Sociability and Society by K. Ludwig Pfeiffer;

Author:K. Ludwig Pfeiffer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART 3

Sympotic Relics

Secrets and Literature

CHAPTER 8

Securing Power and Auxiliary Evidence

THE FOLLOWING THREE CHAPTERS might appear to be remote from the topic of the symposium, but we need them in order to sketch and document drastic social and political changes, especially in nineteenth-century Europe, and to emphasize the need for new controls of so-called reality. In the midst of these changes, something like the resurrection, the reemergence, of the symposium (or at least of parts of it) on the alternative horizons of social cohesion and social anomie (laws are still in force but are not enforced anymore) takes place. It is only in this context that the reemergence can be argued intelligibly. Even the manifold resources of modern states, the efficiency, at least in principle, of governmental and administrative techniques, cannot prevent occasional disturbances of order. Each form of government and rule has weak areas and soft spots that must be dealt with in however makeshift ways if vital processes of the state are at stake. The means by which such areas and spots are supposed to be eliminated or neutralized can take the most heterogeneous forms.

Secrets and Confession

Since the Middle Ages, secret societies and associations have come into being, claiming—only in secret documents and negotiations, of course—to have the ability to remedy the wrongs and shortcomings of rule and to replace a defective order by a better one. Dangers from the outside, threatening to damage or annihilate a state, must be neutralized or outwitted by secret services, whose history, as far as we can tell, dates back much farther than the history of secret societies. Wolfgang Krieger, a well-known German historian of secret services, thinks they date back as far as the times of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt; a recent volume on secret services, Die Macht der Geheimdienste. Agenten, Spione und Spitzel vom Mittelalter bis zum Cyberwar (2020), tries to prove their antiquity with wordplay (espionage as the oldest profession in the world) but then immediately corrects itself: only from the times of the Renaissance onward did ruling noblemen send out secret diplomats in order to spy on enemies and competitors. Eventually, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the size and complexity of international conflicts required secret services of a correspondingly enormous size. In earlier times, spies restricted their activities to information useful for a battle, for instance, as substantiated in Shakespeare with regard to even much earlier times. In Shakespeare’s own times, the fate of a whole country or at least a ruling dynasty might be jeopardized by negligence in matters of espionage. Internal and external Catholic foes presented a serious threat to the stability of England and the rule of Elizabeth I; even Shakespeare himself and his family were suspected of Catholic conspiracy. The need for a clever organizer of espionage and counterespionage became imperative, and Sir Francis Walsingham took over, with a network of agents that extended over more than half of Europe.1

The work of secret services is conservative: it is normally geared toward making the

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