Voluntas (2015) 26:629–648

DOI 10.1007/s11266-014-9448-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Paradoxical Modernity of Civil Society: The

Weimar Republic, Democracy, and Social Homogeneity

Peter C. Weber

Published online: 8 March 2014

 International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2014

Abstract Civil society theory has rarely been applied to the demise of the Weimar
Republic. Emphasizing either the absence of intermediary organizations or the
negative nature of Germany’s associational life, current civil society research does
not integrate historical analysis with civil society theory. This essay roots civil
society in modernity and individualism, thus, linking its fading during the 1920s to
the inability of civil society theory to provide solutions to the complex problems of
Weimar society. Paradoxically, individualism and modernity, the precondition for a
liberal civil society, also paved the path to the homogenizing ideologies of the
twentieth century.

Résumé La théorie de la société civile a rarement été appliquée à la chute de la

République de Weimar. En soulignant soit l’absence d’organisations intermédiaires
soit la nature négative de la vie associative allemande, la recherche actuelle portant
sur la société civile n’intègre pas l’analyse historique à la théorie de la société civile.
Cet essai enracine la société civile dans la modernité et l’individualisme, reliant
ainsi l’affaiblissement de cette République pendant les années 1920 à l’incapacité
de la théorie de la société civile à proposer des solutions aux problèmes complexes
de la société de Weimar. Paradoxalement, l’individualisme et la modernité, con-
ditions préalables à une société civile libérale, ont également ouvert la voie aux
idéologies homogénéisantes du vingtième siècle.

Zusammenfassung Die Theorie der Bürgergesellschaft wird selten auf den Un-
tergang der Weimarer Republik angewandt. Gegenwärtige Forschungen zur
Bürgergesellschaft integrieren keine historische Analyse in die Theorie der
Bürgergesellschaft, sondern es wird entweder das Fehlen vermittelnder

P. C. Weber (&)
Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University, 550 West North Street, Suite 301,
Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA
e-mail: petweber@iupui.edu

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Organisationen oder der negative Charakter von Deutschlands Vereinsleben betont.

Der vorliegende Beitrag sieht die Wurzeln der Bürgergesellschaft in der Modernität
und dem Individualismus und begründet so ihren Verfall während der zwanziger
Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts mit der Unfähigkeit der Theorie der Bürgergesellschaft,
Lösungen für die komplexen Probleme der Weimarer Gesellschaft anzubieten.
Paradoxerweise ebneten Individualismus und Modernität, die Voraussetzungen für
eine freie Bürgergesellschaft, auch den Weg für die homogenisierenden Ideologien
des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Resumen La teorı́a de la sociedad civil se ha aplicado en raras ocasiones a la

desaparición de la República de Weimar. Haciendo hincapié en la ausencia de
organizaciones intermediarias o en la naturaleza negativa de la vida asociativa de
Alemania, la investigación sobre la sociedad civil actual no integra el análisis
histórico a la teorı́a de la sociedad civil. El presente ensayo sitúa las raı́ces de la
sociedad civil en la modernidad y el individualismo, vinculando de este modo su
debilitamiento durante los años 1920 a la incapacidad de la teorı́a de la sociedad
civil para proporcionar soluciones a los complejos problemas de la sociedad de
Weimar. Paradógicamente, el individualismo y la modernidad, la condición previa
para una sociedad civil liberal, también allanaron el camino a las ideologı́as ho-
mogeneizantes del siglo XX.

Keywords Civil Society
Weimar Republic
Social Homogeneity
Democracy

Contemporary debates on civil society often take the form of attempts to ‘‘nail jello
to a wall.’’ It is not far from the truth to describe disagreement as the only agreement
in civil society studies. To scholars of civil society and democratization processes,
this debate is of crucial relevance in the context of the failure of Germany’s inter-
war democracy. Contemporary approaches to civil society are unable to explain the
collapse of the Weimar Republic and, with few exceptions, historical investigations
of Germany’s troubled past are not informed by the multifaceted conceptualization
of civil society (for partial exceptions see: Kocka 2010).
The aim of this essay is to provide a new perspective on the demise of the
Weimar Republic by integrating civil society theory, and the literature on the
Germany’s inter-war political culture. The development of civil society cannot be
de-coupled from the notion of modernity.1 In fact, modernity refers to a specific
condition of the individual against the backdrop of broader societal dynamics that
are influenced by the more or less rapid transition from a traditional society (based
on ascribed identities) to a modern one rooted in achieved identities. Influenced by
the work of Peukert (1992), historians have paid attention to the ambiguity of
modernity and the contrasting solutions to the crisis of modernity, thus, challenging
conventional notions of crisis (McElligott 2009; Marshall 2010; Ziemann 2010;

1
Emblematically, Ernest Gellner authored two influential books on civil society and on nationalism with
a clear ‘‘modernist’’ approach (Gellner 1983, 1996).

