38 JAMES MANOR

and acquired enough substance to endure into the 1970s and 1980s. It has done so despite attempts by his daughter and other populists to de-institutionalize and as disadvantaged groups kicked against inequality and exploitation, according to the egalitarian logic of a political system in which each person has the same number of votes.

Political Studies (1990), XXXVIII, 39-55

The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy: Otto Hintze's

Conceptual Map of Europe

EDWARD C. PAGE

University of Hull

The work of Otto Hintze offers a rare combination oflong-tenn historical perspective, detailed description of institutional arrangements, exploration of broad developmental trends as well as understanding of the factors producing divergent patterns of political development. One of the dominant themes of his comparative writing is his conception of Europe as comprising a heartland, which developed military-bureaucratic government institutions, and a set of peripheral states in which institutions of self-government were more likely to develop. While Hintze's analysis largely only goes as far as the nineteenth century, it offers a number of insights into understanding the development of the modern state in Europe.

Introduction

Our awareness of the importance of historical processes for understanding contemporary political systems has been considerably heightened by the invaluable work done by Stein Rokkan and his followers, loosely grouped under the heading of 'nation building'. This branch of research has focused on three main areas: the mobilization of political support for political parties, the growth and changing modes of distributing welfare benefits and 'state building', the development of governmental institutions. 1 Of these three areas the state­building literature is probably the least well developed. Although it was the focus of Reinhard Bendix's 1964 work on Nation Building and Citizenship, the last major contribution to the field, Tilly's 1975 collection, The Formation of National States in Europe, still concluded by 'preaching about where to go next, not pointing with pride to where we have been' .2

1 Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 'Introduction', inS. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York, Free Press, 1967); Stein Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, Parties (Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 1970); Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin, Economy, Territory, Identity: The Politics of West European Peripheries (London, Sage, 1983); Peter Flora and Jens Alber, 'Modernization, democratization and the development of welfare states in Europe', in Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer (eds), The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Books, 1981).

2 Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of our Changing Social Order (New York and London, John Wiley, 1964); Charles Tilly, 'Western state making and theories of political transformation', in Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Europe (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 636.

40 EDWARD C. PAGE f Of course, this is not to ignore the fact that there have occasionally been broad ~

analyses of the development of bureaucracy and parliamentary government ~-~ within a comparative context.3 Curiously, however, local government has not -. ·. been discussed from a similar comparative historical perspective. Moreover, ,·. some scholars have taken a systemic approach to the comparative study of political institutions by exploring the developmental factors which lead to . parliamentary forms of democracy and to dictatorship.4 These systemic works f tend to focus on broad concepts as dependent variables rather than the I arrangements prevailing in any particular country. Poggi is concerned with the prog~ess ?f dev~lopment to the modern s_tate rathe.r than any part~cular stat~ ~nd .' ·._·_ how It mtght dttfer from other states. Etsenstadt IS concerned wtth the pohttcal ._, systems of empires and Barrington Moore with dictatorship and democracy. . Valuable though such a broad systemic focus can be, it does not address the ·' variability of governmental arrangements for different types of modern states, democracies or dictatorships. There are two broad purposes behind comparative analysis: one is to derive universal propositions about the countries compared, the other is to understand and explain differences between them. Systemic studies of institutional development have tended to stress the former. The focus of this essay is the latter.

Other studies have sought to bring a comparative historical dimension to bear on the different growth patterns within European administrative structures. These have fallen short, however, of providing even in a preliminary way a body of issues and theories that might help in understanding the relationship between state building and administrative structures. In fact, one of the most valuable among such works, Chapman's Profession of Government, consciously eschews a 'theoretical discussion of the state and the legal relationship between civil servants and the state'.' Armstrong's widely cited study is concerned less with understanding the formation of national administrative structures in the process of political development than with exploring how the administrative elites of different countries maintained their elite position, with self-preservation and self­aggrandizement becoming somewhat implausibly the prime motor force in administrative development.6

Despite the apparent revival of an interest in the state, heralded by Theda Skocpol in a leading recent collection of essays in the field, there is no evidence that this has generated a concern with explaining differences in institutional structures cross-nationally .7 In this collection, when structures are discussed they

J Ernest Barker, The Development of Public Services in Western Europe 166Q-/930 (London, Oxford University Press, 1944); Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (London, Hutchinson, 1978).

~ Barrington Moore (Jr), Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World(Hannondsworth, Penguin, 1967); Samuel N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York, Free Press, 1963).

~ Brian Chapman. The Profession of Government: The Public Service in Europe (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1959), p. 44.

6 John A. Armstrong, The European Administrative Elite (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1973); see the review of Armstrong's book by Alfred Diamant in American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 1053-6.

