Prussia and the 'Free Right of Merit'

Between about 1859 and 1864, there was an acute struggle between liberals seeking greater powers for the Prussian parliament, elected on a wealth franchise, and the Crown struggling to consolidate its hold upon the army. With Bismarck's help, the Crown triumphed (more or less).

This was a key turning-point as I discuss it in my book. Rather provocatively, I said it came  "closest to being the most striking example of an archetypal bourgeois revolution".

Partly this claim depends upon my definition of 'bourgeoisie', which is neither as just a disparate rag-bag twixt gentry and labourers, nor a super cohesive class of capitalists. Rather, it is a class category bound by a common interest in what we'd call 'meritocracy'.

There's an interesting section on the dispute in F. L. Carsten's study re-published in his Essays in German History (London: the Hambledon Press, 1985):

The army conflict in Prussia was at the same time a social conflict between a rising middle class and a declining nobility. This was clearly perceived at the time. Thus the historian of the foundation of the German Empire of 1871, Professor von Sybel, said in 1862: 'in internal affairs, the great conflict of our time is not a conflict between Crown and parliament, but one between the excessive privileges of the nobility and the free right of merit.' Another moderate Liberal declared: 'it is a struggle about principles ... a struggle of the burghers versus the Junkers.' ['Bismarck and the Prussian Liberals', p. 239]

It's a nice little paragraph. Too late for the book, but I submit it for your consideration.

Who Were the Bourgeoisie? A Reactionary Definition.

In the early 1860s there was a major constitutional struggle in Prussia, between parliamentary liberals and the Royal state executive, sometimes compared in its passion and import to the English Civil War. The conservative Berliner Revue thought that the liberal demand for government responsible to the elected assembly was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to subordinate the state to their interests. In 1860 it angrily asked the question: who are these upstart “new bourgeoisie” seeking to become the “new nobility”?

The answer is provided by the membership list of the lower house of the legislature, in France as well as in Italy, in Germany as well as in Prussia. In the first place ahead of everyone else are those who have acquired a higher academic education by attending a secondary school and a university, but who have remained virtually strangers to the actual realities of life, in other words, men of abstract education which is instructive about everything and nothing. … the judical officials, the administrative officials, to a considerable extent the clergy, the physicians, the scholars, the teachers, at the higher level, the lawyers, and similar people. … [those] who have acquired a modern scholarly education, and whose spiritual sensitivity has been diminished to the extent that their intellect has been trained, in other words, the engineers, the higher technicians, the men of letters, especially the Reformed Jews of the press, and others of that sort.

[Source: Theodore S. Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 187-8]

The baddies here are the over-educated without a real grasp on the realities of life. There's no mention at all of entrepreneurs in this definition. Of course, in more dispassionate analyses, 'capitalists' usually were categorised along with the bourgeoisie, though as a distinct section. The German language differentiated between Wirtschaftsbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum – the former referring primarily to an economic category (those who lived off profits from investments or the ownership of capital), the latter to an educated and ‘free professional’ category (doctors, professors, bureaucrats etc). 

It's interesting here that the 'bourgeois' are what we now might call a 'meritocracy'. The disparaging reference to the Jews highlights that strata historically deprived of juridically advantaged estate status often led the way in a society re-configuring around marketable aptitudes rather than inherited privilege (as Mitt Romney has maladroitly but not entirely unreasonably pointed out). It's more or less the definition I use too, in the book, though without the Berliners Revue's reactionary fury, I trust.

One problem with 'meritocracy', however, is that it very easily segues into a smug, self-entitled oligarchy (as Chris Hayes argues).