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Canning 2010). Beyond the case of the Weimar Republic, historians have
increasingly used the concepts of modernity, modernism, and modernization as
fruitful lenses for an analysis of historical transformations.2
This essay, thus, points to the weakness of the civil society project in preserving
and defending democratic institutions against powerful political alternatives. This
study shows how during the Weimar Republic, a conceptualization of civil society
rooted in the acceptance of conflict and based on the notion of civility paved the
path to a very different conception of societal organization under the Nazis. In fact,
both civil society with its attempt to balance society’s competing interests and
‘‘sectarian’’ approaches with their emphasis on extra-political or pre-political
notions of unity and homogeneity reacted to the social fragmentation of modern
societies. Civil society theorists’ solutions to the tension between the private interest
and the common good could not solve the problems of a polarized society, and the
same roots of modernity that made the civil society project possible contributed to
its withering away during the 1920s.
In this essay, therefore, I first discuss the collapse of the Weimar Republic and
focus on the different attempts to link the electoral breakthrough of the National
Socialist Party (NSDAP) to the absence of voluntary associations or—alterna-
tively—to the existence of a ‘‘bad’’ civil society. Second, I review the theoretical
debates on civil society, emphasizing the common thrust of a multi-faceted and
multi-layered concept, and argue that in order to effectively support democracy,
civil society is based on and recognizes conflict. In so doing, I distinguish civil
society from a simple network of voluntary associations, because it institutionalizes
and mediates between conflicting interests. It is normatively defined as a sphere that
not only goes beyond economic self-interests but also (and perhaps more
fundamentally) breaks the exclusive boundaries of family, clan, tribe, and religious
community. Finally, drawing on this conceptualization of civil society, I contend
that although Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic witnessed a proliferation
of voluntary associations, these intermediary organizations––because developed
along the traditional ideological and religious fault lines of German society––
weakened Germany’s inter-war democracy and favored National Socialism’s
electoral successes.

The Crisis of the Weimar Republic

Political scientists have looked at the Weimar Republic as the paradigmatic

example of the weaknesses and failures of a liberal-democratic political order.
Therefore, it is not surprising that scholars have analyzed inter-war Germany
from the perspective of the Nazi seizure of power. As a result, historiography on
Weimar Germany has either focused on the ‘‘troubled birth’’ of the republic or

2
For example, the editors of the American Historical Review commissioned a special AHR Roundtable
(AHR Editors 2011) to discuss the question of modernity, and its merits and challenges.

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analyzed it from its ‘‘tragic death—part murder, part wasting sickness, part
suicide’’ (Gay 1961, p. xiii).
During the late 1940s and 1950s, West German politicians and historians
analyzed the ‘‘lessons of Weimar’’ and the structural problems of Germany’s first
democracy. Scholars pointed out short-term causes that led to the collapse of the
Republic, citing the weaknesses of the basic compromises at the origin of the
Republic, the proportional electoral system, the role of Prussia, and Article 48 of the
Constitution as crucial factors in the demise of Weimar’s democracy. Similarly
focused on immediate causes, during the late 1970s and 1980s, economic historians
have related the collapse of the Republic to economic factors in a debate centered on
the opposing poles of economic determinism and existence of political alternatives
(see reviews: Ferguson 1997; James 2009).
Since the 1960s, however, a new master narrative has explained the collapse of
the Weimar Republic as the outcome of a peculiar German historical development
(e.g., Dahrendorf 1979 [1967]; Wehler 1985 [1973]). In their works, both
Dahrendorf (1979 [1967]) and Wehler (1985 [1973]) emphasize the ways a
traditional society (in particular its powerful pre-industrial elites) reacted to the
socio-economic and political structural changes during the existence of the Empire.
The Sonderweg (special path) thesis rested on a set of political (nation-building
from above, limited parliamentarism, and weak party system during the Empire),
cultural (survival of traditional feudal, military, and cultural elites), and social
factors (the weakness of the middle classes). In particular, historians viewed the
failure of the bourgeois revolution in 1848 as the starting point of Germany’s
peculiar historical development (on the debate see: Möller 1984; Kocka 1988).
The Sonderweg thesis investigated the long-term causes of the Nazi regime by
detailing the divergence of the German path from the averred Anglo-Saxon
normality. These historians and sociologists attacked the allegedly uncritical and
apologetic position of the earlier generation of historians. In the late 1970s and early
1980s, however, a cohort of Anglo-Saxon historians—in particular Eley and
Blackbourn (1984)—criticized the Sonderweg paradigm by detailing the emergence
of a bourgeois culture in Imperial Germany and stressing the inconsistency of a
normal path to modernity. In a combined effort, which involved also early
proponents of the Sonderweg narrative such as Jürgen Kocka, historians have
investigated middle classes’ development, associational life, and political culture.
Two broad research endeavors—the Bielefeld Project and the Frankfurt Project—
developed competing theories defining the middle classes in Germany. Although
different definitions of middle classes led to contrasting periodization of German
middle classes’ development in the nineteenth century, both research projects
stressed significant societal changes in the decades preceding World War One (see
the review articles by: Sperber 1997; Haltern 1993). These transformations
heightened the appeal of radical nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century
(Eley 1991).
In the 1990s, however, emerged a new research framework that was influenced
by post-modern frames of reference. In light of Blackbourn’s and Eley’s
‘‘normalization’’ of German history, Peukert (1992) explained the emergence of
National Socialism by de-coupling modernity and progress. While during the 1980s

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and 1990s, the historiographical debate focused on the relationship between