1 Theda Skocpol, 'Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research', in Peter 8. ...... _._,.L n ... ~_.__ .. ., ......... ~ Th .. ~" S\rocnol (eds). Brin.llinx the State Back In (London,

'(

"" ;~··

The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy 41

are treated primarily as independent variables, from the perspective of their impact on policy outcomes, a hazardous task as has been noted in other fields of social science.8 Furthermore, the editors of the volume imply that little progress has been made in the direction of explaining institutional differences since Tilly's edited volume appeared ten years before. 'The time is ripe', they say, 'to extend the approach to basic state formation presented in the 1975 volume, The Formation of National States'.9

It is precisely in this connection that the neglected work of Otto Hintze is particularly interesting since he looks at different patterns of state formation. His concern is above all with the institutions of government rather than with the mobilization of political demands and support more characteristic of the nation­building literature. He looks at the development of legislatures, bureaucratic institutions and local government in individual nations. Hintze's work is an interesting combination of what might be considered more traditional historical scholarship and a concern with general social scientific concepts and issues. The influences on his work reflect this range of interests. As a doctoral student, his work was shaped by and earned the praise of Johann Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey. His interest in the study of law and constitutions brought him into contact with Gustav Schmoller. His admiration for Max Weber's methodo­logical and theoretical work is acknowledged in his historical writing as well as in his essays on Weber. Hintze developed a fascination for sociology which led him to declare in the mid-1920s that he would have studied sociology if such a thing had existed when he was a student. The range of disciplines he brought to bear on political and constitutional questions led Oestreich to describe him as a 'universal scientist since he sought to unite the border areas of history and political science, oflaw, economics and sociology and their conflicting conceptual languages'. 10

The breadth of Hintze's interests was displayed in the variety of his work: the esliays on social science theory gathered in the collection Soziologie und Geschichte, the writing on Prussian history in his highly influential Die Hohenzollern und Ihr Werk, as well as his edited set of essays, Regierung und Verwaltung, and the comparative investigations of institutional history contained in his edited collection, Staat und Verwaltung.

It is this latter focus that is of particular interest here. His writings have begun to attract some attention in the literature on the state. Skocpol points to a well­documented 'Weberian-Hintzean' state theory, although her essay hardly

& See Theda Skocpol and Margaret Weir, 'State structures and the possibilities for Keynesian responses to the great depression in Sweden, Britain and the United States', in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (London, Cambridge University Press, 1985). For an excellent discussion of the structure-performance problem see Christopher Hood, The Machinery of Government Problem (Glasgow, University of Strathclyde, Studies in Public Policy No. 28, 1979).

9 Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol, 'On the road toward a more

adequate understanding of the state', in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (London, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 362.

10 Gerhard Oestreich, 'Otto Hintzes Stellung zur Politikwissenschaft und Soziologie', in Otto

~int~, Soziologie und Geschichte Staat und Verfassung, edited by Gerhard Oestreich (GOttingen,

42 EDWARD C. PAGE

discusses Hintze at all." In fact, as Gilbert suggests, the literature on Hintze available in English remains meagre. 12 Most dicsussions of Hintze in the English­speaking world, including Skocpol's, cite as the sole source Gilbert's excellent translation of 11 of his major essays. Yet these constitute just one-fifth of those collected in the three volumes edited by Gerhard Oestreich.

l Hintze's approach is broad and bold in both its geographical and temporal ·f·.

coverage. In the main he deals with the whole of Europe from the tenth to the . nineteenth century. If one wants to expand the study of the historical .: development of modern political systems to include a more rigorous and defined f focus upon institutional differences between countries, then it is very difficult to imagine it being produced in isolation from Hintze's work.

Hintze's last major publication appeared in 1932. His failing eyesight made impossible the detailed archive work of his early studies and his later work tended towards abstraction rather than empirical detail. 13 He never produced a definitive general work on comparative administrative history. It had been his ambition to write one and it appears that some time around 1930 the manuscript was completed. It was never published since Hintze was unprepared to shorten it in line with publishers demands. 14 The manuscript has been lost.

Although a conservative, he was strongly opposed to the Nazi regime. In May 1933, when Friedrich Meinecke ended the association of his wife, Hedwig Hintze, with the Historische Zeitschrift due to her Jewish extraction, Otto Hintze also refused to have anything to do with the journal. He insisted that his name be taken off the cover of the next issue. 'I want to avoid appearing to agree with a cultural policy with the declared objectives of eradicating the year 1789 from world history and ensuring that in fifty years nobody in Germany will know what the word "Marxism" means' he wrote. 15 In 1938 he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in response to their questionnaire about the racial purity of its members and their spouses. After one of his essays was refused publication he changed his will to require that all his personal papers be destroyed. His wife committed suicide in a Dutch mental hospital in 1942, having fled Germany in 1939 before the war broke out. Apparently, Hedwig Hintze had plans to publish her husband's work in the United States but was refused access to his papers by his family.

'1 See, for example Skocpol, 'Bringing the state back in'. Where Skocpol does say something about

Hintze, this is rather loose. To Hintze appears to be attributed a concern with 'world economic patterns of trade, division of productive activities, investment flows and international finances' (p. 8). This is indeed a novel interpretation and would require further justification.

' 1 Felix Gilbert's The Historical Es ... ·ays of Otto Hintze (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975) is the only English-language source of Hintze's original work. Gilbert describes the secondary lit~:rature on Hintze in English as 'meagre' (p. 29). There is evidence of an increasing interest in Hintze's work: see, for example, Gabriel Almond's recent discussion of the relationship between international and domestic politics, 'The international-national connection', British Journal of Politicui Science, 19: 2 ( 1989), 237-59. This paper was accepted for publication before the appearance of Professor Almond's essay.

ll Hintze's life is discussed by Dietrich Gerhard, 'Otto Hintze PersOnlichkeit und Werk:', in Otto BUsch und Michael Erbe (eds), Ouo Hintze Wid die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft: Ein Tagungs­bericht (Berlin, Colloquium Verlag, 1983).

