Origins of Progressivism

This chapter describes German state theory in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It describes this tradition in order to clarify the relevance of German ideas to the American context. American political scientists and legal scholars frequently rely on German thinkers such as Max Weber and Carl Schmitt to understand the state. But these divergent assessments lack a grounding in the longer trajectory and the institutional dilemmas of German legal theory. The chapter provides that broader context and directs readers’ attention to the most promising strand of German thought: the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel would have formative significance for the Progressive thinkers who developed the American administrative state. Hegel understood the state’s purpose to be the advancement of freedom. The chapter contextualizes this idea and shows its influence throughout the nineteenth century, in the Rechtsstaat theories of Robert von Mohl, Lorenz von Stein, and Rudolf von Gneist. It then shows how this normative concept of the state was emptied out with the turn to legal positivism at the end of the century. Weber’s formal-rational conception of bureaucracy then arrived at a particularly unstable moment in German constitutional history, in the transition from monarchy to democracy. Weber’s bifurcated conception of legal and charismatic authority paved the way for Schmitt’s proto-totalitarian theory of the state. The chapter concludes by showing how German theorists in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Jürgen Habermas, continued to rely on Weber’s instrumental conception of bureaucracy.