National Socialism and the process of modernization, since the mid-1990s attention
has shifted from ‘‘social modernization’’ to modernity as an ‘‘examination of the
modern understanding of the human condition’’ (Dickinson 2004, p. 2). In his
influential works on the Weimar Republic, social policy, and National Socialism,
Peukert rooted the Third Reich in a pathological development of Germany’s pre-
1933 modernity. According to this new master narrative (which aimed to give the
Weimar Republic its own place in Germany’s history), Peukert (1992) described the
Weimar years as a ‘‘crisis of classical modernity’’ and National Socialism as one
possible outcome of the ‘‘pathologies of modernity.’’
Peukert’s path-breaking work had a far-reaching influence. Nonetheless, like an
insightful article by Peter Fritzsche (1996), it has recently been criticized for not
following its own call for Weimar’s historical autonomy. From different perspec-
tives, historians of political culture and bio-politics contend that both Fritzsche and
Peukert still limit their analyses to those negative developments that explain Nazi
successes (Dickinson 2004; Hong 2005). In particular, the recent works on political
culture offer a fresh perspective on Weimar’s political sphere (e.g., Canning 2010).
Both Peukert’s emphasis on the ‘‘crises of modernity’’ and the recent works on
Weimar’s pluralistic political culture offer a framework to a civil society approach
to the crisis of Germany’s inter-war democracy.
Oddly, civil society research has largely ignored the ‘‘lessons of Weimar.’’ While
a preponderant stream in the literature investigates the evolution of civil society as
part of intellectual history (e.g., Colas 1997; Taylor 1990; Hall and Trentmann
2005), orthodoxy in the field identifies civil society with a network of voluntary
associations. Inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2006
[1835–1840]), contemporary scholars describe a vital voluntary sector as the basic
prerequisite for a healthy democracy. With his bestselling academic works, Making
Democracy Work (1993) and Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam has popularized
a neo-Tocquevillian approach to the relationship between democracy and associ-
ational life that is centered on a collective notion of social capital. Voluntary
associations produce social connectedness, norms, networks, and social trust, thus,
facilitating cooperation, as well as the coordination of individual efforts, for the
public good.
Scholars have, however, criticized the tendency to equate civil society with
liberal democracy that undergirds this perspective. As a result, they have analyzed
the normative dimension of civil society, or in other words the nature of voluntary
associations required by a stable democracy. These authors (e.g., Edwards 2004)
describe civil society not only simply as a part of society but also as a kind of
society. The concepts of civility, politeness, and tolerance as foundational blocks of
civil society are, thus, the peculiar outcome of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century European historical development (Hall 1998; Gellner 1996). Conversely,
some authors have emphasized certain organizations’ negative externalities. By
recurring to violent means to foster their political, economic, and cultural/moral
goals, mafia-kind organizations as well as international terrorist groups disqualify
themselves from the civil society family. Scholars have, thus, coined the apparent
antinomy ‘‘bad civil society’’ (Chambers and Kopstein 2001) and pointed to the

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critical role of the political framework within which associational life develops and
acts (Berman 1997b).
Differences notwithstanding, these ‘‘bad’’ groups share several features that
challenge current conceptualizations of civil society (Schneider and Schneider
2003). Scholars have defined such groups as ‘‘segmented societies’’ (Paoli 2001)
and have pointed to the negative externalities that some forms of social capital may
produce for society at large (Fukuyama 2000; Portes and Landoldt 1996). Putnam
(2000) introduced the distinction between bonding social capital and bridging social
capital to pinpoint associational life’s positive and negative effects on society.
While bonding social capital is inward looking and strengthen exclusive ties and
homogeneous groups, bridging social capital is outward looking and establishes
connections across social, ethnic, and religious divides (pp. 21–24). This distinction,
therefore, allows scholars to distinguish between the positive and negative
externalities of voluntary associations, and thus points to the multifaceted impact
of social bonds on forms of societal organization.
Theoretical tensions, however, partially undermine the usefulness of the concept
of social capital and of the distinction between its bonding and bridging forms.
Scholars have pointed to the theoretical contradictions that are rooted in Putnam’s
adaptation of a sociological concept that had been developed for an individual level
of analysis to a collective one (Edwards and Foley 1998; Portes 2000).
Undoubtedly, Putnam has the merit to draw attention to the social bonds that
undergird the good working of democratic societies. The distinction between
bonding and bridging social capital is, however, not sufficiently clear, as Mafia-kind
organizations may, for example, cooperate with Russian organized-crime societies,
thus, also relying on a form of bridging social capital (Etzioni 2001).
From a historical perspective, scholars have investigated civil society as part of real
historical transformations in the context of the history of the middle classes and their
associations; in Germany, this approach is linked to the Sonderweg debate. With the
exception of the work on European (and specifically German) middle classes (e.g.,
Gall 1975), historians who have used the concept of civil society have fallen short of
closing the gap between theory and empirical reality (Trentmann 2003).
Not surprisingly, critics have leveled cutting remarks at the concept of civil society
itself and at its uncritical and un-historical use. The close conceptual relationship
between civil society and liberalism has led to a questioning of the historical
usefulness of the civil society concept over older concepts such as democratization
(Kumar 1993). More pointedly, historians of the middle classes have been criticized
for the tendency to associate a particular segment of society with the ideological
underpinnings of a normative concept. As an ideology or doctrine related to
democracy, scholars who identify civil society with an empirical part of society such
as the middle class situate these classes ‘‘in the context of a liberal-democratic political
system … handing them functions within that system’’ crucial to the establishment of
the system itself (Broman 2002, pp. 4–5; see also: Trentmann 2003).
By stressing the direct relationship between voluntary associations and democ-
racy, neo-Tocquevillian orthodoxy, thus, links the collapse of the Weimar Republic
to a weak—or non-existent—civil society. Anticipating a theme that the ‘‘Putnam
school’’ would later popularize, mass society critics had already explained in the

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1950s the demise of the Republic in neo-Tocquevillian terms. By drawing on Emile