14 Fritz Hartung, 'Otto Hintzes Lebenswerk', in Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, edited by G~~h:Cd _Oes~re~h ((_i~ttin~n, y~denhoeck and Ruprecht, 1962), p. 32.

The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy 43

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the ideas of Otto Hintze on the comparative institutional development of Europe in the form of his conceptual map of Europe. This term is not one that Hintze used. Rather it draws attention first to the link between Hintze's work on state formation and the subsequent nation-building research of Rokkan, who did produce a conceptual map of Europe. 16 Secondly, it emphasizes the importance that Hintze attaches in much of his writing to the physical location of a country as a factor shaping its institutional development. This paper does not offer a critical evaluation of Hintze's work, which can be found elsewhere. 17 The first part sets out the basic components of the conceptual map according to Hintze. Next, it explores how this map was applied in a variety of different contexts: to explain different types of systems of estate representation, parliamentarism, bureaucracy and local government. The final part explores the consequences of these historical insights for contemporary systems of government. Hintze's analysis made relatively little reference to the period in which he lived (1861-1940). His systematic historical analysis concentrated upon the period before 1800. This raises the question of whether Hintze's work can be useful in the development of state-building theory or whether it is merely an historical curiosity. It is rare that an historical perspective of over900 years is combined with such mastery of fine detail as it is in the work of Hintze. There is, therefore, an a priori case for regarding his work as invaluable in any extension of our understanding of different experiences of nation building into the realm of state formation -· the development of administrative and institutional structures.

The Conceptual Map

Of prime importance in Otto Hintze's comparative studies of Europe is the distinction that he makes between the core and the peripheral areas surrounding it. By the core of Europe he means the lands which came under the Frankish empire, including most of continental Western Europe, reaching as far south as central Italy and northern Spain and incorporating, to the east, the German territories west of the Elbe. The peripheral areas are the British Isles, the Scandinavian states (including Denmark), Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Castile and Naples-Sicily.

Two main features gave European institutional develoment its distinctiveness: the feudal system and the intense competition between states for military supremacy. Both of these features were related to geographical position: a feudal system was found in its purest form within the Frankish empire and it was here that the competition between states was at its strongest.

Hintze's discussion stresses three main defining features of the ideal type of feudalism, to use a term he borrowed from Max Weber.

The military: the creation of a special, educated professional warrior class, bound in loyalty to the master and with a position based on contract and privilege.

16 For a good discussion of Rokkan's work see Erik AHart and Henry Valen, 'Stein Rokkan: an intellectual portrait', in Per Torsvik (ed.), Mobilization, Centre-Peripherv Structures and Nation Bu_i!ding (Oslo, U niversitetsforlaget, 1981 ). .

44 EDWARD C. PAGE

2 The socioeconomic: the creation of a manorial-agrarian economy which provided this privileged warrior class with an income without labour.

3 The local dominance of this warrior nobility with decisive influence in a wider state or even virtual autocratic government within parts of it. The state is susceptible to this due to a very loose structure, the preponderance of personal as against institutional forms of domination, through the tendency towards patrimonialism and through a very close connection with the hierarchy of the church. 18

While elements of feudalism in this sense could be found elsewhere in Europe or even in the ancient world and in oriental empires, he believed that feudalism existed only in three places in the world outside the Frankish empire: Russia, the Islamic states and Japan.19 He explains this by arguing that there is a normal process of state building through which a people becomes a state. The creation of an empire is a deviant mode of nation building which seeks to create a political unit by subjecting different peoples. An imperial state such as the Frankish developed feudalism as a means of seeking to exert domination over a wide territory. The normal path of state development was followed 'everywhere outside the old Carolingian empire in Europe', and feudalism in its pure form, where all three of the conditions were met, is found above all in France, Germany and in parts of Italy and Spain.

Outside of the core, feudalism in its strict sense did not take hold because the peripheral areas remained more or less untouched by the 'world-historic imperialistic movement which took hold of the Frankish empire', even though developments in the core undoubtedly had a very strong influence on the peripheral states.20 England, he argues, although 'swamped' by Frankish feudalism after the Norman invasion, managed to overcome this stage very quickly because it already had a strong monarchy and money economy. Thus England 'did not have to go through the childhood diseases of the continental states'. 21

The second distinctive feature of the core of Europe is that it was more closely involved in the interstate struggle for power between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The whole history of the European state system is a chain of attempts by one power or another to win supremacy. In turn the other powers seek to retain their independence or even their existence ... The actual mainspring of this whole movement is the rivalry between France and the Habsburgs in Spain and Germany ... The soul of the new state (in the core of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was the will to power; its backbone is the strong standing army ... it is astounding how this institution of the standing anny determined and altered the structure and functioning of the state right down to the smallest details. 22

1 ~ Hintze, Staat und Verlassung, p. 95. 1 ~ Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 99. ;>u Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 102. ll Hintze. Staat und VerjiJSsung, p. 103.

••••••• ' The Polilical Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy 45

Hintze does not seek to present a deterministic picture of constitutional and administrative development. These are features which figure prominently in his wide-ranging historical comparisons rather than components of a general theory. His analyses at times directly challenge the proposition that economic conditions have a decisive impact on institutional forms of governmental systems, a view which he traces to Aristotle through Machiavelli and finds its most recent expression in the works of Karl Marx 'and therefore orthodox social-democratic dogma' .23 The two features that he identifies within his conceptual map of Europe shape many subsequent developments. In particular, they affected the development of centralized-bureaucratic states and the developnment of local government. We shall look at each of these in turn.

