The American seen

Claus Offe
REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA
Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States
Translated by Patrick Camiller
115pp. Polity. £45.
0 7456 3505 9

This slim and beautifully crafted book packs in nearly two centuries of continental European sociological observation of “America”, from Alexis de Tocqueville, who travelled there in 1831, through to Claus Offe himself, with his series of lectures given in 2003. The fascination lay, and still lies, in observing a Republic created for the stated purpose of safeguarding liberty, and making equality its instrument to that end. European sociologists have wanted to know if that is a practicable social model.

What outside observers have always seen, writes Offe, is “the precariousness of liberty in capitalist societies”. Today, of course, there is deep concern over the destiny of freedom, and not only in the United States, but that concern is as old as is the republic of liberty.

There is a striking similarity in what sociologists as different as Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor Adorno saw in the US. They saw liberty – precarious but nevertheless always vibrant. They saw equality – too much of it rather than too little. They saw unique features of social life, in particular the strength of religion and of voluntary associations. They saw excessive equality as a threat to liberty, and they saw religious and associational life as the bastion that kept that threat at bay.

That similarity breaks down when we get to Offe’s own reflections on the United States in the twenty-first century. So much has changed that an inclusive transatlantic concept of “the West” hardly applies any longer. The US has become “distinctive”, and the comparative curiosity of Offe’s predecessors is no longer meaningful. Offe’s reflections then turn away from the American social model to America the world power.

Alexis de Tocqueville criss-crossed the (now Eastern) United States for nine months in 1831–2. He was a young man of twenty-five, from the French nobility, a junior judge, and a modernizer. His official mission was to study the American penal system for ideas for prison reform in France, but his real interest was in American politics (and in the creation of a science of politics). His Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, still stands as a relevant masterpiece in political sociology.

Tocqueville was a radical democrat. He deplored the backwardness of Europe, specifically France in his case, and admired America for its “almost complete equality of condition”. By equality, he meant the absence of aristocratic hereditary political rights. For most contemporary Europeans, that was tantamount to anarchy and mob rule, but in America Tocqueville saw democratic order. Europe’s difficulty with democracy, he concluded, had nothing to do with democracy as such, but with the transition to democracy, a difficulty America had been spared because it was created as democratic.

While political equality itself contains no threat to liberty, order or stability, this is not so with “extreme equality”, by which Tocqueville meant equality in economic life. The trouble here is that once people set their minds to equality in this sense, that passion becomes insatiable and the smallest difference proves the greatest annoyance. Dire consequences then threaten. Governments will be asked to provide and regulate ever more, and we are on the way to despotism, or “soft despotism”, as Tocqueville called it. Community disintegrates under the force of acquisitive individualism, and we sink into a culture of greed, conformity and a flattening of tastes.

In Tocqueville’s America, however, those threats were only potential. There were counterbalancing forces, mainly in a rich network of voluntary associations, many of them religious, but also in the decentralized political structure of checks and balances. Associational life helped to keep social diversity alive and to educate citizens in a spirit of civic voluntarism, and served as a buffer between individuals and the state that protected the liberty of the former against the coercive instinct of the latter. In the age of democracy, he wanted to say, backwards Europe should learn from advanced America.

Max Weber is the most eminent of the many German sociologists, best known for his books The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and his impenetrably complicated Economy and Society. His impressions of America were gathered during a visit of thirteen weeks in 1904, during which he travelled much the same route as Tocqueville’s. He similarly immersed himself in an intense anthropological study of the Americans, observing, interrogating and interviewing incessantly. Like Tocqueville he was fascinated by what he saw, and developed an almost childlike admiration for the Americans he met, their customs and way of life – in particular their associational life which, echoing Tocqueville, he thought of as producing a “magic of freedom” that maintains liberty in spite of the odds. The visit was so invigorating for him personally that the experience pulled him out of a near-debilitating depression.

Weber was a deeply pessimistic student of modernity. His ambition was to explain the meaning and consequences of “occidental rationalism”. In Europe, specifically Germany in his case, he believed those consequences were mainly negative: bureaucratization, depersonalization and a flattening of life, so that freedom was available only to a privileged minority. He now needed to fit America into that theory. That proved difficult. He found social life there to be lively and free. For example, this son of the European university establishment found that the American universities outshone those of the old world in creativity and free education. His solution, while making many of the same observations as Tocqueville, was to turn the interpretation of trends upside down. For Tocqueville, America was advanced and represented the future Europe should aspire to; for Weber it was raw and backward in not having yet subjected life to “rational bureaucratization”. That backwardness was America’s good luck, but the luck could not last. America was doomed to catch up with Europe, and all the magic of associational life Weber saw there would come to an end.

If Tocqueville and Weber were masters of ambiguity in balancing the good and the bad in their American analyses, Offe’s third predecessor, Theodor Adorno, was blunt and dogmatic. To put it crudely, while in the United States he hated American life, but back in Germany he turned it into an object of love and admiration.
 
Adorno had come to the United States in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and stayed until 1949. He lived in New York and Los Angeles and hardly travelled anywhere else. He did not subject America to investigation and, although he became an American citizen, was rather uninterested in American life and very uncomfortable with it. He remained a German middle-class intellectual, for whom the democratic quality of American culture was alien.

Nevertheless, his American experience was formative. Like both Tocqueville and Weber, he believed Western societies were all on the same trajectory of development. Like Tocqueville, he believed America was leading this development, which he had the opportunity to study from “the most advanced observation point”. Like Weber, he believed that modern capitalism generated productivity and affluence at the price of conformity, standardization and similarity in social life, and, like Tocqueville, that this was driven by a careless demand for excessive equality even into the extermination of “difference”.

