Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870-1914 (review)

In 1967, when the first issue of the Journal of Social History was published, urban history was already an important part of the exciting new field of social history. For the next twenty years, scholars interested in demography, industrialization, class formation, and mobility made cities—great capitals like London and Paris, as well as lesser known places like Newburyport, Hamilton, and Bochum—their units of analysis. Madeleine Hurd’s book suggests that while urban history remains a lively subject, the sorts of questions that historians now ask about cities have changed. Hurd’s inquiry is driven by political rather than social or economic concerns; she is interested in democratization rather than modernization, in the “public sphere” rather than the factory or neighborhood. To be sure, class relations remain at the core of her study, but she finds the sources of class identity in political action and associational life rather than in work or community.

Hurd poses her central question in the book’s opening paragraph: why did Sweden, in contrast to Germany, democratize “with relative ease”? And for her, as for generations of German historians, this is essentially a question about liberalism: “While German liberals remained weak and isolated, Swedish liberal leaders allied with urban progressives, independent producers, and socialists in a successful movement for parliamentary reform. Why was this possible in Sweden and not in Germany?” (p. 1)

Hurd assembles answers to this question in a series of carefully-crafted, deeply-researched chapters on public life in her two cities. She is especially interested in the social and cultural organizations that defined what it meant to be an independent, respectable member of society. “Democratization,” she argues, “was not just a matter of resources, the material basis of common class interests. The definition of legitimate and illegitimate public action was shifted, blurred, or reinforced by definitions of mental autonomy, respectability, and civic morality.” (p. 14)

In Hamburg, liberals’ bourgeois interests and identity divided them from their potential allies among the Social Democrats; the stronger the socialists’ position in national politics, the more isolated they became in the politically, socially, and cultural stratified urban environment. This isolation was reinforced by norms and institutions that defined workers as immoral, ill mannered, and unreliable. As a result, Hamburg socialists remained “ghettoized” even when, on the eve of the war, their relations with leftwing liberals improved. In Stockholm, on the other hand, bourgeois self-consciousness was weaker; the struggle against unequal suffrage (in both national and local elections) brought liberals and workers together, while reform organizations, especially the temperance movement, led to mutual understanding and cooperation across social divides. The result was a popularly-based progressive movement that survived the conflicts between liberals and socialists over military policy in 1914.

Hurd offers her two cases as a criticism of the so-called Sonderweg interpretation of German history, which explains liberalism’s failure in terms of bourgeois weakness. In Hamburg, at least, the problem was actually the strength of the bourgeoisie’s class consciousness and social cohesion. Stockholm’s liberals were more flexible and accommodating precisely because they were more divided and less firmly committed to their common interests. “A democratizing liberal party,” she writes, “need be neither bourgeois, capitalist, nor libertarian.” (p.3)

Public Spheres, Public Mores, and Democracy illustrates both the strengths and the pitfalls of comparative history. Equally at home in Swedish and German, fully in command of the sources and secondary literature, Hurd gives us vivid and finely-drawn accounts of both cities. And, by looking at Hamburg and Stockholm together, she helps us to understand what is distinctive about each. Her book is, therefore, a useful contribution to the history of the two cities and to the scholarly literature on European urban politics and culture. But Hurd cannot overcome the inherent difficulties in trying to move from an description of local conditions to an interpretation of national outcomes. There is, first of all, the...