The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  23.

  Money, the Masses, the Metropolis: The “First Coherent School of Sociology”

  There is something rather fetid about many of the individuals in the previous chapter, with their tightly woven—even overwoven—works. Collectively, they seem to have lacked self-awareness of their own motives, to have shared a willful inability to face their own tendentiousness. At the same time, however, there was a raft of rather more serious thinkers in Germany concerned with a similar range of issues—in particular, the problems posed by industrialization, vast metropolises, and rapid technological innovation.

  Some of these were writers. Following the failed bourgeois revolution of 1848, we saw in Chapter 14, that some authors moved away from the developments of modernity and sought refuge in idyllic surroundings cut off from the mainstream, resulting in a special German path in literature, turning away from the harsh (mainly urban, industrial) realities of life to the inner concerns of Bildung (Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, etc.). In the latter half of the century, however, German writers did start to come to grips with at least some of the more contemporary issues. Among the first books of this kind were Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit; 1856) and Friedrich von Spielhagen’s Hammer und Amboss (Hammer and Anvil; 1869), the very titles of which are suggestive and can be read as a sort of Entwicklungsroman, a parallel to a Bildungsroman, stories that lead to the eventual good fortune of the middle-class protagonist: instead of finding inner development outside society, Freytag’s and Spielhagen’s “heroes” find their niche within the business community.

  After them, the two greatest Realist writers of the late nineteenth century were Wilhelm Raabe (1831–1910) and Theodor Fontane (1819–98), both of whom focused on the society—and morals—produced by capitalism. Raabe, very sympathetic to the aims of the French Revolution, modeled much of his work on that of Dickens, attempting to catch some of the British author’s humor, but he never forgot that capitalism was his target and, in such books as Abu Telfan (1867), Der Schüdderump (The Rumbledump; 1870), and Pfisters Mühle (Pfister’s Mill; 1884), about industrial pollution, he explored both the distortions produced by capitalism and the means of keeping alive our humanity in a capitalist world.

  Theodor Fontane was a better writer, a man who turned to the novel only late in life, after a career that took in being an apothecary, a journalist (including a stint as a war correspondent), and a drama critic—and fighting in the 1848 revolution. In his novels he was particularly aware of the class basis of existence in Germany, and with him the German novel was reclaimed from its special path and joined the mainstream. Unlike many writers, he was generally in favor of capitalism, though he was not without sympathy for the Junker class. His main aim was to show the recklessness with which an “utterly conventional society holds sway over the lives of individuals.” This had been true in the age of absolute state and it was, he insisted, still true. Society had changed less—hardly at all—in the moral grip in which its citizens were held. His most famous book in this regard was Effi Briest (1894), sometimes grouped with Anna Karenina (1878), and Madame Bovary (1857) in a trilogy of nineteenth-century marriages seen from the female point of view. Effi, daughter of a nobleman, is married off to a baron twice her age, who had courted her mother. Ignored by her husband, not accepted by the local aristocracy, she consummates a relationship with a married womanizer. Much later, the baron finds out. He kills the womanizer in a duel, divorces Effi, is awarded custody of their daughter, and Effi goes back home but only after her parents, who had rejected her, realize she is dying from tuberculosis. Everyone ends unhappily. Fontane’s real target was the moral fog in Bismarck’s Germany, its self-righteous emptiness, more destructive than creative.

  It has to be said, however, that although Fontane and Raabe were Realist writers to a degree unknown earlier—in the age of Stifter and Keller, say—more enduring originality about modern society was shown at this time by a different cohort of men in a wholly different discipline: they delivered a set of analyses and warnings that, taken together, amount to what has been called the first coherent school of sociology.1

  In Germany, and perhaps characteristically, sociology had its origins in philosophy and with the work of a man who, though he may not be as well known today as some of his contemporaries, deserves his place as the starting point because, even now, with all that has gone on in between, he was a very clear and sane observer, whose decisive clarity makes him a breath of fresh air.

  “THOUGHT CANNOT GO BEHIND LIFE”: THE BIRTH OF HUMAN STUDIES

  Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was fortunately placed. Born in 1833, he too was the son of a clergyman but one better off than most, being court preacher to the Duke of Nassau. His mother was the daughter of a conductor, and Dilthey inherited a strong interest in music, together with a dislike of the lower classes, in whom—rather like Marx—he had little confidence.2

  Dilthey first pursued theology, at Heidelberg, but transferred to Berlin because of its greater sophistication, especially in music. He formed his own reading circle to explore Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine and completed his doctorate with a thesis on Schleiermacher. After teaching spells at Basel, where he was a friend of Jacob Burckhardt, and at Kiel, where he began publication of his biography of Schleiermacher, the first installment in what would become “a history of the German spirit,” he was offered the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which Hegel had once held. He remained there for the rest of his life.3

