Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820-1989, and: Guests and Aliens(review)

Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820-1989. By Steve Hochstadt (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999) 331 pp. $52.50

Guests and Aliens. By Saskia Sassen (New York, New Press, 1999) 202 pp. $25.00

As its title aptly suggests, Hochstadt's Mobility and Modernity addresses that aspect of the "onward and upward" story of modernity that associates "modernization" with increased mobility, noting that the notion of a "mobility transition" has widely come to assume the status of a truth as powerful as the better-substantiated "demographic transition." On the basis of his painstaking reconstruction of migration records collected in the Düsseldorf district (initially at the behest of the Napoleonic occupation administration), Hochstadt shows that this conception is untenable. He thus contributes to the ongoing revision of the pervasively held image that pre-industrial, peasant societies were sedentary, static, hidebound--in a word, Karl Marx's "potatoes in a sack."

At every turn, Hochstadt challenges conventional wisdom. He points out the absurdity of the "human capital" theory of migration, which involves complex assessments of the benefits of migration without ever explaining how "such calculations, difficult for graduate students armed with computers, might be made by peasants" (31). He insists on the wrongheadedness of assuming that all migration is permanent, or that it is unidirectional--from rural to urban--as has been the staple of much historical migration research. The stress on circulatory migration patterns recently developed by some researchers has therefore been "a major theoretical innovation" (42), and one central to making sense of his findings. Rather than the inexorable drift from the shiftless countryside to the bustling city so familiar in standard accounts, according to Hochstadt, "German migration in the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly a temporary phenomenon" (89).

Yet, even more than his substantive concerns, Hochstadt's chief mission in this book is to rescue the "clown in regal purple" from the obloquy into which he has fallen in the face of "discourse" and other recently fashionable theories of historical understanding. There are limits, to put it politely, to what we can know about illiterate people in the past through "textual" methods. Migration, Hochstadt insists, is uniquely useful as a demographic indicator of the real choices that people made in their lives; birth and death are involuntary, and marriage he seems (oddly) to regard as a near inevitability. Thus "migration data allow historians our closest approach to most humans in the recent past" (48).

Hochstadt is nonetheless sharply aware of the limits of quantitative data. He presents his research in a manner designed to make it accessible to those of a more "humanistic" bent. Indeed, they comprise the audience to whom he mainly wishes to speak, in order to persuade them that quantitative research need not be intellectually indefensible, politically retrograde, or morally dubious. Before we can begin to speculate about mentalités, Hochstadt usefully reminds us, it is helpful to know about what people actually did, and the Düsseldorf migration data that he has mined so deeply give us an excellent source for doing just that. This is an important work of scholarship that should be of value to anyone concerned with the nature of either "mobility" or "modernity."

Sassen's Guests and Aliens, despite (actually because of) the author's status as a leading academic analyst of migration, employment, and urban life in the "globalized" world, neither purports nor aspires to make any scholarly contribution. Rather than offering any of her own research, Sassen's discussion of European labor migration over the last 200 years is based on the works of a number of other migration scholars, especially Lucassen and Chatelain. ¹ These historians' studies of migration patterns are reported in extensive detail--ennobled by what Sassen likes to call her "reading" of them, as if this magical incantation conferred some special truth on her interpretations. The main point of the book seems to...