Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 ed. by David Blackbourn, James Retallack, and: Gorod i gorodskaia zhizn’ v Rossii XIX stoletiia: Sotsial’nye i kul’turnye aspekty by L. V. Koshman (review)

These two books provide contrasting views of the role of the Sonderweg (“special path” in German) debate in German and Russian historiography. In practice, Sonderweg means a deviation from the normal path of modernization followed by other Western states. Until the 1980s, the Sonderweg thesis was dominant in German history, and the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 was presented as the result of Germany’s special path. Key to the Sonderweg thesis was the idea that Germany lacked a strong bourgeoisie to act as a counterbalance to emerging authoritarian movements. In the 1980s, historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley launched an attack on the Sonderweg thesis that was successful in creating a paradigm shift within German historiography away from the Sonderweg. They convincingly showed that the German bourgeoisie had been compared, not to actually existing middle classes in Europe, but to an ideal bourgeoisie that had never existed anywhere.¹ In Russian history, the Sonderweg debate was important for the original formulation of the new imperial history, which sought to question the uniqueness of Russia’s imperial experience by placing it in a wider European perspective.²

Complicating the situation even further is the existence of two broad traditions of modernization theory: the stadial or Marxist and the functionalist. The Marxist theory of modernization will be extremely familiar to those of an earlier generation: there are stages of society characterized by their means of production and ruling class. These stages inevitably follow one another, so that each society must progress through feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally communism. Marx himself borrowed from Adam Smith, who had originated the four-stage theory by the 1760s, in which all societies progress through the stages of hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial society. Interestingly, Russia, via Smith’s student Semyen Desnitskii, was exceptionally early in embracing this theory.³

The functionalist version of modernization, synthesized by Talcott Parsons from the work of classic sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim, linked modernization to parallel processes such as urbanization and industrialization and emphasized the shift from a communal premodern man (the term is chosen deliberately) to an individual modern one. Although Parsons is not often cited in historical scholarship, the functionalist version of modernization often serves as a generally accepted underpinning to much of the work on the topic. Newer functionalist theorists have modified the classic version so that it is no longer unidirectional, nor does it require the destruction of traditional society in order to achieve modernization. Modernization is still related to economic processes such as industrialization and urbanization. Modernity, as it is most commonly used now after the cultural turn, usually has cultural foundations and is linked to mass culture, mass media, and techniques of the self.

Koshman is part of a larger school of history that draws upon the stadial theory of modernization. Boris Mironov‘s magisterial history of the social history of Russia was criticized because of its heavy use of such theory.⁴ The view of modernization here is as a path with its own end. From this point of view, modernization failed and the proof is the Russian Revolution. Koshman follows this argument, but adds the persistence of estate identity to other reasons for the failure.

Another stream of thought deals with modernization as a process with ambiguous and unplanned outcomes. The Russian Revolution is not seen as a moment of failure or even necessarily a definitive break. Some of these scholars focus on how the state forcibly pushed forward its projects to...