The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and Their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Kees Gispen

A number of works on the German professions have appeared recently, opening up some of the most fertile terrain available for students of modern German history. While a majority of these studies tend to focus on the development of a single profession, others cover several or more occupational groups at once. Charles E. McClelland's book belongs to the latter genre. Like Konrad Jarausch in his recent study, McClelland approaches the subject with a broadly based, theoretically informed analysis of multiple professions, in order to arrive at conclusions about the professional phenomenon as a whole. Unlike Jarausch, however, McClelland pays relatively little attention to the issue of the professions' political behavior in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Instead, he concentrates on the long-term growth of modern learned professions during the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth century. His overriding concern is solving problems of professionalization theory as applied to the German context. The author mentions several other reasons for studying professions, but the only one to receive sustained treatment is that of "clarify|ing~ the extremely vague connotations current in the English language about 'professions,' 'professional,' and 'professionalization'" (6). He devotes a special chapter to concepts and limitations of the mostly Anglo-American professionalization literature, confident that his analysis will "yield new perspectives even for social science theory" (26). McClelland regularly returns to this theme in the empirical chapters and ends his book on the same note, concluding that, "In the last analysis, ... the problem |of the German professions~ rests principally with their history not conforming to that of the Anglo-American world, the experience of which has informed so much of the theory of modern professions and professionalization" (242).

The most important difference from the Anglo-American model McClelland finds is that the German professions defined and--until the arrival of the Nazi dictatorship--achieved their societal objectives not merely in terms of freedom from the state but also as freedom through the state. The author demonstrates this argument by analyzing in detail the complicated process through which professional organizations gradually established their ambivalent relationship of partial emancipation from the state and symbiosis with it. This results in sometimes rather tedious descriptions of the agendas of professional associations and the small increments of developments (e.g., teachers eventually succeeding in being coopted into the civil service or acquiring regular pay and promotion scales) that span the book's chronologically arranged chapters. The same goes for the process by which professions such as lawyers, physicians, engineers, and others became part of the establishment, through influencing state-controlled professional and preprofessional education, credentialing, and disciplining. The lack of inherent drama in recounting those piecemeal efforts, repeated for many different professions and necessarily hedged by qualifications and nuances, occasionally diverts attention from the author's larger case. This is unfortunate, because his central point is highly significant: in the long term, the various professional groups successfully negotiated their way between the dual forces of a capitalist market economy and a powerful bureaucratic state that in one way or another characterized the German context from Metternich to Hitler and again afterward. Moreover, in so far as post-1945 professions in many other countries--including the United States--increasingly face comparable dualities, the German experience was not some quaint variation on a larger theme, but rather "showed the way for developments in professionalization for the whole twentieth-century world" (133). Unrelenting concentration on the lessons of empirical analysis for professionalization theory, which make possible conclusions such as this, surely constitute the great strength of McClelland's book.

The achievement, however, does not come without its price. Having triumphed over theory in one sense, the book falls victim to it in another one. The study tends to repeat the isolation from other social and political questions that is the common flaw of most literature on the professions. In his observations about the significance of bureaucracy and the state for German professionalization, for example, the author hardly mentions that those influences pervaded Germany's social and political cultures in general, nor does he say how they might have been connected. Anchors of historiography such as the German idea of freedom or the unpolitical German are a forgotten discourse, even though many of the same issues reappear in the somewhat awkward language of professionalization theory and in the nuts and bolts of associational demands. Likewise, McClelland discusses the beginnings of the professions' associational life in the first six decades of the nineteenth century almost exclusively in terms of the ahistorical concepts of the "professionalization project." He all but ignores that those associations evolved from larger ideological and political movements centering on the ideologies of liberalism, national unification and the emancipation of the middle classes in general. And while he rightly mentions that professions in Wilhelmine Germany became part of an emergent "social corporatism" as a new, highly modern type of societal organization (134), he does not attempt to relate such observations to larger problems of Germany's history.