The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70.

The nineteenth-century Prussian bureaucracy has drawn an enormous amount of attention from generations of historians. Whether construed as Hegel's benevolent "universal estate," or as the early core of an ill-fated Prussian liberalism, or as an elitist monolith that sustained retrograde social interests well past the point of their natural death, the Prussian bureaucracy has been regarded as a key to the tortuous course of twentieth-century German history. In The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia, Hermann Beck promises to revise our understanding of the Prussian bureaucracy and to integrate his own findings into "the larger frame of the debate on continuity and discontinuity in German history." (p. xi) He delivers on the first promise by focusing on the bureaucracy's social policy and by drawing meaningful links between the attitudes of officials and the thinking of Prussian "social conservatives." When it comes to the second, Beck is less satisfying.

The first section of the book offers an illuminating discussion of "social conservative" thought in the face of ever-worsening social problems. In the 1830s, conservative intellectuals like Ludwig and Leopold von Gerlach and the other contributors to the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt integrated social concerns into their defense of aristocratic privilege against the bureaucratic "absolutism" of the Reform Era Prussian state. Adding ulterior motives to noblesse oblige, these conservatives argued that if aristocrats seized the initiative in remedying pauperism, they could squelch revolutionary threats and preempt the intervention of the state into areas of traditional noble prerogative. As the social crisis deepened in the 1840s, this feudalist argument yielded to the concept of the "social kingdom," which Beck calls the central idea of social conservatives prior to 1870. Figures like Radowitz and Wagener envisioned a direct alliance between the monarch and the lower classes, while Rodbertus advocated a high degree of state intervention in economy and society. Here too, self-serving political concerns dominated, for the "social monarchy" was conceived as a tactic to exclude the liberal bourgeoisie from a politics of monarchic paternalism. This is all convincingly presented by Beck, although he does not probe very deeply into the intellectual sources of conservative thinking. Where Beck claims that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to situate the men around the Wochenblatt in an intellectual tradition," (p. 46) one thinks of Mack Walker's study of Johann Jakob Moser or Robert Berdahl's of Prussian conservatism, works which do precisely that. Considering that Beck aspires to disclose the "subconscious mental structures" of conservatives and bureaucrats, much more could have been done to explore patterns of education and the intellectual categories by which these "mental structures" were formed. Some mention, for example, of the Staatswissenschaften or of economic science as it existed in Prussia in the early nineteenth century would have enhanced Beck's discussion of bureaucratic decision-making.

While Beck does not fulfill this aspiration satisfactorily, he does provide a convincing revision of our understanding of the Prussian bureaucracy's response to social problems. Instead of accepting claims about the liberalism of the bureaucracy, Beck emphasizes its deeply ingrained paternalism and authoritarianism. For example, when the Poor Laws were revised in the 1840s, bureaucratic motives were not primarily "humanitarian" or "liberal." While the Reform Era legacy of free movement was preserved, bureaucrats instituted measures that enhanced the state's regulation and control of the population. Moreover, Beck argues that the bureaucracy's willingness to strengthen the role of local Stande in poor relief contradicts historians' assumptions about officials' single-minded desire to centralize power in the state. As further evidence against their putative liberalism, Beck traces the bureaucracy's efforts to stifle the autonomous attempts of bourgeois citizens to create an association to aid the working poor after the Silesian weavers' revolt. Once again, issues of control, discipline, and bureaucratic power overrode liberal impulses. Beck's treatment of official social policy between 1850 and 1870 is less detailed than for the 1830s and '40s, but he argues persuasively for the essential convergence of conservative and bureaucratic policy orientations. This is not particularly surprising since, as he suggests, higher officials came almost uniformly from the nobility. More surprising is that the conservative ideologues discussed in the first part of the book did not recognize their allies in the bureaucracy. Unfortunately, Beck does not consider possible explanations for this blindness.

Beck has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of pre-Bismarckian social policy. The work will be of interest to historians of social policy and state-building, as well as to students of German political thought. However, Beck's attempt to relate his findings to debates about the German Sonderweg is disappointing. On the one hand, he asserts continuity between the ideas of social conservatives like Wagener and Rodbertus and those of the Nazis. Yet Beck essentially accepts without challenge the Nazi's own search for ideological ancestors. He accentuates these links to twentieth-century authoritarianism, while downplaying contrary evidence, such as the fact that some of the early social conservatives were not nationalists. On the other hand, Beck maintains that the bureaucracy's paternalistic orientation contributed to a particular Prussian "state ideology" and, even further, to the development of Prussian "identity," with its habitual deference to authority and rules and its reverence for mindless functionalism. He relies on one reference to Hugo von Hofmannsthal's views of Prussians to arrive at a sweeping statement about the "Prussian spirit" and the bureaucracy's role in molding it.

Is Beck's rich account of the bureaucracy really exhausted by these familiar stereotypes? A comparative perspective on the history of bureaucracy might have led him to a more nuanced position. Comparison would reduce the uniqueness of Prussian officialdom and balance its authoritarianism against its contributions to bureaucratic practice in modern states. Beck allows the final meaning of his work to be dictated by the Sonderweg debate, whereas he might have searched for other continuities and discontinuities. To take a salient example, he interprets the willingness of high officials to adapt their policies to local conditions and allow local organizations some latitude in implementing policy as a sign of bureaucratic conservatism. But one could see this as a sign of tension between centralizing and federalist impulses within the bureaucracy. To be sure, Prussian bureaucratic centralizers played an important role in the formation of a unified German state, but other political traditions and administrative practices also influenced the form of that state. After all, post-1870 Germany was substantially less centralized than Third Republic France. The re-emergence of a strong federalist Germany after 1945, along with the impact of the German federalist principle of subsidiarity upon the evolution of the European Union, suggests that, beyond the horrors of Nazism, there are other narratives of Prussian and German history into which the legacy of the nineteenth-century Prussian bureaucracy may be integrated.

Warren Breckman University of Pennsylvania