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This chapter examines the implications of the German historians' assumptions concerning the problem of bourgeois revolution in Germany. It contends that the assumption that Germany did not have a bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century has structured the general understanding of German history and historiography. It discusses the view that abortive bourgeois revolutions led to fascism. The findings of the analysis indicate that the social determinations of revolutionary crises remain extremely complex and the specific contribution of the bourgeoisie and its various factions are far from clear.

The analytical narrative of the preceding chapters is summarized. This is then examined to see how far it coheres with the idea that bourgeois liberalism tends to recede in proportion to the extent ‘proletarian democracy’ advances. Broadly speaking, it is held to cohere quite well, but with important qualifications. Amongst the most important are these: Will to political power was never a bourgeois characteristic; Bourgeois support for authoritarianism was not always in reaction to challenges from the left; Even as bourgeois radicalism declined, there remained many opportunities for liberal-socialist cooperation; Inter-war fascism was not merely an artefact of bourgeois disillusion with liberty; There are no modern political parties or governments that are ‘purely’ bourgeois; The bourgeoisie relates only indirectly to its ‘vanguard’; The tension between ‘bourgeois liberty’ and ‘proletarian democracy’ remains.

This chapter examines the relation and distinction among bourgeoisie, liberalism, and democracy in the history of Germany during the 19th century. The evidence of German society between 1871 and 1914 lends support to the view that the orderly reproduction of capitalist productive relations could be guaranteed within a form of state which fell considerably short of pure representative democracy. This chapter explains that received ideas of failed bourgeois revolution and liberal capitulation provide a poor means for understanding German political development during this period.

This chapter examines the peculiarities of German history. It suggests that most of those who wrote the history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarded what did not happen as more important than what did, and most of these accounts attributed the sins of omission to the German bourgeoisie. This chapter argues that the great strength of bourgeois revolution, in many respects, was its very lack of open action.

This chapter examines the so-called silent bourgeois revolution in Germany during the nineteenth century. It explains that one of the main changes brought about by this silent revolution was the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist system based on the sanctity and disposability of private property and on production to meet individual needs through a system of exchange dominated by the market. It also describes the changes in the law, in mechanical civilization, and in patterns of sociability.

The collapse of Communism and the weakening of Social Democracy in the face of post-industrial capitalism seemed to nullify all systemic challenges to liberal capitalism. The Neo-conservatives celebrated the triumph of free-market democracy, but worried that bourgeois civil society lacked the moral sinews to see off interstitial challenges from political Islam. The 9.11 atrocity and the subsequent War on Terror allowed for a ‘forward strategy’ in the Middle east, and Iraq was the set-piece for an export of bourgeois revolution on the points of bayonets. The liberation of Iraq was a bloody mess, however, and from the 2008 Great Recession deep-rooted economic problems in the model of financialized capitalism became evident. Nonetheless, bourgeois liberalism was not exhausted: rather, the markets demanded and the politicians agreed that marketization of social life was the appropriate response to multiple social and economic dysfunctions.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the peculiarities of German history, specifically bourgeois society and politics during the nineteenth century. This book explains the basic assumptions in German historiography and the German historians' views concerning the problems of bourgeois revolution. It evaluates the relation of bourgeoisie with liberalism and democracy and attempts to define the concept of state in Imperial Germany.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the course of German history before 1914. The results indicate that Germany did experience a successful bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century but it did not take the form of a pitched battle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The findings also suggest the need to accept the broadly progressive character of German unification and that the bourgeoisie was neither weak nor immature.

This chapter examines the so-called shadow side of the achievement of the bourgeois revolution in Germany, which is the capitalist system. This system unlocked productive capacity, created a national market within an international economy, and opened up opportunities for entrepreneurial talent as material and institutional restrictions were pushed aside. It also increased consumption levels and generated employment. This chapter suggests that the principal problem with bourgeois society in Germany was not its absence but its ambiguity and that the bourgeoisie was as much a victim of its contradictory successes as its outright failures.

This chapter examines the influence of the bourgeois revolution on the developments in state and politics in Germany during the nineteenth century. It explains that there was a basic discrepancy in Germany between economic dynamism and social and political backwardness and suggests that the peculiarity in German history may be traced to the lack of synchronization between developments as the different levels in historian Hans Rosenberg's so-called ‘great triad’. It contends that many accounts of German history have telescoped the links between economy and society and argues that the impact of capitalism was not confined to an encapsulated sphere of the economy.

