Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Hegel’s account of both civil society and the state was replete with details, many of them drawn from Prussia where he taught, and especially from the Allgemeine Landrecht of 1794 that served as its constitution. But the whole schema was also highly abstract. This combination was typical of all his writing and thinking, and is responsible for some of the famous difficulty of reading him. One reason he did not shy away from abstraction was that he believed it to be a defining quality of the world no less than of thought. His whole intellectual project was devoted on one level to showing that behind all the concrete phenomena of existence as we encounter them there stand abstract ideas and relationships without which we could not bring them to mind (I cannot know the book in my hand as particular thing without simultaneously conceiving the “thing” as a general notion applicable to many other ones); this is one ground out of which Hegel developed the “idealism” that was the essence of his philosophy. As we act in the world we employ our capacity of abstracting from the particular things and circumstances in which we find ourselves in order to alter them and make them more amenable to our goals. An essential instance of this is the human manner of fulfilling needs in civil society. Unlike animals who satisfy their wants with what nature provides, humans construct a “system of needs,” a structure of action and market exchange that effects both “the multiplications of needs and [of the] means of satisfying them.” Abstraction is the necessary ground of this multiplication, since only by means of it can diverse goods be seen as exchangeable and techniques developed in one context be extended to others. The whole of life takes on an altered character as a result: “When needs and means become abstract in quality … abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to one another.” Such a result had negative dimensions to be sure, but it is abstraction that makes it possible to bring the diverse totality of needs, means, and relations together into a single whole, an overall system of relations that is “concrete, i.e. social.”46

  Hegel did not use the term “network” to describe this system of needs and means, but he found particular interest in the writings of economists whose analysis of exchange relations showed the mass of apparently unrelated actions through which people exchange objects and services to be a series of “chains of activity all leading back to the same point,” and he described the “mutual interlocking of particulars” that subjects individuals to laws operative throughout the system, as a sign that the rationality which found higher expression in the state was already at work on some level here.47 Hegel gave little direct attention to money as the instrument through which all these connections are established, but he did note that it provided the universal criterion of value, making it a basis for the abstraction that makes an integrated social life on a large scale possible. Simmel would draw greatly on Hegel in his later elaboration of the “philosophy of money.” There is reason to regard Hegel as having achieved an important insight into the nature of modernity precisely through his attention to the simultaneously abstract and concrete qualities of modern social relations. As noted in Chapter 1, the media that make the structures we are calling networks of means possible, and regulate flows along them, must be at once abstract and concrete, in order to permit comparisons and exchanges of disparate goods while also allowing specific persons to possess and employ the tokens that represent them. Despite the abstract considerations that operate when people establish relations through such networks, the objects the media represent are concrete ones, involving specific articles of trade, taxes or government operations, or books and newspapers. Using Hegelian language one might call networks of means “concretized abstractions,” in which the first term takes on a higher valence as the networks expand and thicken. One way to characterize the comparisons we have been making here between English, French, and German conditions, is in terms of the particular mix of concreteness and abstraction that obtained in each place. That Germany was the most abstract was what Christoph Wieland recognized in characterizing writers active in spreading Enlightenment as the “sole men of the nation,” the only ones whose sphere of activity was the country as a whole, and Christian Garve in diagnosing their condition as one of Einsamkeit, loneliness.

  Hegel recognized the abstract quality of his analysis in a second way, namely in connection with his presentation of the state as able to bring people toward the higher and “universal” principles of reason and humanity, even as their lives in civil society draw them toward self-centeredness and the immorality of using others as means for their ends. That the very same individuals appear to themselves and others in both guises seemed to him a sign that the modern state (including the civil society that was a part of it) had a special importance for humanity: “The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet, at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.”48 Marx, who would at first be drawn to Hegel precisely because he offered a way to root these abstract human qualities in actual life, would later reject Hegel’s kind of abstract analysis as the root of the delusions idealism generated, seeking to replace them through a concrete and materialist understanding of history.

