Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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James P. Young

Sumner’s animadversions against government he could offer no way out for

his small-scale hero. His thought represents the triumph of the property-

oriented ‘Whiggery’ on the right wing of Hartz’s liberal tradition. As Russell

Hanson wrote, ‘Reconstruction and the Gilded Age were but two aspects

of the more general process by which the capitalist mode of production was

reproduced in America on an extended scale’ (Hanson 1985,p.183). What

emerged at this time is the peculiar American form of ‘conservatism’ which

scorns tradition and embraces the relentless change inherent in capitalist

dynamics. In this sense, nineteenth-century American conservatism was

very much part of the competitive, individualist, laissez-faire liberal tradition

described by Hofstadter, but as Rober t McCloskey noted, it was not the

liberalism of Locke, but rather of Hobbes which lurked in the background,

so that in Sumner’s world ‘selﬁshness is raised to the status of an absolute

good: the Hobbesian man becomes the moral ideal’ (McCloskey 1951,

p. 47).

Though it falls largely outside the scope of this essay, this was not the

last version of Darwinism to be a force in American thought and politics.

It was not long before a var iety of thinkers noticed that if natural selection

was to be invoked to explain the survival of the ﬁttest, it did not necessarily

follow that the competitive struggle pitted man against man. Why could

not members of the same species band together to adapt collectively to the

problems posed by nature? As E. S. Corwin wrote, ‘Instead of the creature

being adapted to the environment, the environment had to be adapted to the

creature’ (Corwin 1950,p.191). This reform Darwinism, as Eric Goldman

called it, developed in the late nineteenth century, though it was not until

the progressive movement early in the twentieth century that it began to be

politically inﬂuential (Fine 1956,pp.167–369;Goldman1956,pp.66–81;

Hanson 1985,pp.208–18; Hofstadter 1992,pp.66–169).

More immediately relevant was the emergence of populism, considered

as a style of thought, a political movement and a political party. As a style

of thought, populists tended to see not so much class conﬂict as a con-

ﬂict between the mass of the people and a small number of conspiratorial

vested interests. This was coupled with a belief in the essential goodness

of the people, a strong theory of majority rule and a commitment to

participatory politics. Thus, populists came to be critical of the Ameri-

can system of checks and balances and its accompanying legalism which

they believed tended to make popular control more difﬁcult (Young 1996,

pp. 138–40).

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

Nineteenth-century American populism was an agrarian movement. A

fundamental truth of American history is that, ‘The United States was born

in the country and has moved to the city’ (Hofstadter 1955a, p. 23). Farmers

were the victims of a prolonged agricultural depression throughout much

of the late nineteenth century, though, as Hofstadter’s remark suggests, the

problems went much deeper than immediate economic distress. Populists

were caught up in the rapidly changing social position of agriculture and

this, as much as economics, created deep anxieties.

As a political party populism was institutionalised ﬁrst in the Farmer’s

Alliance and then, in 1892, in the People’s Party which ran James B. Weaver

for President. The Omaha Platform of the People’s Party is a central doc-

ument of populism (Pollack 1977,pp.59–65). The platform complained

of a ‘vast conspiracy against mankind’ on the part of propertied interests

(Pollack 1977,pp.60–1). Echoing Locke, the producerist ideology of the

Jacksonians, and Lincoln, the platform argued that, ‘Wealth belongs to him

who creates it.’ To deal with the problems and to bring the situation under

control, the platform called for, among other things, government to be

strengthened, the railroads curbed or nationalised, the monetar y system

altered, the reform of banking, a graduated income tax and direct election

of senators (Pollack 1977,pp.63–5; Young 1996,pp.140–1).

The other major populist document was Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth

Against Commonwealth. Lloyd was an atypical populist, since he was not a

farmer, but instead a graduate of Columbia University and the editor of

the Chicago Tribune, though his radical views ultimately cost him his job.

The book begins and ends with an ethical critique of the new corporate

economy. Denouncing the ethics of the conservative Darwinists, Lloyd

argued that if the doctrine of ‘survival of the ﬁttest’ were to be adopted in

families or by citizens, the result would be ‘a monster and would be speedily

made extinct’ (Lloyd 1894,p.495). Wealth, he claimed, was destructive of

liberty (Lloyd 1894,p.2). The basic problem lay in the economic liberal’s

devotion to the principle of self-interest. This position ignored the fact

that men are social beings. In a true laissez-faire system, we must let ‘the

individual do what the individual can do best, and let the community do

what the community can do best’. In Lloyd’s view, ‘Civilization is the

unceasing accretion of these social solutions’ (Lloyd 1894,pp.496–7, 506).