Durkheim, Arendt (1973 [19651]) and Kornhauser (1959) argued that mass
society—a product of modernization and industrialization—broke the links between
individuals and estranged citizens from one another. The collapse of intermediary
associations left the individual without links in society, and this anomic individual
eventually became the disillusioned elector of the Nazi party.
The historiography on Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, however,
does not empirically support this analysis. Historical research unequivocally details
the blossoming of organizational life in Germany no later than the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Gymnastic societies, singing clubs, book clubs, and other groups
developed in spite of draconian laws prohibiting and restricting freedom of
association, academia, and the press. By the turn of the twentieth century, Germans’
(and more generally Europeans’) fascination with associations, clubs, and frater-
nities reached levels that led contemporaries to speak of an ‘‘associational mania’’
(see: Nipperdey 1972; Sperber 2004; Hoffmann 2006).
By drawing on this literature, Berman (1997a; cf. Reiter 2009) argues that
associational life in nineteenth-century Germany developed in reaction to the
inability or unwillingness of political institutions to address citizens’ needs.
However, this associational boom ‘‘generally occurred within rather than across
group lines’’ and further undermined political institutions. This fragmented but
highly organized civil society favored the breakthrough of National Socialism. The
dense network of associations provided Nazi activists with organizational skills, and
these networks allowed the NSDAP to penetrate all sectors of society. Berman’s
suggestion that, by potentially deepening social cleavages and thus undermining the
stability of democratic regimes, civil society becomes an alternative to politics in
the presence of weak political structures and institutions opened a debate on the
‘‘right’’ nature of civil society organizations. This led scholars to re-introduce the
concept of civility in order to distinguish between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ civil society
organizations (e.g., Chambers and Kopstein 2001; Anheier 2007). In relation to
Weimar, Bösch (2005) contends that under the influence of the Revolution and the
Versailles Treaty during the 1920s associational life increasingly fostered a
‘‘militant sociability’’ (militante Geselligkeit). Associated with masculinity and used
as a substitute for military service, militant sociability played a crucial role in the
development of a bourgeois associational life on the right of the German
Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, or DDP) (see also: Gerwarth
2008; Reichardt 2005; Weisbrod 2001).
From a different perspective, Riley (2010) re-conceptualizes the relationship
between civil society, democracy, and fascism. Riley integrates the Tocquevillian
approach with a focus on the political framework through Antonio Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony. In this way, he contends that the development of civil society
in the late nineteenth century demanded democracy but undermined liberal
institutions due to the interlinked failures of intra-class-, inter-class-, and counter-
hegemony. Although criticizing Berman, Riley followed her lead by linking the
emergence of fascism in inter-war Europe to the tension resulting from voluntary
associations’ pressures for democracy on relatively closed and authoritarian

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political institutions. In this context, civil society undermines the stability of weak
democratic regimes.
Recently, in a further refinement of the growing literature on the ‘‘dark side’’ of
social capital and civil society, scholars have shown that a rich network of clubs and
associations can undermine a functioning democracy. Relying on data from interwar
city directories, Satyanath et al. (2013) link the speed of Nazi mobilization to the
density of civic associations. Most interestingly, they find that both bonding and
bridging social capital have a positive, significant relationship to higher levels of
membership entry in the Nazi party (pp. 35–40). This study, thus, shows that the
negative effect of social capital goes beyond the narrow case of terrorist groups or
Mafia-like organizations. Rather, civic associations’ density can contribute to the
collapse of a democratic system.
Undoubtedly, these studies have the merit to offer a more nuanced understanding
of associational dynamics and to warn against overly optimistic Tocquevillian
notions of civil society. By focusing on associational structures, their outlook, and
their relation to political institutions, however, these scholars tend to equate civil
society with associational life. In the case of Berman, this equation leads to a
dropping of the ‘‘civil’’ in favor of the socio-political structure. By contrast, scholars
emphasizing the ‘‘nature’’ of associations establish (artificial) criteria of exclusion,
which often are based more on the rhetoric than on the practice of violence
(Ziemann 2003). These studies, therefore, fall short of closing the gap between
theoretical conceptualizations and empirical realities. In particular, these scholars
have not analyzed the complex processes by which German elites developed
alternative and contrasting forms of societal organizations, which gradually rejected
the Tocquevillian balance between democracy, individualism, and associational life.
Conceptually, with its attention to the tension between private interest and the
common good, civil society offers a theoretical framework for the understanding of
the social dynamics of Germany’s contentious inter-war society. The specific social
context of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic led contemporaries to
analyze—and perhaps exaggerate—the tension between private interest and the
common good. The inability of conceptually as well as practically solving this
tension eventually contributed to tore apart Weimar society. Civil society, a product
of modernity, paved the path in the 1920s to the homogenizing project of the
‘‘people’s community’’ (Volksgemeinschaft), the pathological product of modernity.

Civil Society: An Ambiguous and Contested Concept

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel opened the modern debate on civil
society by conceptually separating civil society and political society. Before and
after Hegel, however, all major theorists of civil society have addressed the tension
between private interest and the public good. These debates have focused on the
kind of social individuals, social interactions, and organizations needed to establish,
maintain, or reinforce a liberal state. In other words, these theorists were concerned
with the ways self-interested men could participate in public debates over political