The Centralized-Bureaucratic Core

The salient features of the Carolingian empire, the feudal structure and the major involvement in the European struggle for state supremacy, dominated the pre­nineteenth-century development of powerful centralized bureaucracies in the core of Europe. Hintze borrows from Herbert Spencer the notion of the industrial versus the warrior state but fits it into his own historical-institutional framework.

The different governmental and administrative systems of large European states can be traced back to two main types, one of which can be called the English and the other the continental. Some degree of differentiation between the two could already be detected in the middle ages and even persisted in the sixteenth century, when the Tudor monarchy managed to curb the power of parliament; but the actual main difference came in the critical time for European constitutions, after the middle of the seventeenth century. The difference lay in the fact that the continent developed military absolutism with a bureaucratic administration while in England the stormy path that had been set earlier on continued progressively to push back monarchical power and lead to what we call parliamentarism and self-government.24

The influence of the middle ages on the division of Europe between these two models of constitutional development came through the influence of the feudal system on the subsequent system of estates representation. In his 'Typology of estate-based constitutions of the west' Hintze points out, as have many others, the essential dualism of estate representation, according to which the state is divided between royal and estate power. There are two axes of power.

The one axis lies in the court of the king, in the connection of the estates with him, in their dependence upon his power. The other axis lies in the provinces in the local spheres of domination of the estates themselves in their corporative connection with each other.H

Eventually royal power, the domination axis, 'radiates the greater power'. In consequence the estates can either unite and act independently of or even against the monarch or become a tool of royal authority. In France and the German

LJ Hintze, Staal und Verfassung, p. 425; see also pp. 34-5. l• Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 427. lS ll'-•- C'·--• ··-"' 07 __ , __ . ··- - ,,.,,.,

46 EDWARD C. PAGE

territories, the domination axis tended to characterize the development of estate representation, while in England, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe the corporative axis maintained itself. One axis 'tends towards absolutism and the other towards parliamentarism' .26

Hintze distinguishes between bicameral and tricameral systems of estate representation and suggests that "the governmental forms of absolutism and parliamentarism essentially follow on from the difference between the two· chamber and the three-court system'. 27 The estate systems provide the linkage between the experience of state building in the middle ages and the period of absolutism. The feudal system of the Carolingian empire, through creating heritable fiefs, meant that in order to build a state a monarch had to overcome the territorial powers created through the feudal system in order to create nations. In the peripheral countries (apart from Bohemia and Poland) the absence of a developed feudal system meant that old state organizations were maintained and the estates did not have to be overcome in the same way.

The second cause of bureaucratic absolutism was the struggle for power within Europe. Hintze often quotes the English historian and pioneer political scientist Robert Seeley's dictum: 'the degree of political freedom within a state must reasonably be inversely proportional to the military and political pressures on its borders'. 2~ Hintze does not mean here personal freedom but rather the 'absence or rather low level of compulsion in public institutions .. it is the cooperative spirit of voluntary collaboration and self-government as against the spirit of domination as it is seen above all in military discipline' .19 Above all the struggle for power in Europe called for standing armies and an administration to provide for them.

Military garrisons surrounded the country like iron hoops and forced the provinces towards unity. A single will reigned in the firmly structured state~ that of the supreme military commander ~ and gave it its military characteristics.30

The changes in bureaucracy brought about by the requirements of military organization transformed the administration of modern states everywhere but had a special impact in the heartland of the Carolingian empire, which was more closely involved in this struggle for power. Above all, military organization brought about increased reliance on a commissary (a term applied to a distinctive type of royal servant), bound by the instruction of his superior to carry out a determined task. This contrasted with the servant who was an officer, whose tasks and tenure were defined by law. Gradually, the extraordinary position of commissary, over whom princes and monarchs had greater control than officers, became regular officials. 'In this way the old primitive territorial government of bailiffs and stewards was replaced by a new territorial official throughout Europe'. 31

«> Hintze, Staat und Verfa.l·sung, p. 123. Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 125.

11 Hintze, Sraat und Ver.fassung, p. 366. For a discussion of Seeley and his contemporaries see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983).

J<J Hintze, Staat und Ver.fassung, p. 434. w Hintze, Staat und Ver.fassung, p. 429.

' The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy 47

Sweden and England, although closely involved in European conflicts throughout the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, did not develop a centralized bureaucratic administration as did the nations in the core of Europe. Certainly the institution of the commissary developed in these countries too. Yet Hintze distinguishes between different types of commissary: the court commissaries of the centralized bureaucratic and absolutist state, and the country commissaries who were usually recruited from among local elites and who tended to represent and look after prominent local interests rather than be simply agents of a strong centralized authority. The former were agents of bureaucratic centralization and the latter of local self-government. 32

Bureaucratic centralism did not develop in England despite its international military role because its geographical isolation meant tQat it did not have to raise and administer a standing army. Its international strenith as a military, trading and imperial nation was based upon a navy, and navies do not shape the apparatus of government as do armies. 33

Hintze frequently terms the process by which royal power is extended to generate networks extending royal authority throughout the kingdom 'intensi­fication' of state activity; the creation of 'more rational' conduct of legislative, administrative and financial business. In this process of intensification the reception of Roman law, strongest in the core of Europe after the thirteenth century, played a particularly important part." The type of official produced by Seeley's Law in the core of Europe were the intendants of France, who emerged from the civil wars of the late sixteenth century as officials who would provide for the army not only materially but also through the establishment of public order and the dispensing of justice. They became, especially under Louis XIV, peacetime agents of royal absolutism, subsequently developing into the institution of the prefect.35 A similar institutional development is traced in Brandenburg Prussia from Higher War Commissaries through the War and Domains Boards through to the late nineteenth-century institution of the Regierungspriisident, the chief official of Prussian administrative districts.