Civilisation can be destroyed by barbarians from above. ‘Believing wealth

to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good.’ In believing

this, Lloyd argued, we breed pharaohs (Lloyd 1894,pp.510, 515). This

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James P. Young

was an analysis of industrial capitalism in the form of a critique of the

‘atomistic social freedom’ which Hartz saw at the heart of the American

liberal tradition, a conclusion that led Lloyd to socialism as it did not for

the populists he supported (Young 1996,pp.142–4).

Lloyd offered more than the backward-looking nostalgia Richard Hof-

stadter was inclined to see in populism (Hofstadter 1955a, p. 23;cf.

McWilliams 1973,pp.396–406). His thought was an attempt to adapt

Jeffersonian–Jacksonian ideology to the new realities of political economy,

and its harshly critical view of that system pushed against the limits of the

liberal consensus. Lloyd insisted that mere reform was impossible and that

more fundamental change must come (Hanson 1985,p.214;Lloyd1894,

p. 533).Atthesametime,populistsdid exhibit a certain nostalgia for earlier

times; they yearned for the never to be recovered world that was destroyed

in the Civil War. Additionally, in spite of poor economic conditions and

the declining position of agriculture, most f armers did not become pop-

ulists. If not simple nostalgia, the agrarian movement did display a certain

provincialism so that farmers had difﬁculty in dealing with the plight of

the urban working class. Any hope for a real farmer–labour coalition died.

Lloyd’s radical critique of the new economy failed to take hold in the cities,

while the farmers continued to be signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by Jeffersonian

liberalism, particularly in the southern states (Young 1996,pp.143–5).

Nonetheless, many populist reforms were ultimately adopted, and in

the early twentieth century the leaders of the progressive movement made

a more convincing theoretical attempt to come to terms with Jefferson’s

legacy. Signiﬁcantly, this was an urban movement one of whose major

intellectual leaders was an enthusiastic follower of Theodore Roosevelt,

the journalist Herbert Croly. Croly offered his theory in the form of an

argumentative interpretation of American history. Like Lloyd, he too was

concerned by the reign of powerful economic interests which he attributed

to the dominance of Jeffersonian individualism, resulting, he claimed, in

a ‘species of vigorous, licensed, and puriﬁed selﬁshness’. The result was

a system which made for ‘individual bondage’ (Croly 1965,pp.49, 409).

For relief Croly turned to the thought of Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s

old adversary, who was, he thought, a ﬁner statesman and thinker than

Jefferson, and more honourable as well. But Hamilton’s major ﬂaw was

that, unlike Jefferson, he did not really understand his countrymen, which

led to a fatal error, namely ‘making the Federalists a bulwark against the

rising tide of democracy’. It was Theodore Roosevelt’s mission, thought

Croly, to ‘give a democratic meaning and purpose’ to Hamilton’s tradition

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

(Croly 1965,p.169). This was a major reconﬁguration of the mainstream of

American political thought. It is often said that Croly and Roosevelt were

pursuing Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means; there is something to

that, but Croly’s move, by repudiating everything Jefferson stood for except

democracy, went well beyond such a transformation (Sklar 1988,p.401). It

opened the way for state-based reformist liberalism. Even progressives who

continued to revere Jefferson, such as Woodrow Wilson and his adviser

Louis Brandeis, saw the need for a stronger government to regulate the

activities of corporate capitalism. On this populists and progressives alike

agreed (Cohen 2002;Goldman1956,pp.82–179; Hofstadter 1955a; Young

1996,pp.149–68).

In the twentieth century the New Deal and the Great

Society were direct descendants of these movements.

It is important to insist that American liberalism is not, as Daniel Rodgers

suggests, ﬂat and timeless (Rodgers 1992,p.38). Liberalism is not static; it

is a loose label under which a great many ideas can ﬁt. There is a consensus

broad enough for positions within it to migrate from one political camp to

another. Thus, during the Progressive movement, the tradition of Jefferso-

nian liberalism was transformed by a fusion of Hamiltonian managerialism

with Jeffersonian democracy. Liberalism in its familiar contemporary sense

began to emerge. The states’ rights position associated with Jeffersonian-

ism was increasingly adopted by ‘conservatives’, as members of the more

property-oriented wing of American liberalism came to be called, while

these same conservatives continued to hold laissez-faire liberal ideas on polit-

ical economy. In this way the theory of a liberal consensus retained much of

its power, though in a changed form. The same basic elements continued to

be present, but they were restructured into a new pattern, a process that has

occurred more than once in American history. The progressives, later to be

called ‘liberals’, continued to support an individualistic, competitive, capit-

alist economy, with a commitment, often honoured largely in the breach,

to individual rights, but with a new sense that the ends of the individual

might be best served by a stronger government committed to the regulation

of the economy by the state. The characteristic form of American politics

is an example of what the greatest scholar of American political parties

called ‘dualism within a moving consensus’ (Key 1964,pp.222–7).