  In the manner of the ancient Greeks, Dilthey looked about him and observed what he called “the enigmatic face of life.” People, he thought, inevitably found themselves confronted by “circumstances they do not understand, seeing irrational forces and blind chance at work.” Out of all this, he said, they need to manufacture a coherent picture of their circumstances, and they need ideals to strive for and principles by which to order their conduct. Somewhere inside them, Dilthey said, everyone has a “metaphysical impulse”—this is what gives rise to art, religion, and politics. “When the response is based on sustained and critical thought it becomes philosophy.” Philosophy differs only in that it is—or should be—more abstract and closely reasoned than other activities. The history of philosophy, he thought, was a succession of ideas, none of which has proved wholly triumphant, and we should use this fact, this failure, as our guide. Worldviews or systems that have stood the test of time must contain some elements of truth, but each is limited “because the human mind is limited and conditioned by circumstances.”4 When worldviews or philosophical systems make exclusive claims, their credibility is dented.

  This led Dilthey to deny metaphysics. For him, the rich and varied multifariousness of reality can never be adequately captured by any one conceptual approach. He was convinced that there is nothing to discover behind those experiences which, taken together, we call life. “Thought cannot go behind life,” he insisted. Political decision making, for example, could never be explained by the elementary processes of formal psychology, such as reflex action. Instead, we can only analyze, in this example, the products of political thought. “Unmutilated experience” was for him the basic ingredient of human studies.

  He insisted too that man’s basic position in an evolved universe must be linked to his morality, but he also thought it important to say that man’s nature is not fixed, that it too developed in the course of history and that, therefore, moralities also change and cannot be fixed either. This was another ingredient in human studies, a reorientation of disciplines that must be counted as Dilthey’s most distinctive achievement.5

  As part of this, he asked himself what difference man’s possession of a mind had made to the world and arrived at a set of phenomena that, he said, have no equivalent elsewhere in nature. One is purposiveness. Man struggled with this notion, to free himself of the religious mantra that the whole of nature is purposive. Since Galileo, this project had largely succeeded, culminating in Baruch Spinoza. But Dilthey wasn’t sure that
man was any happier, or understood the universe any better, because of this. A second phenomenon was value. Man shares with other creatures an ability to respond to the environment around him, but only man makes judgments in the abstract as to what is good and what is not. Third, there are norms and rules and principles in human life, everything from high moral principles to traffic regulations that, importantly, differ from the laws of science. Human laws are conventions and therefore changeable. Finally, human life is aware of itself as historical. Nature itself is mindless: planets cool, glaciers melt, sea levels rise and fall, producing change that affects humans. Only because of consciousness and memory does the cumulative effect of successive events become important.6

  All this led Dilthey to conclude, simply enough, that the world of the mind cannot be directly observed. Purposes, values, and norms cannot be seen, nor can history, since it exists only in the past. It follows that our knowledge of the mind can come from just two sources—inner experience, which tells us about purposes, values, and norms, and reflects on the past by means of memory; and communication, “without which the individual’s knowledge would be minimal.” It is through these phenomena, these ingredients, that meaning emerges, a meaning that cannot be observed.

  None of this was radical, but its clarity—to repeat—was cleansing and made Dilthey’s coining of the phrase “human studies” seem common-sensical. He split human studies into two, into historical and systematic disciplines. The historical disciplines included political history, economic history, intellectual history, and the history of science. By “systematic disciplines,” he meant those activities—economics, sociology, psychology—that seek to explain phenomena by means of general laws.7

  Dilthey also introduced, or reintroduced, the concept of understanding (Verstehen). He followed Kant in agreeing that we have evolved so as to understand the world. For him, there is a fundamental difference between sheer facts and true understanding.8 Understanding is for him a specific capacity of the human intellect and should be regarded as such. This is shown in the failings, or fallings short, of specific systems, such as behaviorism. Such systems may tell us something about human behavior, human experience, but it is inevitably limited and can never approach total understanding. However many opinion polls were carried out, there could never be enough for total understanding. “Man does not discover what he is through speculation about himself or through psychological experiments but through history.” The historical dimension—and the education on which it is based—underlines the need for interpretation and this, like understanding, to which it was linked, was another insight of Dilthey’s.9 Because the activity of the mind was the chief phenomenon of the human world, Dilthey said that understanding in that world was always more likely to resemble literary or legal interpretation than physics or chemistry. In saying this, Dilthey challenged head-on the claims of modern science to be the paradigm of all knowledge.

