Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany, 1820–1914 (review)

From eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers to Enlightenment law codes to the philosophy of Georg W. F. Hegel, the exercise of private property rights was a central and necessary element of civil society. Yet, curiously, the last two decades of scholarship about civil society has largely ignored the role of property, emphasizing instead bourgeois associational life and its public sphere. Sperber’s superb study corrects this oversight. Not disputing the significance of social networks and opinion formation, Sperber nonetheless illuminates another aspect of civil society—the familial and civic relationships that congealed around property. With stunning empirical richness, Sperber examines property disputes in court over the course of a century, showing how the cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of land ownership formed the fabric of civil society. He thus injects locality and materiality into the discussion, showing how property relations not only structured family and community but also shaped normative values.

Accordingly, Sperber presents the nineteenth century as a “golden age of property,” when “the practice and culture of property transactions” articulated social norms, defined cultural boundaries, delimited economic opportunity, and expressed emotional relationships (9). In marked contrast to the restrictive property customs of the old regime, as well as the altered strategies of social mobility under the twentieth-century welfare state, the importance of property between 1815 and 1914, Sperber argues, was never greater. With its wide-ranging comparisons, magisterial command of the secondary literature, and its instructive periodization of “property regimes,” this well-crafted study elucidates the culture of property that framed the ideals and practices of civil society. Among Sperber’s numerous books on German and European political and social history, this one is arguably the most innovative of his prize-winning corpus.

The study rests on a sample of 1,646 property disputes in the German Palatinate, a noncontiguous Bavarian province in southwestern Germany that practiced Napoleonic law. This series is both dense and evenly distributed; most decades offer hundreds of disputes, further allowing Sperber to divide litigants by social group and religion. Significantly, the study cuts across most of Palatine society, examining not only such impersonal legal bodies as the state and railroad companies but also a full range of social classes, from the wealthy to day laborers. The social heterogeneity of ownership is striking. The “small producer” class of peasants, artisans, boatmen, and teamsters formed the largest group of plaintiffs (32 percent), but even the working class—day laborers, servants, and miners—constituted 17 percent of the pool (260). Although this diversity does not typify central Europe, Palatinate conditions are eminently comparable to areas in western Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, and North America.

Sperber exploits this database in various ways. While he provides information for historians, anthropologists, and political scientists interested in broader sociocultural comparisons, he also limns the social complexities of property ownership with individual case studies, bringing to life the struggles and ironies of family and community life. Sperber’s felicitous marriage of serial analysis with microhistory reveals a graceful expertise with a range of economic, legal, anthropological, and social-historical approaches. Not least, Sperber is concerned with discerning change over time, demonstrating civil society’s overlapping ties to both the old regime and the twentieth century.

Four large themes organize the study’s chapters: property’s impact on the family life cycle; the acquisition and transmission of property and its uses for credit; the legal, gendered, religious, and medical boundaries of property, which framed normative civic relations; and a narrative periodization of nineteenth-century property uses. As such, they offer arguments for numerous disciplines. Historians of the family will benefit from discussions on how property impinged on both family solidarity and individuals’ claims to independence. Sperber further explores how familial cooperation and emotional ties were simultaneously bound up in “rational” and “calculated” market interests. This book’s arguments on the granting and taking of credit—“a central and underappreciated feature of property transactions” (74)—will be of particular importance...