal of Political Ideologies

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 211-226

  Müller, Jan Werner ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADMINISTRATIVE FRAMEWORK; INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK; POLITICAL HISTORY; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

EASTERN EUROPE; EURASIA; EUROPE; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 70449567052     PISSN: 13569317     EISSN: 14699613     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13569310902925857     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
2. See also the short and conceptually in certain ways more interesting version: What it means to be a State: States and violence in twentieth-century Europe', Journal of Modern European History, 1 (2003), pp. 11-23.
3. Charles S. Maier, Consigning the twentieth century to history', American Historical Review (June 2000), pp. 807-831.
4. A similar periodization-but with a focus on democratization as pushed by the Left-is suggested in Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (New York: Oxford UP, 2002).
5. Of course, this is partly the point of the concept. Compare James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996).
6. A prime example would be Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (London: Penguin, 2006).
7. A perception shared by many contemporaries, of course. See for instance Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918-1937, Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Ed.) (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 2005), p. 713.
8. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien: Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20.Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982).
9. In many ways, another liberal anti-totalitarian followed in Bracher's footsteps: François Furet, whose Le Passéd'une Illusion endorses Bracher's book as 'la meilleure introduction générale au sujet' in a footnote. See Le Passéd'une Illusion: Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe siécle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), p. 223
10. Giovanni Gentile, The philosophic basis of fascism', Foreign Affairs, (1927/1928), pp. 290-304; here p. 301.
11. The existing account that comes closest to this is Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000).
12. Thus, the discourses I am interested in cut across the division between 'philosophical discourse' and 'public political discourse' developed by Andrew Chadwick in his suggestive 'Studying political ideas: a public political discourse approach', Political Studies, 48 (2000), pp. 283-301
13. At the same time, it remains something less than the symbolic discourse or 'the political' in a Lefortian/Rosanvallonian sense (cf. Rosanvallon's Towards a philosophical history of the political', in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Eds), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 189-203.
14. For an interesting example of a history of governance', see David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006)
15. For another helpful theoretical elucidation, see Paolo Pombeni, Ideology and government', in Michael Freeden (Ed.), The Meaning of Ideology (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 59-74.
16. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 2004), p. 61.
17. I hasten to add that a focus on institutions is not necessarily state-centric: parties and councils (as sites of worker self-management, for instance, and, more broadly as explicitly anti-statist institutions) are undoubtedly also political institutions. Moreover, such a history of institutions does not have to turn into a kind of Siegerwissenschaft, that is, a history of the victors: frustrated institutional proposals, or institutions that clearly failed as institutions, must be given their due, where they illuminate a larger set of political challenges and responses.
18. If this argument is accepted, at least some analysis of the changing structural conditions of mass justification (the media and, more broadly, the public sphere) also becomes an important part of the kind of account suggested here. Thanks to Heinz Bude and Martin Bauer on this point.
19. Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, with a Foreword by Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939), p. xi.
20. Closest would be a synthesis of German Ordoliberalismus and Catholic social thought (or 'social capitalism', as it has sometimes been called). I intend to say more on thus synthesis on another occasion.
21. Martin Conway, Democracy in postwar western Europe: the triumph of a political model', European History Quarterly, 32 (2002), pp. 59-84; here p. 61.
22. Witness Edward Shils already in 1955 observing a very widespread feeling that there was no longer any need to justify ourselves vis-á-vis the Communist critique of our society'. Quoted in Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 182-183.
23. I am indebted for the following to David D. Roberts, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
24. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
25. Arguably, the theorist who articulated the most coherent and most intellectually powerful justification of the party as an impersonal charismatic force was Georg Luka ́cs. A successful party organization, Luka ́cs insisted, could only be based on a correct theory of the revolution; in the nether-world of theory disagreements could be blurred, incorrect political diagnoses remain without consequences-but not so in organizational praxis. The proletariat had to be completely conscious of its mission-which meant following the lead of the party as the 'objectification of the proletariat's will'. It would have to carry other classes (and recalcitrant parts of the proletariat with it). Luka ́cs insisted on discipline and total participation as characteristics of the party, and, above all, the 'conscious subordination of the self to that collective will that is destined to bring real freedom into being. this conscious collective will is the Communist Party'. See Georg Luka ́cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 315.
26. In an important book, Karl Schlögel has recently drawn attention to the role of the constitution in the Terror, but also its centrality in understanding the Soviet experience more broadly. See Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich: Hanser, 2008).
27. Quoted in Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 131.
28. Gentile, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism, Ref. 8, pp. 302-303.
29. See in particular Carl Schmitt, Staat-Bewegung-Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935).
30. Tzvetan Todorov, Stalin close up', in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(1) (2004), pp. 94-111.
31. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
32. The term 'consensus politics' of course makes sense against the background of deep and violence-inducing ideological divisions before 1945-but it hides an important number of differences even between centre-left and centre-right after 1945, both at the level of macro-ideals and micro-policies. Thanks to Michael Freeden on this point.
33. On the liberalization of post-war political thought, see Mark Lilla, The other Velvet Revolution: continental liberalism and its discontents', Daedalus, 123(2) (1994), pp. 129-57;
34. On the heuristic value of the category 'liberalization' more generally see Ulrich Herbert (Ed.), Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung, 1945-1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002).
35. At the same time, as Martin Conway has pointed out, 'freely elected national parliaments were the fetish symbols of postwar Western Europe, advertised both to the Communist world and to colonial populations aspiring to freedom from European tutelage as the indispensable institutions of a democratic political system'. See his highly instructive 'Democracy in Postwar Western Europe', Political Ideas in Modern Britain, Ref. 16, p. 65.
36. Christian Bommarius, Das Grundgesetz: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009), p. 110.
37. 30. As clearly and with much evidence argued in Peter Lindseth, The paradox of parliamentary supremacy: delegation, democracy, and dictatorship in Germany and France, 1920-1950s', Yale Law Journal (2004), pp. 1341-1415.
38. Gordon Hewart, The New Despotism (London: Ernest Benn, 1929).
39. Lindseth, The New Despotism., London: Ernest Benn, 1929.
40. Peter Hennessy, Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 26.
41. Hand in hand with the rise of the administrative state went the juridification of ever more areas of social life. This is where the famous Habermas-Luhmann debate of the mid-1970s has traction; in a sense they both were right: Luhmann about the rise of complexity and the emergence of ever more subsystems, Habermas about the dangers of 'colonizing the lifeworld'. See Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1971).
42. Lindseth, The New Despotism., London: Ernest Benn, 1929.
43. I am indebted to discussions with Samuel Moyn on this point.
44. Cf. Pasquale Pasquino, Constitutional adjudication and democracy: comparative perspectives-The United States, France and Italy', in Carol C. Gould and Pasquale Pasquino (Eds), Cultural Identity and the Nation-State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 131-144.
45. Theo Öhlinger, The genesis of the Austrian model of constitutional review of legislation', Ratio Juris, 16 (2003), pp. 206-222. Czechoslovakia introduced a similar institution at about the same time.
46. Karl Loewenstein, 'Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights I', American Political Science Review, 31 (1937), pp. 417-432.
47. Loewenstein, Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights I', American Political Science Review., p. 424.
48. Karl Loewenstein, Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights II', American Political Science Review, 31 (1937), pp. 638-658; here p. 647.
49. Loewenstein, Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights II', American Political Science Review, pp. 656-657.
50. Peter Niesen, Anti-extremism, negative republicanism, civic society: three paradigms for banning political parties', Shlomo Avineri and Zeev Sternhell (Eds), Europe's Century of Discontent: The Legacies of Fascism, Nazism and Communism (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2003), pp. 249-268.
51. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 142. I have benefited from exchanges with Giovanni Capoccia on this point.
52. Militant democracy, and party bans in particular, were later practiced elsewhere in Europe, with Portugal and Poland being two outstanding examples. See Peter Niesen, Zwischen Pfadabhängigkeit und Kommensuration: Verbote politischer Parteien in Europa', in Christian Joerges, Matthias Mahlmann and Ulrich K. Preuß (Eds), Schmerzliche Erfahrungen der Vergangenheit' und der Prozess der Konstitutionalisierung Europas (Wiesbaden: VS, 2008), pp. 258-273.
53. Thanks to Peter Lindseth on this point.
54. See Andrew Moravcsik, 'The origins of human rights regimes: democratic delegation in postwar Europe', International Organization, 54 (2000), pp. 217-252.
55. Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1992).
56. Paolo Pombeni, 'Political models and political transfer in the shaping of Europe', European Review of History, 12 (2005), pp. 223-238.
57. The expression is Wilhelm Röpke's. See also Conway,op. cit., Ref. 16.
58. M. Salvati, 'Behind the Cold War: rethinking the left, the state and civil society in Italy (1940-1970s)', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8 (2003), pp. 556-577.
59. Maria Mitchell, 'Militarism and secularism: CDU politicians and national socialism, 1945-1949', The Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), pp. 278-308.
60. I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Kim Lane Scheppele on this point.
61. Ernst Nolte, Das 20. Jahrhundert: Die Ideologien der Gewalt (Herbig, 2008).
62. Pombeni, op. cit., Ref. 50. Conversely, the twentieth century witnessed attempts to preserve nineteenthcentury class structures, while rejecting liberalism as a system of thought or public justification: Horthy's and other inter-war authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes are prime examples here.
63. Michel Foucault drew attention to the novelty of the post-war German model (broadly speaking: a synthesis of Ordoliberalismus and Catholic social thought) in a series of lectures in early 1979-except that this new 'art of government' could not plausibly be characterized as resting on a primacy of the market, as Foucault seemed to think; rather, the political framing of the market-the rule of law in particular-as well as a kind of Protestant-inspired moral pedagogy were primary. In parts of his lectures at the Collège de France Foucault comes close to saying as much, especially when he equates Modell Deutschland with the Rechtsstaat. See Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collége de France, 1978-1979 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
64. On the 'deep Protestant grammar' of German neoliberalism see Philip Manow, Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie', Leviathan, 29 (2001), pp. 179-198.
65. Marcel Gauchet, L'Avènement de la Démocratie, 2 Vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
66. Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), p. 1.
67. Waldemar Gurian, After World War II', Review of Politics, 8(1) (1946), pp. 3-11; here p. 7.