The

31 For comparative perspectives on the transformation of liberal reform see Kloppenberg 1986 and

Rodgers 1998a. On the general transformation of American life, thought and politics at the end of

the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century see Wiebe 1967, which remains a classic.

32 The historian Alan Dawley, though sceptical of the consensus theory, and a sharp critic of the theory

of American exceptionalism, nevertheless sees that the evolution of liberalism is characterised by

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James P. Young

historical norm in the United States is one of two-party competition which

tends to draw the parties towards the centre. However, over time the centre

tends to move under the stimulus of events, the response of party leaders to

them, and sometimes the agitation of ideologues on the fringes or outside

the bounds of political respectability, thus expanding the scope of political

conﬂict.

Consider, for example, the abolitionists and populists who, while

not immediately successful in ordinary electoral terms, nevertheless moved

the consensus to the left. Were liberalism simply a monolithic, unchanging

block of ideas it would be even more difﬁcult than it is to gain leverage for

critical positions. Through most of American history this has not been an

essential problem; within liberalism there has been real room for debate.

With the advent of progressivism the ‘long nineteenth century’ in Amer-

ican politics came to a close. Only later in the twentieth century would the

individual rights of minority groups again become a matter of state concern

as they brieﬂy were during Reconstruction. W. E. B. DuBois exaggerated

but slightly, if at all, when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk that, ‘the

problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line’ (DuBois

1986,p.359). This has been a major problem within the liberal tradition that

neither Jeffersonianism nor progressivism has successfully addressed, and it

was indeed to become a major theme in the last half of the new century.

‘change within continuity’ (Dawley 1991,p.11). The consensus Key refers to is a general agreement

to the rules of the game which probably refers to the liberal tradition, though without speciﬁc

reference to t he Hartz thesis or any other general theory.

33 Consider the brilliant, though now somewhat neglected work of E. E. Schattschneider 1960 who

described the struggle at the margins of politics to expand the scope of the political system to include

broader participation of previously excluded groups.

34 Nor did they successfully cope with the dramatic development of science and industrial technology,

though the late writings of Henry Adams, who did not join with the progressive reformers, fruitfully

opened that topic. Taken together, Adams’ works can be read as a commentary on the entire

nineteenth century, ranging from his masterful historical study of the Jeffersonians, to his journalism

following the Civil War, to his autobiographical reﬂections which culminate in one of the earliest

meditations on the increasingly rapid pace of social and technological change (Adams 1958, 1963,

1986; Young 2001).

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German liberalism in the

nineteenth century

wolfgan g j. mo mm sen

Conventionally German liberalism is held to be one of the main reasons why

Germany in the nineteenth century never managed to break the fetters of an

authoritarian political system and why it eventually came to be the breeding

ground for extremist movements on the right, notably radical nationalism

and ﬁnally National Socialism. The history of German liberalism has always

been seen as an aspect of the so-called German Sonderweg, a departure from

the path towards modernity and liberal government which had succeeded

elsewhere in Western Europe. In this approach, the failure of liberalism to

impress German society with its values was considered a key factor. Recent

research has shown, however, that this was at best a partial view. First, the

parallels in the development of German and British liberalism are consid-

erable. Secondly, the achievements and the failures of German liberalism

ought to be compared with those of other European countries, notably Italy,

Austria and Hungary. Such a comparison produces a far more diversiﬁed

picture of German and European liberalism (Langewiesche 1988b).

1 Enlightenment, war and reform from above

In 1957 Leonard Krieger argued in an inﬂuential book The German Idea

of Freedom that German liberalism largely originated in a movement of

intellectuals without deep roots in the middle classes as such (Krieger 1972).

These intellectuals propagated liberalism as a set of idealist principles, not

as a political message of an emancipatory kind by which the middle classes

could free themselves from authoritarian rule and bureaucratic control. In a

predominantly agrarian society with few urban centres the core of the liberal

movement indeed consisted of intellectuals, notably those in public ofﬁce.

