Big Business and German Politics: A Comment
1969; Oxford University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1841918
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Theory and Policy
ResumoTO give a critical analysis of the preceding articles is not my intention. Rather I shall try to establish a relationship between the three topics; then I shall point out the general problem toward which they contribute a solution; and, finally, basing my remarks on certain general statements in the three articles, I shall add some considerations about the relationship between politics and economics as well as between historical scholarship and ideology. The authors have outlined three epochs in the relationship between German politics and economics, that is, in the relationship between the holders of modern economic power, based on control over money and industrial capital, on the one hand, and the holders of political power, based on tradition or acclamation, on the other hand. No matter how strong the position or how great the wealth of Gerson Bleichrbder may have been, there can be no doubt that his relationship to Otto von Bismarck was one of subordination. Fritz Stern does not hesitate to compare Bleichroder's position in certain respects to that of a court Jew; he rightly calls this situation anachronistic, although even in the Weimar Republic, as Henry Turner points out, to Paul von Hindenburg the mightiest bankers and industrialists were hardly more than shopkeepers. Anachronisms in history are often persistent, and it seems clear that in Bismarck's Reich not only the Chancellor's banker but business in general, although influential and indispensable, was sub. ordinate to political power, that is, subordinate to the complex of military monarchy, rural nobility, and high bureaucracy. Gerald Feldman's observation that business lightheartedly saw the old regime collapse in I9I8 does not, therefore, come as a surprise. The relationship thereafter became one of coordination, and businessmen could even harbor the notion that they held the key to the nation's future, because in some quarters business was said to be the determining factor in the nation's fate. But obviously these men were not the masters of the Weimar Republic; otherwise the majority of them would not have opposed this bourgeois democracy with so much arrogance, mistrust, and even hostility. The relationship becomes less clear when one examines the National Socialist epoch. The thesis has been advanced with great determination that the big industrialists brought Hitler to power in order to become masters of the state and
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