  But Hegel was not so naive about his portrayal of the state’s ability to resolve the dilemmas of everyday social existence as some of his formulations may suggest. Because he recognized that society was a realm of egotism where class division and poverty created misery and conflict, he saw the attempt to show that there was something essentially rational in the state as a challenge he could not decline, since it was his philosophic task to show that the whole world was subject to being understood in the terms reason provided. But it was the hardest of the challenges that faced him, as he declared by famously invoking the classical tag “Hic Rhodus, hic saltus” – here is Rhodes, jump here, now is the time to show that you can do what you boast you can – in the preface to his book. The treatise was “nothing other than the endeavor [italics added, but the emphasis is already there] to apprehend and portray the state as something inherently rational.” Philosophy could reconcile the contradictory principles of society and the state, but only in thought, not in reality: by comparison with what Goethe called the green of “life’s golden tree,” philosophy’s theory is “gray in gray”; it provides reconciliation “in the ideal, not the actual world.” The consequence, as he recognized elsewhere, was that the typical condition of moderns like himself, drawn to ideal resolutions that could not be brought to realization, was not satisfaction, but “vexation.”49 Hegel knew full well that the resolution he proposed to effect between the categories of individuality and universality, egotism and devotion to the social whole, self-centeredness and moral uprightness, was only an abstract one.

  To take such a position, at once attributing to thought and thinkers great power in the world and recognizing that in fact their means were abstract and thus very limited, marked Hegel as the early Bildungsbürger he was, given an important position as part of a state apparatus that needed such people as he to do its work, but in the end dependent on its power and threatened with unhappiness and frustration at moments when it failed to live up to the hopes they invested in it. It is clear that this discord between everyday existence and the aspirations for it embodied in Kultur and Bürgerlichkeit affected other educated state servants too, since, as noted above, they complained about the dreary and “mechanical” quality of their actual work. Hegel insisted that those who, unlike himself, preferred to measure the state against some ideal vision of what it should be, opened themselves up to deeper disappointments even than his own. But the advantage brought by “the peace with the world which knowledge [that is, his own kind of philosophical understanding] supplies” was only “less chill” – not even more warmth.50 Hegel’s project of reconciling himself to the world by way of philosophical abstractions that even he reco
gnized as cold and existentially unsatisfying was responsible for some of the elements in his thinking that seem least persuasive to us today, as they already did to others in his time, but it was this same intellectual enterprise that provided him with a perspective from which to grasp the important – and by no means wholly positive – role played by abstract and distant relations in both modernity and bourgeois life.

  Many similar themes, but organized to quite a different end, can be found in the second German writer who demands our attention now, the publicist and critic W. H. Riehl, whose book Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, published in 1851, was often reprinted. Riehl drew on Hegel, but unlike the philosopher he was a self-conscious conservative, a defender of the old order of Stände, and an advocate of trying to preserve its character under modern conditions. This made him an enemy of some of the things Hegel regarded as most positive in modern life, notably the bureaucracy that the latter made the vehicle of reconciliation between society and the state. But Riehl also recognized that powerful and in some ways positive forces of change were at work in his time, and that the urban middle classes were the source of some of them. The most-often quoted sentences from his book declare that in his age the Bürgertum possessed “prevailing material and moral power,” and that “the whole age bears a bürgerliche character.” Many readers have taken bürgerlich to mean simply bourgeois, and we will see that such a rendering conveys a part of what Riehl had in mind. But in 1851 the French word had not yet acquired the general applicability it later came to possess, and Riehl himself specifically distinguished between it and the German variant when he pointed out (as noted above) that revolutionaries in his own country named their enemies “bourgeois,” not Bürger, because the history of the July Monarchy gave the French word an association with reaction or resistance to change. The German term had (as yet) no such connotation, and could not be used in the same way, since those it named had no political power on a national scale.51

  Although well aware that much middle-class activity was economic, Riehl identified what marked Bürger off from other social groups in quite different terms; what distinguished them was that they “strive for the general or universal” [dem Allgemeinen], for things whose value transcended local and limited conditions and could be recognized anywhere. The contrast was especially sharp with country people, devoted to concrete and particular things such as homegrown food, dress, and language. And whereas “the particular” was usually something that already existed, “universality has first to be created.” This led him to the second distinctive quality of Bürger, their penchant for reaching and striving, an orientation that made them value movement itself, even above the goal that drew it forth. Riehl found the quintessential expression of this stance in Lessing’s declaration that he preferred seeking the truth to having it, a position echoed in a different connection by Friedrich List (the advocate of tariffs to protect German manufactures from English competition) that “the power to create riches is infinitely more important than riches themselves.” It was this spirit that made taking pride in becoming something through one’s own efforts “genuinely bürgerlich.” And it was because modernity shared with bourgeois existence an orientation that transcended local situations, and a persisting impulse to push beyond given conditions, that contemporary life had a bürgerliche character. The Bürger were the part of society with the ability “to give most decisive expression to the universality of modern social life.” One testimony to this was the role Riehl believed the bourgeoisie played in the French Revolution. He did not say that they became the ruling group then but that it was in the Revolution’s universal principles that the Bürgertum “found its voice.” Testimony that it was the voice of modernity and not just of a part of it was provided by the way people used the term bürgerlich to mean social or civil, as when they spoke of bürgerliche honor or a bürgerliche death, applying it to things outside the middle classes.52