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matters and still identify with the common good. The different solutions to this
debate provide a useful framework for the understanding of Weimar’s tragic fate.
In ancient Greece and Rome, civil society was equated to political society (hence,
not recognizing forms of resistance against power). The historical roots of the
modern concept of civil society can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In Western
Europe, the competition between spiritual and secular centers of power, the
emergence of the feudal system, and the existence of communes and cities with their
privileges established some structural limits to centralizing nuclei of power. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emergence of the absolute state and
natural law led theorists to find new ways to challenge the legitimacy of traditional
sources of political authority. Locke (1980 [1690]) juxtaposed civil society to a state
of nature. In contrast, however, to the devastation pictured by Thomas Hobbes,
Locke argued that society existed before government and thus was formed by the
enjoyment of natural rights (property) granted by God. Society as pre-political or
extra-political and rooted in the economy was, therefore, not limited by spiritual or
political authority.
With the fragmentation of Christianity in the wake of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation, civil society was conceptualized in response to deep concerns
about pluralism and the dangers of sectarianism. As a reaction to religious wars,
theorists advocated a clear separation of politics from religion and the need for a
distinctive private sphere, where religious differences had to be relegated. Smith
(2003 [2003], pp. 995–1028) argued that religious zeal was dangerous if only few
big sects existed in society and hence suggested that only the existence of many
small sects could ensure that none would dominate. In his works on moral
philosophy and political economy, Smith (1976 [1756]) identified moral principles
such as sympathy and fellow-feeling as counterbalances to self-interest, thus,
ordering society and ensuring its stability and civility. The tendency to sympathize
with those familiar to us underlined, however, the dangers of factionalism and
sectarianism. This tension could be solved only through the ‘‘impartial spectator,’’
which emphasized the necessity of observing actions from outside and thus
provided the prerequisite for the development of the concepts of civility and moral
compass.
The American and French revolutions changed significantly the framework of the
civil society discourse. The juxtaposition between state of nature and political (civil)
society had responded to the need of conceptualizing the possibilities of resistance
to political authority, whereas the Scottish moral philosophers’ emphasis on
‘‘civility,’’ ‘‘sympathy,’’ and similar principles had been part of a debate on the
types of social individuals and social relations needed to balance the consequences
of a market society. The dramatic enlargement of the polity following the
democratic revolutions shifted the focus to ways in which expanded political
participation could be integrated, mediated, and transferred to political institutions
without threatening political as well social stability (Terrier and Wagner 2006a).
Hegel’s (1988 [1830]) conception evolved in response to the French Revolution,
which in his view had delegitimized the contractual notion of government and
demonstrated the fallacy of the principle of individual will. In civil society, persons
are connected in a developed totality through a ‘‘system of wants,’’ where the

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division of labor ‘‘limit[s] each person to a single kind of technical skills, and thus
produce[s] more unconditional dependence on the social system’’ (p. 133).
Nonetheless, the individual constantly and inevitably falls for egoistic self-interests,
thus, risking to tear apart society. Only the state and an impartial cast of professional
bureaucrats could achieve the unity of civil society and an abstract public interest.
Through constitutional law, the state ‘‘protects the family and guides civil society,’’
acting as a mediator between particular interests and universal will (pp. 138–149).
In short, the state ensures that civil society remains civil.
By blending citizen and bourgeois, classical republicanism had traditionally
emphasized the convergence of political participation and economic self-interest in
the ideal independent man. In contrast, Marx (1972 [1843]) shifted the emphasis to
economic self-interest. Under capitalism, civil society became a sphere of freedom
for few based on the exclusion of many. The French Revolution dissolved the old
civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) but granted only a limited degree of
freedom. Contemporarily, the individual suffered a split of identity: man, as abstract
citizen in politics, was separated from man as an egoistic and materialistic
individual in civil society. According to Marx, full human emancipation required
the overcoming of this separation and the recognition of personal forces as social
forces. In a materialistic vision of history, the division of labor implies an unequal
distribution among individuals of material and spiritual activities as well as ‘‘of
labour and its products, hence property’’ (Marx and Engels 1972 [1845–1846]
p. 159), produces a ‘‘cleavage … between particular and common interest,’’ and (out
of this contradiction) forms the state. However, the state is only ‘‘illusory communal
life … in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among each
other’’ (Marx and Engels 1972 [1845–1846], p. 160). The proletariat—‘‘a class in
civil society which is not a class of civil society’’—historically can represent the
whole society, bring forward universal human emancipation and hence successfully
carry out the revolution. The revolution is possible when its objective conditions are
at hand and the proletariat, in order to develop its ‘‘universal character,’’ has taken
consciousness of itself and of its history (Marx 1972 [1844], pp. 62–65).
On the other extreme of the theoretical reflection, the American experience
shaped the reception of classical republicanism and liberal Enlightenment. In
Federalist No. 10, Madison (1787) advanced a pragmatic solution to the limits of
classical republicanism. In order to contain factionalism and in the impossibility to
address its causes, Madison argued that only large nations could possibly control the
effects of factionalism, thus, criticizing classical republicanism’s emphasis on small
republics.
Like Madison, Tocqueville (2006 [1835–1840]) also recognized the dangers of
factions. Associations are not only voluntary and publicly oriented, but their actions
are also driven by ‘‘certain manners.’’ In contrast to America, European
organizations developed as ‘‘weapons’’ for political conflict (pp. 193–195). From
a political perspective, Tocqueville discussed associations in relation to the tensions
between majority and minority. Universal suffrage mitigated the ‘‘excesses of
political association’’ in America, because ‘‘no party can reasonably claim to
represent those who have not voted at all’’ (p. 194). While civil associations
facilitated political associations, because men become familiar in the former with