  Dilthey therefore derived five important principles by which human studies were to be guided. First, individual cases are intrinsically interesting and it is beside the point to generalize from such cases “because their differences are just as important as their similarities and are due to their historical character.” General laws, applicable within science, have no place in human studies. Second, the relationship of parts to wholes is different so far as people are concerned. The sense in which people are part of communities is nothing like pistons in a machine. Third, investigation must start at the level of complexity we find in nature. Nothing is gained by attempting to understand the poet’s imagination through simple processes that may be observed in animals or small children. Fourth, we are free to switch disciplines “whenever that helps.” Fifth, man is both subject and object. Circumstances have made him—he is an object. But he also knows himself and controls his actions.10

  We are left with an important conclusion. Because assumptions and interpretations are involved, knowledge of the human world “can never be a kind of photograph of reality.” It is always a construction, constantly under revision.11

  MENTAL LIFE IN THE METROPOLIS

  Despite Dilthey’s very great influence, formally the first German sociologist of note was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), whose study of the German peasant was especially interesting to foreigners, where such a way of life had died out owing to the industrial revolution fifty years earlier. The peasant’s idea of constitutional government, he found, was very tenuous. He also identified important differences between Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany (Middle Germany being more “individualistic” than the other two areas), and he conceived the notion of the “social philistine,” the individual “indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests.” This was not the “inwardness” of the Bildung classes but its petit bourgeois equivalent and much more problematic.

  But Riehl is now overshadowed by a raft of bigger names, still read with profit today, of which the first was Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Born in the very center of Berlin, Simmel was in every sense a modern urban man. After he had read Simmel’s first book, Ferdinand Tönnies wrote to a friend, “The book is shrewd but it has the flavour of the metropolis.” As someone else said of him, “Simmel suffers from modernism.”12

  Simmel was the youngest of seven children. His father, a successful Jewish businessman who had converted to Christianity, died when Georg was still a boy, and a friend of the family, a music publisher, took over as his guardian. Simmel studied history and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he was taught by a wide raft of luminaries—Mommsen, Treitschke, Sybel, Droysen, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and the anthropologist Moritz Lazarus (who also taught Dilthey and William Wundt.)13

  In 1885, he became a Privatdozent (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees) at the University of Berlin, giving courses on ethics, sociology, Kant, Schopenhauer, “The Philosophical Consequences of Darwinism,” and Nietzsche. He was a superb performer, and his lectures became one of the socio-intellectual attractions of Berlin, attended not only by students but by the cultural elite.

  Despite this success, despite the fact that the reception of his books brought him eminence throughout Europe and as far afield as Russia and the United States, where he was an advisory editor of the American Journal of Sociology, despite the fact that he had the friendship and support of leading academic figures like Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Adolf von Harnack, despite the fact that he was a close friend of both Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, and that with Tönnies and Weber he was a cofounder of the German Sociological Society, Simmel was constantly rebuffed by university authorities when chairs became available. When he was finally made professor, at the University of Strasbourg, it was already 1914 and within a short time the university was closed and converted into a military hospital. He didn’t let anti-Semitism get him down. His predicament was eased by financial security when his guardian left him a considerable fortune. Instead of growing bitter, he perfected his performance as a lecturer, “punctuating the air with abrupt gestures and stabs, dramatically halting, and then releasing a torrent of dazzling ideas.” As one admiring American observer described it, “Simmel ‘simmelifies.’”14

  CAPITALISM AS PROSTITUTION

  For the Paris exhibition of 1900, the American sociologist Lester Ward presented a report on the state of sociology on both sides of the Atlantic. After referring to the absence of any chairs of sociology in Germany at the time (a situation not rectified until after World War I), the report singled out Simmel who, it said, had been offering courses in sociology “for the last six years.” Simmel was thus the first professional sociologist in Germany, his rise coinciding with what Thomas Nipperdey describes as the “collapse of philosophy.”15

  Simmel had first come up with what he called “a new concept of sociology” in the 1880s. Darwinism and Social Darwinism were in the ascendant, but Simmel in his lectures argued that no single element can be identified as decisive in the cease
less interaction of society. For Simmel it was the “interaction of the parts” that counts. He thought there was a key difference—insufficiently appreciated—between “what takes place merely within a society as a framework and that which really takes place through society.”16 The latter was the concern of the sociologist.

  He was particularly interested in the wider ways in which people in the new social circumstances (post–industrial revolution) organized themselves. Accordingly, in Über sociale Differenzierung (On Social Differentiation) his early contribution was to show that, as the social group to which the individual belongs gets larger (as in the great metropolises), the individual achieves greater moral freedom: “the purely quantitative enlargement of the group is merely the most obvious instance of the moral unburdening of the individual.”17 He also made the point, though, that much of this freedom is illusory, “since beneath the choice there is a relentless pressure, and the capacity to choose itself is a sign of rootlessness.”18 He also enlarged the concept of collective responsibility—in a closely woven urban society, where people live cheek by jowl, we must all bear a share of the guilt for various forms of pathology, and this is not an easy thing to do. We are both more free and more responsible.19 At the same time, with the stronger development of individuality that occurs in urban society, there is bound to be a weaker sense of group belonging. Simmel observed an “increase in nervous life” in the cities, brought about by the fact that a city has more differentiated social circles. This promotes superficiality and imitation—“one of the lower intellectual functions.” The most obvious form of imitation is the phenomenon of fashion—not just in clothes but, for example, in musical consumption, a way of belonging and differentiating.20