  All the same, Bürger were not oriented only to movement and fluidity (as the increasingly dissatisfied fourth estate of workers was), but also to stability and calm. They wanted not to dissolve or explode society but to “bridge over its sharp distinctions”; their paradigmatic exemplar was Luther, the model German Bürger because he was at once radical and conservative.53 One reason for the Bürgertum’s multiple orientation, and for its ability to represent modernity as a whole, was that it contained parts corresponding to other social strata: there existed “an aristocratic, a specifically bürgerlich, and a proletarian Bürgertum.” (Engels, as we saw, said a similar thing about England, but to quite different effect.) Riehl gave particular emphasis to the middle class’s quality of mediating or transcending oppositions, both between itself and other parts of society, and between the present and the past; its ability to do so provided him with evidence that society could become, as he hoped it would, at once more bürgerlich and more ständisch, continuing to progress beyond any given point while still preserving the sense of stable integration it possessed in the past. Evidence that the Bürgertum could be the bearer of these hopes came from the attachment many of its members maintained to associations of producers, not just the old guilds but also (he believed) new forms that would emerge as the traditional ones waned. Even as industry expanded along the lines List and others projected, these associations would impart to their members a sense of unity, loyalty, and moral commitment, qualities that society was in danger of losing by virtue of the purely individualistic attitudes that threatened to fragment and weaken it in the present.54

  These dangerous attitudes derived in Riehl’s view from two quarters. The first was a certain segment of the Bürgertum itself, those who favored unbridled industrial expansion, seeking to produce ever more goods and profit without concern for the effects on either workers or the quality of their wares. Here he had in mind people such as those who had provoked the Silesian revolt of 1844; he may have included advocates of mechanical methods on a large scale too, but it should be remembered that there were still few of these on the German scene at the time he wrote. Whoever they were, such people had no care for society’s unity, and their actions would end up reducing it to a stark opposition between rich and poor. Their stance did not represent contemporary bürgerliche Gesellschaft as a whole, however, since to generate social solidarities was equally characteristic of it. Society’s defining characteristic was that it “naturally” generates divisions between people based on the kind of work they do, large distinctions as between peasants and town-dwellers, and smaller ones between tailors and shoemakers, but these collective identities had always been and could still be sources of the solidarities and moral commitments that generated the principles of civilized life.55

  For this reason it was the second source of atomistic and dangerous individualism that was the most threatening. It was rooted not in society but in the state. Riehl considered the division between the two to be a defining characteristic of his age, drawing here as elsewhere on Hegel. But he placed this separation in a wholly different light, because in his eyes what made it both powerful and perilous was the work of the very bureaucrats whom the author of The Philosophy of Right saw as the vehicle of its overcoming. Devoted to the notion that all the inhabitants of a state belonged to a single category, that of Staatsbürger, the bureaucrats (among whom the Prussians were the preeminent, that is the worst, example) did away with every traditional distinction between people, weakening or destroying the guilds and kindred associations through which individuals could develop other and independent identities. The officials may have seen their aim as raising productivity and increasing well-being, but the effect of their policies was to deprive society of its own more varied form of existence, and thus to foster a tyrannical kind of state authority, meanwhile giving free rein to shoddy work and shady dealing, and spreading impoverishment among worthy craftsmen. Riehl thus presented what he called his “social politics” as a defense of society against the state, a plea to limit bureaucratic incursions into the social realm in order to ret
urn to an order that could preserve social coherence and well being.56

  Riehl’s way of identifying the essence of what was bürgerlich, and what it shared with modernity, had much in common with Hegel’s emphasis on the abstractness of needs and means that made social life on a large scale possible, but where Hegel saw the apparent opposition between society and the state as reconciled on a higher level, Riehl regarded the contrast between the two as more permanent and dangerous. To him, bureaucrats were not really part of society, they were too one-sided and abstract to be genuinely bürgerlich. He was not alone in taking such a view; as we have seen, others regarded the dependency of officials on states and sovereigns as disqualifying them from Bürger status too. But there can be no doubt that the Bildungsbürgertum of which they formed the core was an essential, and at the moment Riehl wrote his book was still the preeminent component of the German bourgeoisie.