“The Social Movement” vs. the State: Lorenz von Stein and Institution-Blindness

• In Event: Brushing History against the Grain

Abstract

The dichotomy of state and society is among the most fundamental assumptions of modern democratic politics: a conceptual lens so familiar that it seems difficult to imagine politics beyond its field of vision. The state/society dichotomy takes on normative force where it shapes our thinking about collective action and institutional forms. Not only since the post-2011 cycle of contestation has the success or failure of social movements been judged by their ability to effectuate legal change: social movements have been imagined as extra-institutional sites of claim-making whereas the law of the nation-state has been naturalized as the exclusive medium of institutional durability. In this dichotomous frame, institution-building gets reduced to a set of state responses to movement demands. What in turn drops out of sight are practices of institution-building that do not look to the national legal system as the guarantor of durable organization. Where a recent wave of 'plebeian republicanism' has questioned the ‘anti-institutionalism’ of ‘radical democrats,’ this paper instead aims to interrogate the terms of this debate. It raises the question whether a more serious problem for democratic theory might not be the 'anti-institutionalism' of movements or theorists, but rather a wide-spread institution-blindness: the inability to recognize social movements as spaces of already ongoing institutional founding beyond the familiar, yet reductive logic of movement claim and state response.

In order to question institution-blindness in our thinking about social movements, I propose to return to one of its sources: the work of 19th century Hegelian state theorist Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890) who first popularized the concept of ‘the social movement’ (in the singular). Although the expression ‘le mouvement social’ had already been circulating among French socialists, Stein’s History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850 (1850) was crucial for the formation of the concept. Stein, who knew the French workers' movement from his experience as a Prussian police spy in Paris in 1842, understood ‘the social movement’ as driven by a class antagonism between ‘propertyless labor’ and ‘industrial proprietors.’ In political terms, ‘the social movement’ in France took the form of ‘two republics’ that confronted each other during the 1848 Revolution, as Stein cited Pierre Leroux: the republic of property against the republic of labor, whose struggle tended towards civil war. Yet unlike his contemporary Marx, Stein did not wish to resolve the contradiction through proletarian revolution. Instead, he defended a constitutional monarchy that would stand above and against ‘the social movement,’ pacifying an irremediably unequal society by responding to movement demands with legal reforms and social administration. Where early socialists understood themselves as involved in republican institution-building beyond the nation-state, Stein construed ‘the social movement’ as a negative force that could only find institutional expression through the legal-administrative response of a sovereign state.

The argument of the paper proceeds in three steps. A first part shows how the dichotomy of ‘social movement’ and ‘state’ has left its mark on political thinking in the present, through the examples of comparativist Sidney Tarrow and theorist of populism Chantal Mouffe: blinding observers to institutional experimentation within social movements and reducing the institutional imagination to national sovereignty. A second part then offers a close reading of Lorenz von Stein’s ‘social movement’/‘state’ dichotomy as well as its reception by his most enthusiastic reader during the 20th century, Carl Schmitt. By locating Schmitt’s interpretation from the 1930s and 40s in the context of what he called ‘concrete order thinking,’ the counter-insurgent logic of Stein’s doctrine of social administration can be brought to light most clearly. Finally, a third part takes up Leroux’s comment on the struggle between ‘two republics’ to challenge the Steinian inheritance of institution-blindness, revealing social movements as positive sites of republican founding from below. Against the reduction of institutional forms to nation-state law, the paper concludes with a reappraisal of those plebeian and internationalist practices of republican institution-building in 1848 that Stein, Schmitt, and contemporary theorists alike have tended to push out of view.

Author

• Niklas Plaetzer, University of Chicago