Such a category of officials is simply absent in Britain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as bureaucratic absolutism was developing out of military necessity in the heartland of Europe, British battles were fought on distant seas and shores. 36 While they were costly and swelled the national debt, they brought in greater revenue through their impact on trade and industry. Consequently:

The state appeared to a certain extent to be a lucrative undertaking in which its creditors were shareholders. The entire state had a more cooperative and corporative character, while on the continent the domination-oriented monarchical form of organisation was prominent. 37

Characteristic of this contrast is the difference between the English Justice of the Peace and the continental commissaries. The Justices of the Peace, originally

32 Hintze, Staal und Ver.fassung, p. 270. 33 Hintze, Staat und Ver.fassung, p. 428. .w Hintze, Staal und Verfassung, p. 184. JS Hintze, Staat und Ver.fassung, p. 430. 30 Hintze, Staat und Ver.fassung, p. 431. J7 u;_, __ "'•--· .. .J rr __ r __

I 48 EDWARD C. PAGE

agents of monarchical control under the Tudors and Stuarts, became repres­entatives of dominant classes in the locality.

Administration was conducted in an old-world patriarchal style, with the comfortable nonchalance which is the hallmark of an uncontrolled aristocratic self-government and which provides a striking contrast with the sharpness and bustle of continental administrative authorities.38

The peripheral areas of Europe resemble more closely the English pattern than the French and the German. In Sweden, the development of absolutism and later parliamentarism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincides with its development and subsequent loss of world power status. Hungary. despite its link with the Habsburg monarchy, retained its parliamentary forms of govern· ment and likewise failed to develop a centralized bureaucratic structure based upon powerful central administrative agents such as intendants or prefects. Poland is further proof of Seeley's Law. At first it was spared the pressures on its borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but with the changing constellation of European powers was faced in the eighteenth century with increased external pressure from Austria, Russia and Prussia. By that time, it was unable to create a powerful national army due to the strength of its territorial nobility and eventually disintegrated as a result of internal pressure and external attack. 39

The Demise of Higher-Level Local Government

Hintze's analysis of the development oflocal government follows on closely from his analysis of bureaucracy. His concern is with the period before the nineteenth century. After the nineteenth century, he argues, the influence of theories becomes decisive in the development of local government -.conscious delibera­tions about the shape of local government as they emerged from the thought of Turgot, Stein or the French Revolution affected reform movements. However, before that, theories played little part in shaping local government; "real relationships' affected its development. This development took on the character of organic growth rather than a deliberately conceived plan.40

Hintze concentrates his analysis on 'higher-level local government', a term used to describe counties and their equivalents in other countries. He excludes municipal government which, he suggests, was modelled on the principle oflocal self-government as it emerged in the counties. Counties and municipalities were shaped by different historical processes, above all different social and political classes; in the municipalities this was a free bourgeoisie interested in trade and commerce, while in the counties a landed aristocracy had its origins in feudal relationships.

How do we tell whether a governmental system has self-government? Hintze defines self-government broadly in the following terms:

Self-government is national government which is carried out in a local authority through its own organs or by those appointed by the state to carry

31 Hintze, Staal und Verfassung, p. 431. w Hintze, Staat und Verj~ssung, PP:..~~7-20.

'if' The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy

it out but selected from their own number ... It rests upon the fact that the general interests of the state as a whole coincide with the special interests of the leading sectors of the population of the area.~ 1

49

The best example ofself-government is the English county. Hintze's emphasis on the subordinate nature of local government is important for his historical explanation. To be a local government, a territory must be an 'integrated component of a larger whole state' .42 Areas which are not components of a whole state might be territories of a fragmented state or components of a federal or confederal system but they are not local governments.

The first condition for the development of higher-level local govermnent is the absence of the centrifugal force of feudalism. In the Carolingian empire the feudal system created powerful decentralized loci of military power of a central monarchy. The Frankish feudal system patrimonialized the counties by making county offices heritable. This led to a destruction of the state, a

degeneration of the life of the state which was countered by the development of cities in Italy, by the monarchy striving for centralism and absolutism in France and later by the French Revolution, while in Germany there was no countervailing response, a fact that marks off German public life to its disadvantage even when compared with that of its less cultivated eastern neighbours. 43

A patrimonialized system of territorial government is incompatible with local self-government. To the extent that these territorial units make themselves independent of a national monarchy (as in the West German states) they are no longer units of local government since they are not subordinate to a state authority; to the extent that the national monarchy combats the power of these territorial units through appointing at their head national administrative agents, they are no longer self-governing. In the peripheral areas, on the other hand, the old territorial divisions persisted without needing to be transformed in the process of 'intensification' of state activity into agencies of state centralization and the locus of royal bureaucratic authority. Thus the county in England, the Laen of Norway and Denmark, the Caste/lanies and later the Voivodships of Poland, the Comitates of Hungary and Bohemia, the burgraveships and later the districts as well as the provinces of southern Italy and the counties of Germany east of the Elbe survived as possible foci oflocal self-government.

