David Sugarman 260 sory? Not necessarily. However, the idea of national “peculiarities” has to be treated with caution. If one considers some of the most important individual histories of Germany, Italy and France for example, as well as England, then one will find it asserted by historians in each of these countries that their country was peculiar: that their country departed fromsome conception of normal development with which other countries complied. This is graphically illustrated in a debate surrounding the peculiarities of Germany. Historians have asked why should fascism, in such an extreme form, have taken power in Germany and not elsewhere? The post-1945 orthodoxv within German historiography looked to the peculiarities of Germany; to its political and social structures for an answer. In essence, they argued that Germany had never experienced a bourgeois revolution and that its traditional ruling class, the landed aristocracy, had never adapted to the twentieth century. Germany was peculiar because feudalismpersisted much longer here than elsewhere. Recently, two English historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, have challenged this orthodoxy in a book which immediately consigned its two authors to the centre of an academic tempest. Blackbourn and Eley’s work is valuable because it problematises the concept of national peculiarities; and the “normal” development of Western capitalist societies. In the first place, it points out that the supposed “norm” of a successful bourgeois revolution in, say, Britain, is a misreading of British history. Indeed, a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy, dominated by a triumphant middle class, simply did not exist anywhere in nineteenth century Europe. It usefully details the ways the historiography of several European countries - not just Britain - have been haunted by a supposedfaillere to followthe universal road to modernity (signified by a major shift in power which secures the dominance of the middle classes over state and culture - the so-called “bourgeois revolution”). Secondly, Blackbourn and Eley re-define what a “bourgeois revolution” means. They stress that it should be viewed as a longtermprocess; that it did not require any particular form of state - save one that functioned “as guarantor of civil society”; and that the type of state that guaranteed civil society cannot be explained in terms of the rise or fall of the middie classes but by a welter of particular historical factors. Thirdly, they emphasize the real economic, social, political and legal achievements of the German middle classes. Having secured important advances on several fronts many middle class Germans were opposed to constitutional reforms which, as they saw it, would only improve the lot of the working-classes. Thus, many middle class Germans “rationally” chose to ally themselves with the landed establishment in resisting change at the political level. In short, Germany was both unique (like all countries) and similar to, or, (in some spheres) more advanced than France and Britain. The point is not to reject the notion that all countries are peculiar, but some 183
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