‘Won't you tell me, where have all the good times gone’? On the advantages and disadvantages of modernization theory for history

Abstract

The German brand of ‘history of society’—Gesellschaftsgeschichte—has been known from its beginning in the 1970s for its application of sociological and politological modernization theories to (German) history. Modernization theory was presented by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in particular as the way to transform ‘traditional’ German history, that is: national political history, centred on a few ‘great men’, into an integrated and comparative history of German society, that is: encompassing societal structures outside politics. The catastrophic German politics between 1914 and 1945—Germany's ‘special path’, alias its Sonderweg—was interpreted in terms of a ‘delayed modernization’ of its political structures. Simultaneously, social scientific theories and methods, capable of explaining societal structures and processes, were presented to German historians as promising alternatives for ‘traditional’ methods of emphatic understanding of individual persons. In the 1970s and early 1980s German historians of society gained dominance in Germany by applying both modernization theories and social science methods to German history. From the 1980s onwards, however, they were increasingly criticized by proponents of the ‘cultural turn’ for not incorporating culture in the history of society, for reducing politics to society, and for reducing individuals to structures. This article not only argues that this criticism was basically correct but—more importantly—argues that the problems associated with the history of society are the consequence of conceptual inversion. What historians of society basically did was invert the ‘traditional’ positions they criticized (on the model of Marx's inversion of Hegel). As a result, the problems pertaining to the positions criticized were not resolved but only turned on their head. The ‘traditional’ focus on individuals was inverted into a ‘modern’ focus on structures, the ‘traditional’ focus on culture was inverted into a ‘modern’ focus on structures, and ‘traditional’ emphatic understanding was inverted into ‘modern’ causal explanation. It is argued that in order to escape from the conceptual trap of inversion new theoretical labour by historians of society will be necessary.