Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918. Translated by Tom Lampert. Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. x + 413 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-472-11573-0.

Reviewed by Marynel Ryan Van Zee (University of Minnesota, Morris)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Civil Society in (Theory and) Practice

This excellent, clearly collaborative translation of Hoffmann's prize-winning Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen Buergergesellschaft, 1840-1918 (2000) should find a wide audience among German historians.[1]. Hoffmann's point of departure is the difference between contemporary German social theorists' definition and use of "civil society," in which moral virtues that citizens might hone through associational activity are not essential, and the nineteenth-century, more Tocquevillian version in which the civic virtues allegedly developed through sociability were fundamental to the formation of civil society. German freemasonry offers an especially interesting case study through which to puzzle out the "intimate connection between civic virtue and civil society in the nineteenth century" (p. 4) and highlight the tensions and contradictions inherent in the idea of civil society that cannot be evaded by the replacement of bürgerliche Gesellschaft with the neologism of Zivilgesellschaft or the excision of Tugend from the German political vocabulary.

The overarching question to be answered, looking back from our contemporary struggles to define what civil society is and does, as well as forward from the Enlightenment ideas tied to its emergence, is "which social and discursive practices have transformed ideas about the social and the moral, the national and the universal, the public and the private into objects of politics?" (p. 12). Hoffmann's insights are drawn from a close look at how Masons practiced civil society, and "lived" the Enlightenment through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, and negotiated the tensions and contradictions brought into relief by challenges to the ideas they espoused. This "political history of culture" (p. 12) is especially good at interweaving a more general view of nineteenth-century European society (thereby placing freemasonry in context with other forms of associational life, and other ways of thinking about the relationship between the individual and society) and an emphasizing what set Masonic practices apart from those of other bourgeois individuals.

Hoffmann's source base is tripartite: government files that have their provenance in the surveillance of freemasonry (which was tolerated but watched in Prussia and Saxony, the primary geographical foci of Hoffmann's study), lodge files from those states (especially of the Leipzig and Breslau lodges and the Berlin and Dresden grand lodges), and a wealth of Masonic pamphlets and journals (supplemented with anti-Masonic literature from the period). This rich selection of evidence supports three different approaches, around which Hoffmann orders the book. In the first set of chapters, he delineates the ways in which lodges established boundaries and distinction through contradictory uses of humanist language. Above all, Hoffmann argues, implicit religious criteria came to light in the conflict over whether to exclude Jews and in the open and often politicized anti-Catholicism of many lodges. In the second set of chapters, Hoffmann turns to the language and practices of the lodges and especially to the way that lodges served as spaces for the construction of the masculine self. Gender-exclusive practices further complicated the universalist claims of freemasonry, but were also essential to its appeal to men. Hoffmann suggests that a sort of "civic religiosity" expressed through faith in Bildung and cemented through participation in secret ritual may have served as a counter to the "feminization" of religion during the nineteenth century (p. 215). The third and final set of chapters addresses the ways in which the interconnected levels of improved selves, civil society, nation, and humanity that formed the mainstay of freemasonry's moral-political language evolved and were transformed from the period of the Franco-Prussian War through the First World War. In these chapters, in particular, Hoffmann connects the attitudes of freemasons closely with those of the bourgeoisie at large and argues effectively that a connection between "'nation' and ‘humanity'" (p. 273) was alive and well among them at a moment when scholars have tended to assume that the former concept had eclipsed the latter.

Hoffmann's study is very useful in illuminating how the contradictions that we have long since understood as part and parcel of Enlightenment thinking emerged, developed, and were maintained or discarded in interaction with the changing historical context. Hoffmann also brings an international perspective to bear on German freemasonry by providing selective comparisons to American and French lodges, and analyzing how war and more philosophical conflicts (such as arguments over whether American lodges should admit African-American members) further complicated ideas about universal brotherhood. Readers interested in the international salience of the idea of civil society and of its actual organizational interactions will find much of interest in these debates and in Hoffmann's specific attention to the uneasy coexistence of international and national sentiment that characterized the later nineteenth century.

Closer to home, Hoffmann also successfully makes the case for the importance of freemasonry in the urban locales that form the basis of his case studies. His examination of the membership of lodges and the stakes of belonging reveals the importance of the ties of sociability to commercial and other interests. Freemasons also involved themselves in local politics, and Hoffmann outlines their influence and public presence, which existed in yet another tension with the imperative to secrecy. The balance between the larger context and the local mirrors the balance between the general and the particular that makes Hoffmann's study such an excellent contribution in the vein of a "political history of culture."

Hoffmann seems more reticent to make claims about influence at the level of states. But he also notes that professors gained increasing prominence in at least two of the lodges that he uses as case studies, and at least one of those whom he cites regularly (Johann Kaspar Bluntschli) taught Staatswissenschaften at Heidelberg and wrote several standard texts in the field.[2] Although the decline in officer and aristocratic participation in Prussian freemasonry that Hoffmann notes had occurred by late in the nineteenth century may have reduced the potential for Masonic influence on state policy or personnel, civil servants-in-training may have been influenced more indirectly through the educational system in Prussia and other states. Hoffmann is admirably careful not to overstate the significance of elite participation in freemasonry, but this is one potential connection to state activity that may deserve further exploration.

I had also expected Hoffmann to include an explicit analysis of Masonic attitudes toward imperialism, particularly in view of the way that freemasons and others found ways to reconcile their nationalist and universalist sentiments, through articulating a German "mission of leading the world to the goal of humanity" (p. 276). The limitation of the "brotherhood of people ... at least initially to cultured peoples" was already under discussion in the 1860s and the 1870s, as Masons asserted their national over their cosmopolitan allegiances (p. 265). I found myself wondering how later enthusiasm for the German imperial project might have played a role in balancing nationalism and universalism or cosmopolitanism, and provided a new "other" of the kind that Hoffmann argues was indispensable to the "hierarchies within humanist semantics" employed by Masons and others (p. 265).

Those hierarchies, though, are the final and most important lesson of this study for the concept of Zivilgesellschaft as we continue to employ it. Hoffmann's work reminds us of what's in a name, in a text that simultaneously provides a new and compelling example of how to approach such complex historical (and contemporary) objects.

Notes

[1]. Published by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, the book won the Association of German Historians' 2002 Hedwig Hintze Prize for Best First Book.

[2]. See David Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), especially 166-180, on Bluntschli.

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Citation: Marynel Ryan Van Zee. Review of Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23502

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