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Centralization and Homogenization Doomed Inward-Turn Communities, September 1, 2009
This review is from: German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648-1871 (Paperback)
The German home town's existence depended on stability and separateness from those outside their walls. To be considered a home town, the population must be within a critical size where familiarity could be developed without the intrusion of `formal, anonymous pattern of law and politics.' The guilds maintained stability and separateness by controlling the `economic regulation, political organization and representation and guardianship of social and domestic standards.' Burgerrecht, the citizen's right, was granted upon the satisfaction of what Walker refers to as the cloverleaf of the social man: citizen, workman and neighbor. `Familiarity and economic acceptance' conferred communal membership. The principles of the balance of power in the Holy Roman Empire kept stability and acted as an incubator for home towns with similar patterns of communal life to form. The individualized countries intervened only to maintain the equilibrium of the home town community. The local civic governments were not meant to `operate independently of the local social community.'
The foundation of its stability also divided the empire into `social and occupational groupings' of home townsmen, nobles and peasants and movers and doers `mutually exclusive and often hostile to each other.' The popular science of administration cameralism put the fiscal administration as `the medium of harmony among discrete parts of German civil society. `Unsuited for economic growth and social mobility,' the home towns stood apart as a paradox and opposed by economists like Justi, whose notion of coherence stressed the `duty of the government to remove all obstacles to that individual human ambition that brought individual productivity.' On the other hand, Johann Moser attributed `an aura of nature and primeval' to the home town community and invoked its communal guardianship of honor and virtue as the best guarantor of peace. Hence, the hometown became a larger discourse of `Wesenwille that underlies communities, and Kurwille of the association, the fluid society and state.'
During the changing demographic and economic landscape from Napoleon to Bismarck, the German states made bids to infiltrate inward-turn communities like the home towns and centralize their authorities. Napoleon's intrusion became an opportunity that `stimulated the administrative energies of the German states.' In Wurttemberg, the issuance of state licenses directly meant to replace communal mastership in an effort to redirect economic control to the state and inculcate a body of productive, mobile workers. During the struggle of local control in the succeeding decades, the civil service of the individualized country converted from cameral to liberal principles and viewed the accretion of state powers as a way to liberate individuals from the suppression of home towns - the disruptor of harmony.
Abetted by the transformation caused by the demands of industrialism, state building effort spelt the decline of inward communities like the home towns. Take Prussia for example. With relatively smaller, newer, and semi-agricultural home towns compared to other German states, it could assert sovereignty over them early on, such as using the 1731 imperial edict to turn `negative political control into positive state control.' It avoided other states' deadlock of economic expansion and freedom necessitated by industrial changes and communal power of economic exclusion.' The passing of the home towns also marked the precedence of state citizenship over communal membership as the state assumed greater social, economic and political control over the whole of its population, extirpating ethos and culture entrenched for generations. Yet, succeeding generations would look back at communities like the home towns with fond memories. The National Socialist, even attempted to reincorporate the same incompatible home town social traditions and rituals into the modern society.
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