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‘‘the principle of association,’’ they come together—Tocqueville argued—in great

numbers only in political associations. Therefore, men learned to ‘‘subordinate to
the common action’’ in political associations. Associations as ‘‘schools of
democracy’’ ensure the equilibrium of society balancing the individualist tendencies
of democracy (p. 522). By identifying associations as schools of democracy where
the self-interested individual learns to compromise, Tocqueville equated civil
society with the sphere of voluntary associations. Associations teach members to
mediate between different interests and therefore to restrain their egoistical self-
interests. Associations provide those levels of civility—‘‘self-interest properly
understood’’—that keep democracies from being torn apart by individualism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the use of the term ‘‘civil society’’ lapsed.
Democratization and industrialization transformed society. In a new shift, the debate
moved from the ‘‘atomized society’’ (Smith) and polity as multitude of different
individuals (Locke), to a search for new bonds other than pure interest that were
able to hold society together. ‘‘Class consciousness’’ (Marxism), nationalism, and
sociological theories such as Emile Durkheim’s ‘‘mechanical solidarity’’ and
Ferdinand Tönnies’s juxtaposition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellshaft dominated the
political discourse (Terrier and Wagner 2006b).
Durkheim (1997 [1893]; see also: Tönnies 2001 [1887]) investigated the intrinsic
problem of modern industrialized societies, i.e., the tensions between individual
freedom and the social bonds necessary for the survival of the system. Solidarity is
the affective and psychological bond that ties the individual to the social group.
However, the French sociologist was aware that organic solidarity is extremely
labile and that the division of labor can produce ‘‘different or even opposite’’ results.
Durkheim contended that since state and family could support the moral integration
of the individual in industrialized societies, intermediate institutions had to create
equilibrium and prevent the atomization that a market society might create
(Durkheim 1997 [1893], pp. 291–294). Organic solidarity, where the individual is
integrated in the social group, prevents anomie from emerging, since ‘‘we may say a
priori that a state of anomie is impossible wherever organs solidly linked to one
another are in sufficient contact, and in sufficiently lengthy contact’’ (Durkheim
1997 [1893], pp. 304–308).
Civil society, however, cannot be reduced to simple self-organization, as civil
society allows differences and accepts and encourages them within limits. Civil
society comprises a set of institutions and ‘‘a pattern and standard of judgment.’’
Edward Shils (1997) defines the practices of this political conduct ‘‘civil politics’’
and the ethos of it ‘‘civility.’’ Civil politics operate with a constant concern for the
common good. In cases of conflict, the civic person ‘‘thinks primarily of the civil
society as the object of his obligations, not the members of his family, or his village,
or his party or of his ethnic group or his social class, or his occupation’’ (p. 72).
Since conflict cannot be avoided in large differentiated society, civility balances
‘‘between conflicting demands and conflicting interests’’ (p. 76). Only civility
makes pluralistic societies possible and distinguishes them from a Hobbesnian
‘‘bellum omnium contra omnes.’’
The relationship between the civil society debate that is centered on the tension
between private interest and common good and liberal democracy is based on a

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conceptualization of civility as the recognition of differences and conflicts. Civil

society is closely related to the process of modernization, because the ‘‘virtue of
civility’’ breaks the exclusive ties of family, tribe, and religion. Civil society is
contrasted to other forms of society such as ‘‘segmentary communities’’ because, as
Gellner (1996) eloquently stresses, ‘‘Traditional man can sometimes escape the
tyranny of kings, but only at the cost of falling under the tyranny of cousins, and
ritual’’ (p. 7). The ‘‘modular man’’ is, therefore, a fundamental pre-condition for
civil society, because he is
capable of combining into effective associations and institutions, without these
being total, many-stranded, underwritten by ritual and made stable through
being linked to a whole inside set of relationships, all these things being tied in
with each other and so immobilized. (pp. 99–100)
Against the background of the disruptive forces of industrialization, social
classes, and claims for participation of previously excluded groups, political
theorists and sociologists struggled with principles able to keep societies together.
There was no place left for a concept of civil society as a sphere of diverse
individuals. After the Civil War and during the slow liberalization in European
nation-states, associationalism grew exponentially. If earlier associations had a dual
purpose—improvement of virtue and private interest—the new associations
allegedly gave voice only to particular interests and to previously marginalized
groups, thus, challenging traditional moral imperatives (and the notions of
sociability and bürgerlichkeit associated with voluntary organizations) (Hoffmann
2006; Kocka 1995). While the bourgeoisie in Germany had supported until the
nineteenth century, the liberal social Erwartungsmodell of a class-less bürgerliche
Gesellschaft (intended as civil society or citoyen society), by the last quarter of the
century middle classes reframed their idea of a civil society into a class-based
bürgerliche Gesellschaft (an exclusionary bourgeois society) (Gall 1975). Further-
more, social democratization and political diversification of associational life
encouraged the spread of a radical nationalism as the only force able to keep society
together (Eley 1991). The inability of political leaders to integrate nationalities and
social classes explains the disappearance of the concept of civil society in the late
nineteenth century, as the exclusionary politics of the period caused not only the
disappearance of the concept but also the violent conflicts of the twentieth century.

The Withering Away of Civil Society and the Weimar Republic

Although retreating from his earlier positions in the Sonderweg debate, Kocka has
argued that when fundamental questions about nation-state building, parliamentar-
ization, and industrialization have to be addressed in the same period (as in Imperial
Germany), the democratization process faces serious challenges. In an influential
essay published in 1966, Lepsius (1973 [1966]) criticized similar democratization
studies and approaches by noting the surprising stability of Germany’s political
system between 1870 and 1928. According to Lepsius, this stability stemmed from
the linkage between major political parties and specific socio-cultural milieus.

