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Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Edward Ross Dickinson
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati

Extract

In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderweg thesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2004

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References

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90. For a study characterizing Stalinism as one extreme of the European welfare state, see Kotkin, Steven, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).Google Scholar

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92. See for example Usborne, The Politics and Grossmann, Reforming Sex.

93. Mitchell, MB. R., European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970 (New York, 1975), 130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar By 1969 it had fallen to 2.3 percent (132).

94. See David Crew, “The Ambiguities of Modernity: Welfare and the German State from Wilhelm to Hitler”, in Society, ed. Eley; Crew, David, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler (New York, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eghigian, Greg, Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany (Ann Arbor, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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98. Again, Baumans formulation is revealing: for him, “making things better than they are” means making them “more pliable, obedient, willing to serve.” Modernity and Ambivalence, 39.

99. Schwartz, Michael, “Eugenik und Bevölkerungspolitik,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 32 (1992): 434Google Scholar; Weindling, , Health, 343Google Scholar quoted in ibid., 440.

100. Detlev Peukert, “‘Rationalisierung’ zwischen utopischem Entwurf und krisenhafter Zurücknahme,” in idem, Max Webers Diagnose, 79, 81.

101. Bauman, , Modernity and Ambivalence, 8.Google Scholar For a similar view see Stepan, Nancy, “Race, Gender, Science, and Citizenship,” in Cultures of Empire, ed. Hall, Catherine (New York, 2000), esp. 68.Google Scholar

102. See for example Grossmann, , Reforming, 161Google Scholar; Schwartz, , Sozialistische Eugenik, esp. 1214Google Scholar; and the older discussions of British eugenics in Paul, Diane, “Eugenics and the Left,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Freeden, Michael, “Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity,” Historical Journal 22 (1979).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

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108. See Suval, Stanley, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, 1985)Google Scholar and Anderson, Margaret, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000).Google Scholar There is a good discussion of these issues in Geoff Eley, “The Social Construction.”

109. Eisenstadt, , “Multiple,” 5.Google Scholar For an even more positive assessment of “Western modernity,” see Taylor, Charles, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): esp. 92, 99, 103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

110. See Fritzsche, , “Did Weimar Fail?,” 638Google Scholar; also his Germans and Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

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113. This is an issue addressed in Dickinson, Edward Ross, “The Men's Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914: Some Reflections on Sex, Politics, and Sexual Politics,” Journal of Modern History 75 (2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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