- Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber & Adorno in the United States
Claus Offe is a German political scientist, and this little book translates some lectures he delivered at Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research in 2003 and that he published in 2004 in German. The writing is of unusual interest, and Offe revivifies old questions of American national character and of America's meaning to European intellectuals.
The book looks at three analyses of the United States by European students of society who traveled in America. Alexis de Tocqueville's trip of ten months in the early 1830s led to Democracy in America. Max Weber visited the country in 1904 for some three months and, according to Offe, the visit influenced many of Weber's ideas, including those presented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Theodor Adorno fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and lived in the United States for eleven years. While he did not travel in the country the way the other two did, his long stay also resulted in many writings that explicitly developed ideas about life in America.
I would describe Offe's field as the political economy of the modern West. He is still trying to develop large-scale generalizations about culture in the United States on the basis of a tiny amount of evidence, and the method will send a shiver up the spine of historians. But the discussion is more grounded in empirical study than, for example, the lucubrations of many recent French intellectuals who have expounded on American civilization. The basic idea is to take the ruminations of each visitor and use them not primarily to talk about America, but to show how they connect up to the authors' deepest concerns about Europe and its prospects. The writings of the Europeans in the first instance are not taken to analyze mores in the United States but to illuminate hopes and fears about European political regimes.
In his examination of Tocqueville and Weber, Offe puts forward the central issue. The United States represents the future of the West, and in some measure the emphasis of its political and economic institutions on equality is not only seen as inevitable but also to be recommended. Simultaneously, both Tocqueville and Weber are disquieted by the prospect that commercial egalitarianism will result in the destruction of civil liberty—if not in the United States, at least in Europe, when American ways reach its shores. [End Page 155]
Offe's chapter on Adorno is less interesting, although this is probably due to the fact that Adorno's views themselves are less nuanced. A Heideggerian of the left, Adorno disliked the United States, constantly dreading that it might evolve into a fascist state and always betraying his qualms about the outlook for Europe. Offe does suggest, however, that in later, less well-known work, Adorno retracted his negative conclusions about America and intimated that the United States might remain a beacon of civic freedom. Still, in this writing, Adorno was exuding anxieties about the Europe that Hitler had sullied and what might lie in store for it.
In the last chapter, which summarizes his ideas about the West, Offe is less convincing. His perspective is skeptical. The trajectories of Europe, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, seem to him to be diverging. There is not much sense in speaking of a "West" at all. Who knows if the speculation is true? It is grounded in the display of Offe's not unjustified feelings about American unilateralism and the imprudence of the war in Iraq. It is hard to dispute these feelings; but it seems to me to be a mistake to use them as a basis for forecasting this century's structure of world politics.
There is one trope that certainly appears in the writings of Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno, and perhaps in Offe, that bears noting. Each of the three, and perhaps their interlocutor, presumes that the Euro-Americans carved their state...