However, liberal ideas were to be found in many quarters. A substantial

number of the key spokesmen were aristocrats, often in inﬂuential social

positions. Nobility did not play a role in Germany comparable to that of

the Whigs in Great Britain; there were not enough of t hem around, and

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Wolfgang J. Mommsen

generally they did not occupy the independent social position enjoyed by

their peers in Great Britain. But they certainly exercised substantial inﬂuence

and were able to induce the princely or monarchical administrations to

implement at least parts of the new liberal agenda. During and after the

Napoleonic wars there emerged a liberal bureaucracy that was prepared to

meet liberal demands in part, if only to strengthen government positions in

a period of transition and unrest.

The civil servants who opted for a modernisation of the governmental

systems in Ger many, notably in Prussia, were impelled by Enlightenment

ideas. After t he upheaval of the Napoleonic wars a thorough reform along

liberal lines of governmental structures, especially in the smaller and medium

principalities, in line with liberal principles, seemed to be overdue. Notably

the introduction of legislative bodies, either as assemblies of the traditional

estates or as representative assemblies, was thought necessary in order to

bring about greater cohesion of those principalities whose territories had

been redesigned by the Congress of Vienna. Furthermore the patriotic

attitude of the burghers to their rulers during the Napoleonic wars needed

to be rewarded, if only to a limited degree. The constitutional reforms

implemented by Freiherr vom Stein in Prussia from 1807 were designed

to bring about a higher degree of participation of the burghers in public

affairs, though only at a local level. Stein introduced a new system of self-

government for the cities and towns, whereas in the countryside the power

of the local nobility was by and large left intact. Similarly all governmental

activities were now subjected to the rule of law. These reforms stopped far

short of the demands of the nascent liberal movement but they pointed in

the same direction, namely towards a greater degree of participation of the

people, or rather of the bourgeois classes in the affairs of government.

Such measures from above initiated by an enlightened state bureaucracy

were inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and centred on the

principle of the self-determination of the autonomous individual (Merchior

1991,pp.85–7). Although Kant did not introduce the principle of individ-

uality into the public arena, he nonetheless demanded from the state that its

actions must obey rational procedures and respect the life-sphere of the indi-

vidual whose ultimate task was to realise himself as a rational human being

guided by moral principles. Even though Kant did not coin the notion of

Rechtsstaat, state of law, in substance this principle had already been fully

developed in his philosophy. Later the principle of Rechtsstaat became a

battle cry of the German liberal movement with the claim for the pro-

tection of the individual against arbitrary action of any sort. Although this

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German liberalism in the nineteenth century

benevolent bureaucratic liberalism did not go very far, it certainly paved

the way for the liberal movement, if only of a moderate kind. The civil

servants considered themselves not as the tools of the princely govern-

ments, but in Hegelian terms, as a ‘universal estate’ exempt from the web of

interest politics pursued by the different estates. They claimed to represent

the general interest of the state and – increasingly so – of the nation, and

this encouraged them to work for legal, administrative and, to some degree

at least, constitutional reforms.

This constellation led the liberals to assume that administrations could

gradually be made to conform to liberal principles by public opinion.

It should be noted that intellectuals inside and outside the administrative

apparatus, notably those in academic positions and in the ‘free professions’,

not least in the judiciary, shared much the same world-view and, to some

degree, the same social interests. However, the early liberal movement was

by no means a movement of intellectuals only; on the contrary it enjoyed

the support of sizeable sections of German society (Sheehan 1988,pp.22ff.).

Certainly the lawyers, professors and journalists who enjoyed a high degree

of Abk

ommlichkeit (namely the ability to engage actively in political life),

played a dominant role in the early liberal movement, but their views were

shared by artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, master craftsmen, sometimes

even by the owners of larger peasant holdings, that is to say the middling

classes in general, and also the still marginal industrial entrepreneurs. This

was also true for the Catholic part of German society. Initially there was a

strong involvement of some Catholic intellectual elites in liberal policies. For

example, Joseph Goerres, the well-known editor of the Rheinischer Merkur,

came to be an important spokesman of reform. Only later did the Catholics

dissociate themselves from the liberal movement, a process that eventually

culminated in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s.