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All of Germany’s political parties (Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, and

Catholics) were rooted in specific socio-moral milieus that surfaced, with the
exception of the socialist one, before the foundation of the Reich. Each subculture
developed its own network of voluntary and self-help organizations, trade unions,
press, and eventually political parties. Voting behavior remained, thus, consistent
over time (Falter 1992). Although Lepsius’s approach has been criticized for its
rigidity (e.g., Anderson 2000, pp. 101–133, pp. 416–419), his interpretive
framework has remained substantially unchallenged.
Milieu formation fragmented and polarized German society at the turn of the
twentieth century in the wake of and in reaction to the processes of democratization,
parliamentarism, and industrialization. Even the process of modernization, which
accompanies democratization in the forms of rationalization and bureaucratization,
did not break the exclusive ties of subcultures. On the contrary, the Weimar
Republic, which is characterized in Peukert’s account by an accelerated process of
modernization, consolidated milieus (Walter and Matthiesen 1997, pp. 47–48) and
opened a ‘‘civil war of memories’’ (Gerwarth 2006, p. 6) in which the right, the
republicans, political Catholicism, and the extreme left developed their own master-
narratives of Weimar’s place in history, hence stressing ‘‘the lack of any basic
consensus about the past, present and future of the German state and society’’
(Gerwarth 2006, p. 7).
Divided along the traditional confessional and political fault lines of German
society, associational life was not only unable to bridge the increasing gap between
socio-economic individualism and communitarian values, but also tended to
increase these tensions because fragmented along milieu-lines. Voluntary associ-
ations, therefore, replicated and hardened German society’s traditional cleavage
lines; hence, they could not play the positive, Tocquevillian role of ‘‘schools of
democracy.’’
Similarly, the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary system reinforced the perception
that political parties—as expression of different socio-moral milieus—represented
only the narrow (economic, social, and religious) self-interest of different groups
within German society. The emergence of ‘‘interest politics’’ in the late 1920s, the
inability of the liberal movement to bridge its internal division between Deutsche
Demokratische Partei and German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, or DVP),
and the increasing emphasis on nationalism as the only electoral strategy able to
keep its constituencies from falling apart into their particular socio-economic
interests reinforced both criticism of the parliamentary system as fragmented into a
narrow minded economic self-interest and the longing for a national community
able to overcome these divisions (Jones 1988).
The Weimar Republic lost its legitimacy and therefore could hardly play the role
of the Hegelian protector of civil society. In fact, the proportional electoral system
and party politics appeared to enhance societal fragmentation. Because with the
proportional system, no single party was able to form a strong majority, the liberal
economist Bonn (1924) perceptively described Germany’s parliament as in a
‘‘permanent deadlock’’ and a ‘‘never-ceasing haggling over economic points and a
preponderance of purely materialistic interests,’’ which discredited these institutions
‘‘among the men of action and the dreamers of dreams’’ (pp. 313–314). This

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intermingling of political parties and economic interests was caused—Germany’s

first post-1945 president, Heuss (1926) asserted—by the proportional system. In
contrast to a two-party system, which was able to integrate all tendencies and
factions, doctrinism and multitude characterized Germany’s system of representa-
tion. As a result, Germany’s political society had, ‘‘unconsciously, sacrificed the
system of rule to the search for ideal justice’’ (pp. 157–158). Hence, the proportional
system as a technique designed to assess the will of the people was transformed into
a tool fragmenting this will and thus jamming the political system.
For democrats, political discourse lacked the basic common ground necessary for
the survival of the Republic (Kirchheimer 1969 [1930]). Already during the
constitutional debates of the spring of 1919, Weber (1994 [1919]) and Meinecke
(1919) consistently argued in favor of a strong head of state as a necessary counter-
force to the fragmentation of the party-dominated parliament. For these old
Wilhelmine liberals, a strong executive in the hands of a president had to be
protected from fluctuating parliamentary majorities. By analyzing Germany’s
critical political situation after the war, Max Weber described an omnipotent
bureaucracy in ‘‘all forms of domination from the factory to army and public
administration’’ (Weber 1978 [1917], p. 1400) and a consequent lack of direction in
Germany’s policies (Weber 1946 [1918], pp. 111–115). He could solve the inner
tension between individuality and rationality only by attributing a sort of
charismatic authority to the politician able to survive the struggle for power inside
mass parties and the political system (Weber 1978 [1917], pp. 1447–1451).
Nonetheless, aware of the risks of a dictatorship in a Bolshevik or fascist style,
Meinecke (1925) posed it as the German task to find a ‘‘trust dictatorship’’ able to
solve a common European problem.
Similarly, a conservative like Schmitt (1988 [1923]; see also: Schmitt 2007
[1927]) described political parties as interest factions striving for political power.
Based on openness and discussion, parliamentarism—Schmitt observed—con-
tradicted mass democracy, which has made argumentative public discussion ‘‘empty
and trivial formality’’ (p. 50). Societies were an integrated unity of identical
individuals, and therefore, the restoration of the unity between rulers and ruled was
possible only if the former were inspired by what represented the identity of the
collectivity. Schmitt’s emphasis on legitimization of power by acclamation
represents a justification of authoritarian rule based on social homogeneity.
Schmitt’s analysis had a far-reaching influence on right-wing and conservative
scholars. Emblematically, Schmitt was involved in an open polemic with the most
original social democratic thinker of the time, Hermann Heller. Germany’s first
school of public affairs, the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German School of
Politics), became the venue of this theoretical debate. Heller (1928) contested
Schmitt’s definition of the parliament as the locus of public discussion and of the
search for truth through the open competition of opinion (p. 40). He asserted that
parliaments embodied ‘‘the belief in the existence of a common discussion ground
and, with it, the possibility of fair play with the opponent in domestic politics, with
whom it is deemed possible to reach an agreement by eliminating naked violence’’
(p. 40). The degree of a unity and of the solidity of the representatives’ position
depended on the level of social homogeneity, and below a certain level—Heller