This chapter examines the political stage and the problem of reform during the bourgeois revolution in Germany during the nineteenth century. It explains that the there were major divisions with the bourgeoisie and that the chief victim of political discord within the bourgeoisie was that part of the class that thought of itself as both liberal and national. It suggests that open political action exposed the divisions within the bourgeoisie and revealed its vulnerability in political relations with subaltern social groups.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of Germany during the nineteenth century. The results suggest that most historians have adopted a rather restricted idea of what constituted a successful bourgeois program and therefore blamed the failure of the German bourgeois revolution for Germany's peculiar history. This chapter proposes a redefinition of the concept of bourgeois revolution to denote a broader pattern of material, institutional, legal, and intellectual changes whose cumulative effect was all the more powerful for coming to be seen as natural.

This chapter examines the so-called German exceptionalism, focusing on the view that German history is different from the rest of Western Europe. It explains that most German historians believed that the exceptionalism argument is linked to the supposed failure or absence of bourgeois revolution in German history and its consequences for the country's future political development. It suggests that the bourgeoisie's failure to conquer the pre-industrial traditions of authoritarianism has left Germany vulnerable to the future, particularly the internal strains of a modernizing society.

It has been an article of faith in Mandelstam studies that he conceived an early antagonism for Soviet life and became an outcast. This chapter surveys the political language of journalism and poetry from 1918 until the collision with Stalin in 1934. Combining literary analysis, biography, and a forensic survey of his publishing record, it analyses his ideological positions. The profile of the writer in this revisionist account is of commitment to cultural revolution and professional involvement. In the late 1920s as the Proletarian movement and class warfare became entrenched, he sought to establish his credentials as a writer ‘made’ by the revolution, courting controversy at the end of New Economic Policy with views on state-sponsored translation as a tool of progress. His defence of expertise as the right means to enlighten cut across political trends, leading to a clash with fellow writers and Stalin.

This chapter examines the realpolitik of the German bourgeoisie and argues for the redundancy of liberalism. It stresses the need to dissociate the idea of bourgeois revolution from the achievement of some necessary level of parliamentary democracy and redefine it to mean the body of change that inaugurated the bourgeois epoch. It suggests that the bourgeoisie's partnership with the pre-industrial power elite was influenced by the particular form of Germany's bourgeois revolution that combined with the accelerated character of capitalist development to impose a specific logic of class alliance.

This chapter outlines the arguments created and challenges faced by the Communist party for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, particularly in opposition to the CNT's plans for the libertarian socialization of industry. Socialization would impinge upon the property of the middle classes, whose support the Kremlin needed for the success of its foreign policy. Hence, the Spanish Communists argued that the attempts to further the revolution at the expense of the middle classes were due to the workers' lack of political understanding, among other things. To argue along these lines in the prevailing state of revolutionary exultation was for the Communists a heavy task; for they had to contend not only with the libertarian movement, but also with the more radical members of the UGT, the Socialist party, and of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU).

This chapter argues against the belief that the long-term peculiarity of German history can be explained by the twin factors of failed bourgeois revolution and absent liberalism in the nineteenth century. It suggests that this lament for the lost liberalism of the German bourgeoisie is profoundly unhistorical and contends that most historians have focused too much on the issues of failures, blockages, and mistaken development in trying to explain why German history diverged from the ‘model’. It explains that the continuity of authoritarian values and its resilience depended on a combination of ideological mechanisms which warped the true perceptions of the bourgeoisie and hindered the establishment of the constitution of liberty on the model of the ‘West’.

This chapter explains how the original terms Left and Right emerged in the French Revolution in 1789-1792. The Left and Right were divided primarily on the question of the legitimate source of authority for government, and secondarily on the question of universal and equal human rights. The Right defended religion and aristocratic birth as sources of authority. The Left rejected these, and sought somehow to root authority in the will of the people. The Left leaders of the French Revolution advocated an individualistic, property-owning, market economy, just as the English Levellers had done in the 1640s and the American revolutionaries in the 1770s. This chapter also contests the Marxist notion that 1789 was a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was not primarily a victory of capitalists over feudal aristocrats.