The question of whether self-government in higher-level local authorities would really develop in these [peripheral] countries is not decided [by the feudal system] alone'." The second condition for the development of higher· level local government in the counties is a 'broad and strong lower knightly nobility as a landowning aristocracy'. It was~ petty nobility, rather than a high aristocracy that was the major bearer of local self-government; the gentry in England rather than the lords, the petty nobility of Hungary rather than the magnates, the Bohemian country knights rather than the upper landed aristocracy. The upper nobility cannot be the bearer of local self-government because of its 'tendency

41 Hintze, Staal und Verfassung, p. 220. 42 Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 218. 41 Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 226. 4ol U;~·~A (',n_, ,. _ _./ lf-~1"---·-- - 'l'lf\

50 EDWARD C. PAGE

towards exclusiveness and to seek to form a state within a state'. Farmers as a social group were too parochial, although they were the basis for lower-level self­government within parishes in England until the eighteenth century and in Scandinavia for much longer.

Between high nobility, farmers and the cities, rural local self-government generally only came about where a sufficiently broad and strong class of economically independent large landowners was present who had the means and the time for public service in peace and war and whose horizons were broad enough to look beyond the interests of those living within the precincts of the local church tower, and who through their mobility and versatility were able to take part in public affairs and understand and exploit the relationship between the interests of their area and the interests of the state as a whole.45

Of the areas outside the heartland of the Carolingian empire which failed to develop local self-government in higher local authorities, Hintze cites the Scandinavian countries (apart from Sweden)46 and Spain where the power of the higher nobility prevented its development. In the eastern peripheries, Bohemia, Hungary (which had a pattern of development especially close to that of England) and Poland, where the higher nobility allied itself with the petty nobility, local self-government developed in a different form to that experienced in England. Instead of collaborating with the crown, local self-government in the eastern peripheries was opposed to the crown and eventually gained the upper hand.

The Conceptual Map and tbe Contemporary Map

Hintze's analysis then, is based on the distinction between the core of Europe and its peripheries. Before the nineteenth century, there were sharp differences between the centralized-bureaucratic states that occupied the territory of the Frankish empire and the states surrounding it which displayed tendencies towards parliamentarism. While the common features of central or peripheral location did not necessarily entail identical patterns or timing of state-building processes, they did however create two general paths of development. Hintze was not unique in pointing this out but the detail and rigourwhich he brings to bear in his analysis of the subject is impressive to say the least.

Between the turn of the nineteenth century and the 1980s, there are clearly discontinuities which make it impossible to extrapolate to the present day the patterns of development set out by Hintze. In between we have, to hit the high points, witnessed three major reconstructions of European boundaries; the achievement and in some case loss once again of independence by a number of states; major changes in the industrial, political and social structure of European countries, including the expansion of government responsibilities, the spread of various forms of parliamentary government and the modernization of local government and bureaucracy; the unification of Germany and Italy; three major

H Hintze, S1aat und Verfassung, p. 231. .. For a discussion of Sweden see Otto Hintze, 'Die schwedische Verfassung und das Problem der

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I

The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy 51

European wars and several less extensive ones, not to speak of the Russian Revolution and the imposition of Soviet rule on Eastern Europe. Moreover, the discontinuities between the period covered by Hintze's main comparative administrative historical works and the period after 1800 is further marked by the fact that the forces moving national development changed. After 1800, as Hintze suggests, there is a more conscious use of theories and ideas about governmental structures than before, making the linkage between broad historical factors such as feudal legacy, power politics, the social structure and the pattern of state building far more tenuous and difficult to detect.

Hintze's discussion of contemporary issues underlines the discontinuity: 'it is impossible to treat the new aspects of government as deviant cases or abnormalities of only ephemeral importance as French political doctrine likes to' .47 What are these discontinuities? Perhaps the most important was the French Revolution and its impact. While democratization was something that had begun its development in England and the United States, 'the world-historic signific­ance of the French Revolution rested on the fact that with a great explosion it unblocked the path leading to a new era of development for continental European government'." This path had been blocked by the absence of a reliable petty nobility, the centralist absolutist monarchy and the militaristic spirit. In order to prevail, democratization had to break down many of the institutional features that had emerged from a long process of political development. This meant that the institutional differences isolated prior to the nineteenth century no longer obtained.

We have until now concentrated mainly on the early development right up to the end of the eighteenth century; this was of particular importance since the contrasts between different governmental and administrative structures was especially sharp. From then to the present (1913) much has changed, and one can say that the states of Europe have converged with each other in respect of their institutions. Absolutism has disappeared from the continent, but the traits of a military-bureaucratic state have remained intact not only in Germany's monarchical system but also in France's Republican system. Nevertheless, bureaucracy is everywhere linked to institutions of self­government . . 49

While Germany, with its persistent monarchy, was a major exception, six years after he wrote these words it ceased to be one.