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wryly concluded—, the democratic formation of unity was not possible any more
(p. 40). Both Schmitt and Heller recognized the contradictions between mass
democracy and civil society. They investigated civil society’s capacity to
incorporate differences, contrasts, and conflicts, and—conversely—pointed to the
basic degree of social homogeneity needed for the working of a democratic, civil
society. As a solution to this contradiction, however, Schmitt theoretically
conceptualized the end of a liberal civil society and personally joined the National
Socialist movement.
As Mergel (2005) has recently suggested, the fragmentation of German society at
the time did not overshadow a fundamental agreement across the ideological
spectrum that went beyond political differences. The German population overloaded
the Weimar Republic with expectations. The inability of politics to represent and
guide the people and to create a utopian Gemeinschaft led to a search for a
charismatic leader able to overcome the internal divisiveness of German society. In
a way that the Weimar Republic could not, this charismatic leader was to create the
mythical ‘‘people’s community’’ that—more in propaganda than in reality—had
characterized the first years of the Great War.
Kershaw (2000) emphasizes ‘‘a specifically German political culture’’ that
allowed National Socialism’s roots to grow.
The ways in which nationalism developed in the late nineteenth-century
Germany … provided the set of ideas that, often in distorted—even
perverted—form, offered the potential for Nazism’s post-war appeal. (p. 75)
The concept of Volk required ‘‘no dramatization of individual rights,’’ since
‘‘The folk is conceived as a prepolitical essence; the individual is subsumed under
this collectivity on the basis of the identity ascribed to his properties’’ (Lepsius
2004, p. 487). The Volk is, therefore, constitutionally indifferent and the
submission of the individual to the superior, pre-political, order of the Volk can
legitimize limitation of individual freedoms and rights as well as both traditional
and charismatic rule.
In the fragmented and crises-ridden Weimar Republic, the völkisch heroic leader
could be juxtaposed to the leaderless democracy. Although the utopian ideal of the
Volksgemeinschaft may have increased internal tensions and conflicts by appealing
to many different socio-economic groups and creating extremely high expectations
(Föllmer 2005), National Socialism’s growth can be seen as a ‘‘political offensive
undertaken against the republic in the name of the national people’s community, or
Volksgemeinschaft’’ (Fritzsche 2008, pp. 60–61).
The delegitimization of the parliamentary system and the fragmentation of
associational life in relatively homogeneous but separated milieus deprived civil
society of intermediate venues (either associations or representative institutions)
able to institutionalize conflict and hence mediate between contrasting interests.
Nationalism’s emphasis on social homogeneity, the elevation of the state to a
‘‘moral project,’’ and the increasing appeal of a charismatic leadership bypassed
existing political institutions and created new channels of power that consciously
avoided contrasting interests.

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Conclusion

In the wake of the social, political, economic, and religious transformations of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, civil society emerged as a debate rather than
as a historical reality over configurations of social relations and political forms. In
other words, civil society ‘‘is a way of addressing the political problématique of
modernity’’ (Terrier and Wagner 2006c, p. 231). By tackling specific problems, civil
society theorists have suggested different solutions to the tension between private
interest and the common good.
The ideal of the independent political and economic men, the notion of a self-
regulating market, and the moral principle of sympathy that had played a crucial role in
carving out a sphere of autonomy against the backdrop of absolute monarchies lost their
appeal in the wake of the political disruptions following the democratic revolutions.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, alternative solutions emerged, aiming not
anymore to open venues of direct political participation for the independent self-
conscious, political man but rather to guarantee some limited forms of participation
(through voluntary or political intermediary institutions) without destabilizing the
precarious social order. Hegel’s bureaucratic state (as the embodiment of an abstract
common good) and Tocqueville’s voluntary associations (as the concrete locus of
mediation and compromise between different interests) appear as the two opposing
poles of the debate. Civil society as the recognition of conflicts and differences,
however, paved the way at the turn of the century to new concepts—the nation, the Volk,
the Volksgemeinschaft—that provided pre-political or extra-political notions of unity
and homogeneity that were able to overcome the social tensions of a modern society.
Scholars have explained the collapse of the Weimar Republic either by stressing
the weakness or the absence of intermediary organizations, the negative nature of
existing voluntary associations, or the inability or unwillingness of political
institutions to incorporate the democratic pressures expressed by the proliferation of
associational life. In Germany, the longing for ‘‘wholeness’’ and the fragmentation
of society into close-knit socio-moral milieus led to expectations of unity that were
shared across political and social cleavage lines. Civil society is based on a
multiplicity of conflicts crisscrossing each other, thus, preventing cleavages along
one axis. The emergence of close-knit groups radicalized conflicts and thwarted the
ability of these conflicts to exercise a positive social function (Coser 1956,
pp. 87–110). National Socialists’ activism and rhetoric of an idealized Volksgeme-
inschaft increasingly appealed to broader sections of Germany’s population during
the 1920s. Social milieus and longing for unity were not in contradiction but rather
were two sides of modernity. Both, however, epitomized the disappearance of civil
society as the recognition of diversity and conflict.

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