Germany 1789-1919 by Agatha Ramm

Author:Agatha Ramm [Ramm, Agatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Germany
ISBN: 9781000008470
Google: iQ1oAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

Treitschke invested with great force the idea that Germany was to become a unitary, monarchical and constitutional (Liberal) state. He carried conviction in urging that it was inevitable by means of a political theory, an historical theory and a theory of society. The starting-point of all three was in a notion of the Volksgeist, the mind or spirit of the nation. Though Treitschke was heir to the long history of this doctrine and influenced by Wilhelm Roscher, the economist, as well as by Hegel in his conception of it, it was not, for him, a mysterious and silently working-power nor the purpose of God for men, as it still was to some extent for Roscher, nor yet the highly abstract and precisely defined notion of Hegel, It was something, at once, more political and more superficial. It was the product of the thinking of the educated men, which might exclude both the nobility and the working men or peasants, of the nation over the centuries. When Treitschke set himself the task of investigating the justification for and the inevitability of the different forms of state in which different peoples lived, he set out to discover what the Volksgeist of a particular people was and to relate it to the form of state in which they lived. From this starting-point he went on to apply a political theory which was largely based on a priori assumptions. First, Treitschke asserted that there was a tendency for every state to increase in unity as its population increased. The unitary state was the natural continuation of Germany’s political development so far. Next, he accepted Roscher’s interpretation – perhaps drawn originally from Schleiermacher – of Aristotle’s classification of forms of government. It placed them in an order of value with democracy lowest, since it was nearest to the horde in which men ‘naturally’ (primitively) lived and based on the principle of equality; aristocracy, based on the principle of exclusion, next; and monarchy, based on the principle of unity, highest. Germany, he asserted, had reached the monarchical stage. The main justification for monarchy, however, was the state’s duty to provide a great deal for its subjects and to maintain a numerous civil service for the purpose. A monarch was, Treitschke asserted, by definition one who offered a great deal to his subjects and ruled them directly. Part of what such a state must offer, Treitschke wrote, was the chance to participate in politics. Thus, he found the justification for constitutional, as distinct from autocratic, monarchy. Finally Germany must become a unitary state under a single monarch with a single constitution; for a federation of monarchies was a contradiction in terms. No monarchical member state could accept the derogation of its sovereign rights which the acceptance of a decision, imposed by the majority of members, would imply; and a federation could only work if its members accepted the decisions of the majority among them.

Treitschke’s historical theory, like his political theory, lent an air of inevitability to the unitary, monarchical, constitutional state.

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