His writing on the modern state is less systematic than his historical writing. Perhaps the clearest statement of the relationship between his historical work and the contemporary world is found in his 'Nature and transformation of the modern state' ( Wesen und Wand/ung des modernen Staats) of 1931. In this essay he suggests that the character of the modern state has developed through four stages. Each of the stages, however, is overlaid rather than superseded by the next. 'In this way we can detect four diverse abstractions which are complement­ary and overlapping - like the different components of a colour picture - and together represent the ideal type of the modern state as it has developed since the

47 Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 495 . ~ Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, pp. 504--5. 40 ••• -. ,.,_ '>r ,. .... ,..

52 EDWARD C. PAGE

middle ages'.~ These four components are: the sovereign warlike state of the European state system; the relatively closed trading state with bourgeois~ capitalist social and economic structures; the liberal constitutional state based on the rule of law directed towards the personal freedom of the individual; and the national state, which embraces all these tendencies and is directed towards democracy.

The sovereign warlike state is represented above all by the absolutist states of the Frankish empire and has already been discussed. The closed commercial state is based upon trade rivalry; it began with mercantilist policies in the seventeenth century but 'it was in full blossom in the nineteenth century'." The liberal constitutional state, in which the state is both the product and protector ofa legal order, originated in the codifications of Roman law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and emphasized constitutionalism and personal freedom. The national state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emphasized national community. No longer was the state simply an organization for domination; rather, citizens identified with it and participated in it. This could be seen in the English, American and French Revolutions; individuals became less like subjects and more like citizens. Their citizenship gave them a stake in the nation and a national pride and identity which transformed the notion of sovereignty from the property of an individual to that of a people and a nation. This fourth layer ofthe modem state had become increasingly important since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Hintze suggests that by the 1920s the state is in flux, 'without knowing clearly and unambiguously the direction of change'. 52 He points to a number of changes: the growth of new world powers, the development of regulation and corporate management of the economy, the growth of welfare benefits, the development of interest groups, the decline of class identification, the decline of the bourgeois family, the decline of national identity. On the basis of this, he draws up a typology of modern states: the old democracies; Communist Russia; Fascist Italy; the other states which hover between the three principles. This analysis does not contain the rigour and coherence of his historical work; the use of ideal types is lax, his final typology of nations lacks theoretical underpinning and reflects too closely the specific governmental structures of the 20-year period between the two world wars to be of any great use in understanding contempor­ary political systems.

What is more characteristic of his historical work is the emphasis upon layers of historical experience shaping contemporary practices. In this sense, explana­tion of institutional structures is similar to geology. To understand contempor­ary structures it is important to understand the conditions surrounding their creation. In his masterful work on the origins of modern ministries he argues:

Of course I am well aware that the structures [I explain by reference to their origins] are only the formal aspects of historical-political life, the tools as it were, which were created by the intellect and will of those who governed. But just like real tools, these instruments of political activity have their own special history: they survive those who created them, and even if they are in

~ Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 476. •11 Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 482.

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The Political Origins of Self-Government and Bureaucracy

changed times used for purposes different from those for which they were designed, and for different motives, they nevertheless remain strong girdles of political tradition; they keep the conduct of affairs to familiar paths for generations, and it needs a strong impuse to bring about a change in their condition. 53

53

Similarly, his analysis of civil servants as a social phenomenon explains their current status and the problems of this status in terms of an ethos and structures developed in different periods of state building."

We might expect to find, then, to continue the geological analogy, possibly below the surface, remains of the old pre-1900 conceptual map of Europe in the contemporary world. In Hintze's own work we see references to this. For example, when discussing the apparent anachronism of the German con­stitutional monarchy in 1914, he argued that 'in Germany, as in France, the basis of a military bureaucratic state cannot be eradicated ... '55 and

the uprooting of monarchical power by repeated revolutions, which eventually made France's military state a parliamentary republic. It is an admirable achievement of the French nation that it has managed to develop militarism and administrative centralisation within a parliamentary con­stitutional framework. 56

Although this paper cannot hope to 'update' Hintze's work, it can point to some obvious places where we might reasonably expect to find traces of the old map of Europe in contemporary structures and forms. The form of local government widely regarded as Napoleonic, with its emphasis upon prefectoral supervision, is one possible area. 57 A second area in which we might look for traces of the old map is in the status of civil servants. The link between the military and the civil service in France is made obvious in the military uniforms of the Polytechniciens, and we might look to see whether the influence extends into less symbolic aspects of status and relations with the executive. A third area is in the development of different legal systems and their political implications. As Hintze suggested, the reception of Roman law was related to the development of absolutism. 58 The literature on comparative legal history also stresses, for example, the specific features of the state-building process in the reception of Roman law in France and Germany. Modern British political science is only just beginning to develop an awareness ofthe implications that different legal structures and processes have on the conduct of politics and policy-making.

Taking this point about the development of Roman law a little further, studies of comparative law have divided European legal systems into different families. Zweigert and KOtz distinguish between Romanistic, Germanic, Anglo-American

13 Hintze, Staat und Veifrusung, p. 275. 54 Otto Hintze, 'Der Beamtenstand', in Otto Hintze, Sozio/ogie und Geschichte, edited by Gerhard

Oestreich (GOttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1962). jS Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 401. ~ Hintze, Staat und Verfassung, p. 415. l? For an excellent discussion see L. J. Sharpe, 'Local government reorganisation: general theory

and UK practice', in Bruno Dente and Francesco Kjellberg (eds), The Dynamics of Institutional Change: Local Government Reorganization in Western Democracies(London and Beverly Hills, Sage, 1988).

