Reconsidering the modernity paradigm: reform movements, the social and the state in Wilhelmine Germany

In the past decade, many German historians have embraced a new historiographical paradigm that stresses the force of 'modernity' in shaping the historical trajectories from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. This new interest in German 'modernity' has been inspired by cross-disciplinary borrowings from the work of sociologists, political scientists and cultural theorists, and scholars now frequently invoke the term to explain the powerful conjunction of social reform, 'social discipline' and biopolitics in the evolution of welfare states, racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide in twentieth-century Europe. This article interrogates this new interest in the term 'modernity' in German historiography, and its relation to 'the social' and the state, in order to challenge its increasingly undifferentiated usage as the label for an apparently singular and inherently authoritarian process of 'social discipline', driven by Enlightenment or scientific 'reason', as the malevolent essence of 'modern' politics. It questions the analytic value of this definition of modernity and seeks to recover the multiple political contests over the very shape of 'the social', the diverse rationalities and discourses of social reform, and the complex and varied institutional and ideological formations of the evolving welfare state in imperial Germany. In these ways, this article argues for a definition of the German 'modern' that permits analysis of the high degree of ideological innovation and struggle — rather than convergence and uniformity — in the domains of the social and the generative social and political contexts of state-orchestrated projects of social reform, discipline and biopower during the Wilhelmine era.