Unlike both Tocqueville and Weber, Adorno did not see the pressure for conformity as a mere threat, but as something actually happening. This was at the core of his great contribution to sociological theory, that of “the culture industry”. He was a theoretical Marxist and took the Marxist economic orthodoxy for granted, but made a notable addition to it: the inevitable perversion of autonomous bourgeois culture into mass culture. The culture industry is a machinery of manipulation and control, against which the individual is powerless; this results in non-liberty, the destruction of progress and “enlightenment as mass deception”. Had Adorno left it there, he might have been seen as a follower of Tocqueville and Weber who verified some of the dark predictions of his earlier colleagues. But Adorno’s problem was that he did not much believe in observation. Instead he rejected careful empirical social science, as in some way being a branch of the culture industry. That may help to explain how, back in Germany, with no apparent difficulty, he turned America into a model, when it proved to be a convenient vehicle of social criticism. The mass culture he had observed while living in the United States became a model of resistance to totalitarianism in Germany. And, lo and behold, again the magic is to be found in American associative culture. “Associative culture” is about as far away as one can get from “mass culture”, but Adorno never made the connection whereby his later polemics would have destroyed his earlier theory. While Tocqueville and Weber were great analysts of nuance and contradictions, Adorno, writes Offe, “offers two pictures of America that simply do not go together and are each as unconvincing as the other”.

The age of visiting America to discover what it looks like is, of course, long gone. Social scientists of Offe’s calibre have been coming and going over the years. Also, as Offe remarks, America is no longer a distant entity but a military, commercial and cultural presence, here and now, in a common space. As a result, he seems to say, there is no longer much point in looking to the American social model as a contribution to the understanding of our European reality. What is worthy of comment is America as a world power.

I am not persuaded. Offe’s own comments on America in the world are cautious, but also standard, and may not have much relevance beyond the present administration (President Bush is frequently referred to). Tocqueville’s, Weber’s and Adorno’s reflections abound with questions that have lost none of their relevance. What is the destiny of freedom and is it better protected in the American or the European social model? Are we excessive in our demand for equality, and if so what follows? The state is both necessary for and dangerous to freedom; how do we find the balance? Is culture, now a huge sector of economic growth, an industry of manipulation? Is there a social architecture between the individual and the state or was Margaret Thatcher right that there is no such thing as society?

If anything, the European–American comparison seems to me to have become more relevant. Europe has put behind it the transition to democracy that Tocqueville correctly saw would be difficult, and is now an equal partner with America in the great drama of liberty. Europe has not been “Americanized” except superficially, and is competing with America with a distinct social model. Comparatively speaking, the European model is more state and less voluntarism, the American model less state and more voluntarism. Which serves the cause of liberty best? The controversy between America and “old Europe” is, from the European side, at least in part about defending the European social model. But is it better? And how can we know?

What Tocqueville, Weber and eventually Adorno saw as peculiar to the United States was not the precariousness of liberty – liberty is always and everywhere under threat – but the strength of the social model to guard against that precariousness. They all predicted that that strength would erode, but, when Weber observed America almost a century after Tocqueville, he found that it had not happened yet. Sociologists are still busy predicting the demise of community and civic culture, but that will probably again prove a mistaken prophecy. America is an enormously complex society. In that complexity, there still is a fabric – call it association life – between individuals and state that continues to offer protection against both social isolation and the coercive instinct of the state.

There is, of course, much lacking in the American model – the persistence of poverty, discrimination and racism. But is the European model superior? If we stay on the Continent, these are some of the things it seems unable to provide: anything more than sluggish economic growth; full employment; an inclination to have enough children to reproduce the population; the eradication of poverty and the prevention of new forms of social exclusion; mass participation in higher education in decent universities; and even social peace.

When France exploded in social riots of near revolutionary strength in late 2005 and early 2006, there was at its core the spectacle of university students protesting against economic and educational reform. These are the students who are offered the most sub-standard higher education in Europe, with no other prospect than diplomas of next to no value on the labour market, who were rallying to protect a system they should have seen as offensive.

I think the French paradox of educated young people mobilizing against their own interests is explainable in mindsets reminiscent of those against which Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno warned. There is clearly mass deception, possibly a product of a state-dominated culture industry. There is a perverse demand for equality in the expectation of free university education for all, which is so strong that it is not affected by a breakdown in the system’s ability to produce what is in demand, in this case real education. That misplaced concept of equality follows through to excessive demands on the State: redress is sought from a State that has already proved itself unable to deliver. There is something deeply disturbing for the cause of liberty when bright young people take to the streets in mass action against their State and see nowhere else to direct their demands than to that self-same discredited State.

Claus Offe’s return to the sociological classics is a reminder of how complicated the concept of equality is. Egalitarians today tend to think of it in distributional terms. The classics saw it as a matter of rights and liberty, and warned against reducing the great idea of equality to a quest for goods. Their challenge, translated to present day conditions, is this: are propenents of the European social model obsessed with little inequalities at the cost of ignoring the big ones? As an egalitarian, I am uneasy about not being able to dismiss that question.

The European social model needs to be challenged more than protected. The way to do that is not for Europeans to turn inwards, but to take their model to the world and submit it to competitive testing. There is more to see in America than a threatening world power; there is also a social model that continues to put trust in voluntarism, and with much success – look again to the American universities. It is a good idea for us in Europe to maintain a healthy curiosity about the peculiarities of American social life.