Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Theory after 1945 by Jakob Norberg (review)

In 1910, Georg Simmel gave a lecture at the First Annual Meeting of German Sociologists. It was entitled “Soziologie der Geselligkeit,” or sociology of sociability. Simmel depicted sociability as being located between what Ferdinand Tönnies had called Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and what Max Weber would term Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung a few years after Simmel’s lecture. Simmel associated sociability with free-floating forms of association, encumbered by neither concerns for conviviality for the sake of affirming communal bonds (Gemeinschaft) nor attempts to attain personal goals or facilitate certain outcomes (Gesellschaft). For Simmel, sociability was play, and therefore it was a practice of the process of associating; but not among unequals, as he was acutely aware of the class-aspect of such exchange. Simmel’s concept of sociability had little resonance in sociology or even the social sciences in general. Yet a few decades later, Norbert Elias made it a cornerstone of his theory of the civilizing process, in which such sociability would become the cornerstone of ever-expanding ties of affiliations in modernity that required practicing making associations with less-and-less familiar others.

Alas, in his spirited look at postwar sociability in Germany, Jakob Norberg makes but one or two fleeting references to Simmel in a footnote, and Elias’s writings remain unexplored. He confines his analysis to the role of the German Bürgertum in the body politic. His question is a simple but intriguing one: in what ways did intellectuals address whether Germany might be able to recover from the despairs of losing World War II, and from the experience of the dystopian form of Gemeinschaft known as National Socialism, on the basis of a sociability of the Bürgertum, or bourgeois socializing among the civic-minded educated upper-middle and upper strata of a to-be-reconstituted German society? Max Weber—who is never mentioned in the book—might have answered the question by pointing to the advantages of developing a professionalized, bureaucratized, and democratized polity as well as market capitalism, which, indeed, was the course chosen in West Germany in contrast to its eastern regions. It is also the focus of Norberg’s book, which, in spite of its over-reaching subtitle, only covers the first decades after 1945. The book is derived from Norberg’s Princeton dissertation in Germanic studies.

Norberg does not reduce the meaning of sociability to forms of talk or to mere conviviality as such, yet looks largely at discursive socializing and thereby the intellectual positions of contributors to and in the political realm: Dolf Sternberger as editor of the magazine Die Wandlung, the political scientist Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the historian Reinhart Koselleck, and the sociologist Jürgen Habermas, plus a few other figures such as the writer Alexander Kluge. Habermas and Sternberger emerge as protagonists of communities of discourse designed to serve as a foundation for cohesion and order. Habermas made this argument in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), in which he established the first traces of his concept of communicative action in the life world and a basic affirmation of the rationality of modernity that would inspire his later writings. Comparatively, Sternberger was a lesser public figure, whose civic import was in providing a platform for discourse in one of the main early postwar magazines for the educated public. One of its contributors was Hannah Arendt, who in Norberg’s analysis emerges as a sharp critic of the notion of bourgeois sociability. For her, unlike Habermas, there was no facile transition from conversation to deliberation, from salon to politics, from discursive exchange to rationally ordered society. Arendt, according to Norberg, saw the German bourgeoisie as an atomized amalgamation of individuals, mostly interested in realizing its own interests, with an affinity for both a philistine worldview and the mob. For Schmitt, harmonious sociability was but a cover for partisan politics under the guise of a hegemonic culture of...