2 The emergence of a liberal movement

What were the main tenets of German liberalism in its early stages? A promi-

nent place was given to the demand that all citizens be treated as equal,

regardless of their status within the social hierarchy. All legal claims that

were not in line with this principle were to be abrogated, although possibly

with adequate compensation of the former beneﬁciaries. All remnants of

arbitrary rule were to be abandoned and government subjected throughout

to the rule of law. The individual was to be freed from all arbitrary restraints

in society, and given liberty to pursue his or her own interests within the

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Wolfgang J. Mommsen

limits of the law, while the state was to retreat to the role of a guardian

of public interests. Wilhelm von Humboldt argued in a famous pamphlet

Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu Bestimmen

that within the limits of the law the state had no right whatsoever to inter-

fere with the behaviour of the individual; it must not weaken the personal

responsibility and the creativity of the individual citizen in conducting his

affairs and caring for his well-being. Furthermore, citizens were generally

to be given the right to form their own associations of whatever kind with-

out control by the state authorities. These essentially negative principles

were supplemented by moderate postulates of a political nature. Citizens

were to be granted the right to participate in legislation and taxation by

means of freely elected legislative bodies. These bodies were not supposed

to take over control from the government; they were merely to ensure that

the rulers and their governments would accept public opinion as the guid-

ing principle of their policies. The experience of the French Revolution

appeared to convey a clear message in this respect. In fact the liberals did

not wish to interfere with the operation of the executive as such, let alone

to install their own leaders in ofﬁce. They were convinced that although

it should conform to the demands of public opinion, a strong bureaucratic

state was indispensable in the implementing of liberal principles in society at

large. Their demands therefore stopped short of challenging the authority

of government. However, the relative weakness of the liberals on the par-

liamentary level was compensated to some extent by their predominance in

local government. As a rule local parliaments and city councils were ﬁrmly

in the hands of the liberals.

This was certainly a modest programme, not least because the liberals

were themselves afraid of potential revolutionary upheavals. J. Fr. Benzen-

berg argued in a treatise

Uber Verfassung (On the Constitution) published in

usseldorf in 1816: ‘It is not the purpose of the parliamentary assemblies to

govern. Instead they ought to bring to bear pressure upon the government

always to govern in line with public opinion . . . although in a reputable

and law-abiding manner. The constitution guarantees that public opinion is

ofﬁcially brought to the attention of the government via the instrument of

parliament’ (Mommsen 1971,p.239). On this basis there developed in the

southern German principalities a speciﬁc version of constitutional rule that

on the one hand recognised the autonomous positions of the prince and

his government, while on the other insisted that the government should

secure a parliamentary majority in matters of legislation and in particu-

lar of taxation. Needless to say a rather narrowly deﬁned suffrage based

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German liberalism in the nineteenth century

upon taxable wealth ensured that the members of the assembly came only

from the upper sections of society, an arrangement resulting in the chamber

possessing a high proportion of ofﬁce-holders. This dualistic type of con-

stitutional government carefully respected the principle of the separation

of powers and in no way objected to the rulers freely choosing their own

ministers.

In the ﬁrst decades after 1815 this rather tame system of liberal constitu-

tionalism, usually known as Kammerliberalismus (chamber liberalism) worked

quite smoothly in the majority of south German states, albeit with the

exception of Prussia which even refused to establish a representative body

for the Prussian state as a whole, and instead maintained rather traditional

regional representative bodies. This new constitutional form became the

seedbed of German liberalism. It wasn’t until the 1840s that Robert von

Mohl broke with this dualistic doctrine of constitutional government. He

argued with reference to English experience that the ‘unfortunate dual-

ism’ between the government and the people could only be overcome if

the ministers were chosen from the parliamentary majority (Angermann

1962,p.407). This view was not yet, however, shared by the majority of

liberals. The most they envisaged was that ministers who had violated the

constitution should be liable to prosecution in a special constitutional court.

The liberal movement had a variety of different roots. South German con-

stitutional liberalism was largely informed by French and Belgian examples,

and derived its political claims from the philosophy of the Enlightenment

and in particular the theory of ‘natural rights’. Rotteck and Welcker`s Staats-

lexikon in many ways came to be the Bible of this variety of south German

constitutional liberalism. But there also existed, as in Great Britain, a strong

group basing its claim for constitutional rule on historical premises, namely

the alleged status of free communities in early medieval times. Constitu-

tionalism was considered by this group as nothing less than the overdue

recognition of the ancient rights of the free burghers by the princes. This

view was by no means radical; respect for traditional rights and hereditary

monarchical authority was part of their message. This position is perhaps

best represented by Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, who was a staunch

adherent of the English model; he praised the balance between the powers

of the Crown and of the people as an ideal solution. More radical was a

group of liberal writers who were mostly from east Prussia, notably Johann

Jacoby, a physician, who on grounds of ‘natural reason’ demanded the right

1 For an impressive description of early Liberalism see Langewiesche 1988b, pp. 12–27.

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