Illiberalism and Beyond: German History in Search of a Paradigm

Abstract

The German catastrophe in twentieth century is a challenge to historical imagination. To explain inexplicable public thirsts for simple answers, no matter how abstruse and improbable.' Engulfed by an ever-growing mass of information, scholars also search for a master key, an issue for an ism which might order intellectual chaos. In 1960s interest in structural qu6stions and Fischer controversy over German responsibility for World War One prompted a thorough reorientation both in political assessment of German past and in methodological approaches. A new social history of politics appeared which, though not uniform, was more critical, analytical, socioeconomic, domestically oriented, and theoretically inclined than older tradition.2 In order to explain the belated and uneven political and social modernization' of Central Europe, German scholars proposed a number of fundamental concepts, such as Bonapartism, social imperialism, organized capitalism, Sammlungspolitik, negative integration, and national socialist polycracy, which, though also present elsewhere, made for particular virulence of Central European development from 1871 to 1945.3 However, these theses were quickly challenged by other specialists who were preoccupied with political history, historicist in methodology and objectivist in their evaluative stance. Because more traditionally inclined historians succeeded in revealing some shortcomings of above constructs,