The rise and demise of German statism : loyalty and political membership / Gregg O. Kvistad.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kvistad, Gregg Owen, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political participation--Germany--History.

Political participation.

Political parties--Germany--History.

Political parties.

State, The.

Germany--Politics and government.

Germany.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 p. )

Place of Publication:

New York ; Oxford : Berghahn Books, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

German statism as a political ideology has been the subject of many historical studies. Whereas most of these focus on theoretical texts, cultural works, and vague "traditions," this study understands German statism as a functioning logic of political membership - a logic that has helped to determine who is "in" and who is "out" with regard to the German political community. Tracing statism from the early nineteenth century through German unification and into the 1990s, the author argues that, with its central concern for a political loyalty, statism historically served the function of stabilizing the political order and containing democratic mobilization.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, a mobilized German democratic consciousness gradually rejected statism as anachronistic, and German political institutions began to respond in kind.

Contents:

Introduction: Political Membership, Logics of Appropriateness, and Political Loyalty in Germany

1. State Bureaucrats Before Societal Citizens: The Articulation and Consolidation of German Statism in the Early Nineteenth Century

2. "The Most Democratic Democracy in the World": German Statism Survives the Weimar Republic

3. The Institutional Politics of Postwar West Germany: The Parteienstaat, the Professional Civil Service, and the Political Mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s

4. German Statism and West German Political Party and Intellectual Discourse in the 1970s

5. The Tensions Endemic to an Alternative Politics in a Statist Context: The West German Greens Between State and Society.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [242]-256) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-78920-580-8

1-57181-161-3

OCLC:

1453643555