54 EDWARD C. PAGE

Nordic and socialist legal families in Europe." The development of different legal families depends to a large extent on the reception of Roman law and the degree to which it shaped customary laws."' As Vinogradoff concluded from his study of Roman law in medieval Europe, 'the reception of Roman Law depended largely on political causes'. 61 For example, the fragmentation of authority in the German territories led to the greater influence of Roman law than in France and England. The different legal systems that developed produce different styles of law and lawyers. Zweigert and KOtz characterize the virtues of the French lawyer as "brilliant oratory', 'clarity and brevity of expression, eloquence, style, effect and form', whereas prized virtues in German lawyers are 'thoroughness, exactitude, learnedness, a strong tendency to tolerate academic disputes and the ability to construct concepts of law'. 62 Since the legal systems of European nations have been so closely connected with political and administrative institutions, with national and local politics and administration developing from judicial bodies, one route through which the development of law shapes contemporary systems is in the styles of elite political behaviour which, in France and Germany, bear close resemblances to Zweigert and KOtz's characterization oflegal virtues.63

A fourth area for exploring the value of Hintze's work is suggested by Hintze himself: culture, both elite and mass. While it is undoubtedly easy to overemphasize the impact of culture on political action, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the norms and accepted modes of behaviour differ as between, say, the French, British, German and Dutch bureaucracies. Hintze distinguishes between cooperative and hierarchical organizational principles for government. The former is based upon voluntary collaboration and the latter upon the compulsion to obey a single authority. The institutions of all political systems mix these principles in the organization of the executive and the relationship with parliament, yet in contrast to Britain, where cooperative principles are stronger, Germany and France display more pronounced hierarchical characteristics. Moreover, these two distinctions, hierarchical and cooperative, reflect dimensions of national culture.

National culture of different people is not something laid down by nature, but a product of history and, like the history itself, conditioned by location and the political tasks and necessities which result from this location. The love of freedom, that is of a looser form of political structure with as little as possible hierarchical compulsion, is somethng that apparently all primitive peoples share in common. It all depends upon whether their historic fate compels them to evolve a more hierarchical constitution (as it does when they have to be perpetually prepared for war) or whether they are spared this and allowed to develop the cooperative components of their constitutions in relative safety, and to make this the basis of their public life.64

59 Konrad Zweigert and Hein KOtz, Introduction to Comparative Law, Volume/: The Framework (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987).

'"' Zweigert and KOtz, Introduction to Comparative Law, p. 69. •• Paul Vinogradoff. Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe (New York and London, Harper, 1909), p. 130. 02 Zweigert and KOtz, Introduction to Comparative Law, pp. l34 ff. o.1 See Frank Baumgartner, 'Parliament's capacity to expand political controversy in France',

Legislative Studies Quarterly, X: I (1987), 33-54; Kenneth Dyson, 'West Germany: the search for a rationalist consensus', in Jeremy Richardson (ed.), Policy Styles in Western Europe (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1982).

"\'.

The Political Origins of Self~Government and Bureaucracy 55

England was spared such a hierarchical constitution, the heartland of continental Europe was not. How far divergences between these two different organizational principles can be carried forward cannot be determined here. However, such distinctions do fit notions of 'hard state' versus 'soft state' and state versus non­state forms of government which are worthy of further exploration. 65

Conclusions

Of all the branches of political science that stand to benefit from comparative analysis, the comparative study of administration, national and local, has been among the least developed. There are very few studies, other than edited volumes, entailing original research which go beyond two-nation comparisons. Even here, works such as Chapman's Profession of Government and Armstrong's European Administrative Elite are stronger on the discussion of empirical differences than on providing a conceptual framework or general set of theoretical tools with which to discuss the significance of these differences." Although Aberbach eta/. provide invaluable empirical information about the background, training and careers of top officials in the late 1960s and early 1970s, their theoretical concern consists of little more than elaborating and investigating Max Weber's alleged distinction between politics and administration.67

The absence of any strong theoretical bases for comparison makes the possibility of linking variations in administrative structures to broader concerns of nation building especially attractive. In this way it might he possible to gain a clearer understanding of why administrative structures differ, as well as the significance of these differences. I have already started exploring this more fully in the context of local government, where both the state-building issues identified by Hintze in his discussion of local government and the development of party systems and the evolution of party support both appear to have a role in shaping contemporary systems of local government.68

Hintze's work is important precisely because it links what might be considered as mere administrative institutions and their structures to the process of state building. It stops weU short of providing a linear or even continuous model of development stretching to the present. Yet his major analyses spanning nine centuries are not only impressive, combining a broad theoretical sweep with mastery of detail in a form of scholarship rarely seen in contemporary political science, but also point to a number of interesting issues for analysis under contemporary conditions. Hintze's writings offer real possibilities for the development of a strong theoretical focus in the comparative study Of public administration.

•5 See J.P. Nett!, 'The state as a conceptual variable', World Politics, 20 (1968), 559-92; Michael

M. Atkinson and William D. Coleman, 'Strong states and weak states: sectoral networks in advanced capitalist economies', British Journal of Political Science, 19: I (1989), 47--62.

66 Armstrong, European Administrative Elite; Chapman. The Profession of Government. 67 Joel Aberbach, Robert D. Putnam and Bert A. Rockman, Bureaucrats and Politiciaru in

Western Democracies (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981). 6i Edward C. Page, Political Centra/ism and Legal Localism (Oxford, Oxford University Press,