Stein, Lorenz Von
Stein, Lorenz Von
Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890) is remembered for his attempt to establish a science of society based on Hegelian idealism and his interpretation of the ideas and events of the French Revolution. He played a major role in introducing class conflict and socialism as public topics in Germany and influenced the academic development of public administration and finance.
Stein was born in Schleswig, then under Danish suzerainty; he died near Vienna. His father was Baron von Wasner, his mother a commoner. Stein spent much of his youth in an orphanage, but in 1832 he succeeded in going to the university. He studied philosophy and law at Jena and Kiel, where he received his doctor of law degree in 1840. Subsequently he went to Paris on a travel grant to undertake research in legal history. There he met Victor Consideran!, Étienne Cabet, Louis Blanc, and others, and under their influence his interests shifted to the study of socialist ideas and social movements. With his talent for speedy literary production—which also proved useful for his many newspaper articles—Stein was able to publish his Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frank-reich by 1842; eight years later he produced the three-volume Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich (1850a; 1850b). This work established Stein's fame with the politically agitated public of the time.
In 1846 Stein became a professor at Kiel, but in the early 1850s he was dismissed by the Danish authorities for having advocated the independence of Schleswig-Holstein during the revolution of 1848. Since he had also opposed Prussian intervention in his homeland, Prussian authorities forced the Bavarian authorities to withdraw an offer of a professorship at Würzburg. However, with the backing of the Austrian minister of finance, Stein became professor of government (Staatswissenschaften) at Vienna in 1854, a position which he held until his retirement in 1885. In 1868 he was ennobled in recognition of his academic achievements and his public service; he had wanted to merit a patent of nobility on his own rather than take on his father's name and title.
Stein's eminent academic career was not matched by success in politics and business. The Prussian victory of 1866 brought to nought his advocacy of Austrian predominance in Germany; before that, the various proposals for reform that he had made as an adviser to the ministry of finance were ignored, and he lost an election for a seat on the Austrian Reichsrat, for which he had tried to qualify as a “Saint-Simonian industrialist.” He also ruined himself in a series of industrial speculations.
Stein's exposition of his science of society is contained in the long introduction to his History, “The Concept of Society and Its Dynamic Laws.” His approach combined the social and socialist theories of Saint-Simon and his followers and of Blanc, on the one hand, with Hegelian views of the individual and the state, on the other. Thus, Stein posited a basic difference between society and the state: society is governed by social laws, the crucial factors determining its functioning being economic interest and class struggle; the state is man's instrument for bringing about personal autonomy and self-realization. Economically dominant groups in pursuit of their material interests always attempt to capture the state, thus provoking class conflicts. It is a “social law” that such groups first strive for economic privileges, then tend to develop into classes, and, finally, become estates and castes. Historically, these phenomena have occurred sequentially, but they may also exist concurrently. Stein believed that the history of France, and of Europe following French precedent, would be a history of class struggles as long as the ruling class—whether aristocratic or bourgeois—refused to accord political rights to that stratum of the subject class that had acquired the education and wealth necessary for social and political independence. He argued that a monarchy, because of its relative independence from the class structure, would be more likely to succeed in social reforms than a bourgeois republic.
Stein and Marx developed their ideas contemporaneously, but Stein wrote and published his work on the class struggle in France before Marx did. Marx read Stein's work and reacted in his customary negative manner; there is no evidence that he was influenced by it. To Marxists (e.g., Marcuse 1954), Stein's juxtaposition of determinist and voluntarist viewpoints and of dialectic and positivist elements has appeared typical of “idealist aberration” and to pragmatists (e.g., Weiss 1963), typical of “dialectic obscurantism,” but this theoretical dualism permitted Stein to be sociologically more perceptive and historically more nearly correct than Marx.
Stein not only believed that social reforms could control the dynamics of class conflict, but he also recognized that unless the workers acquired more education and wealth, a proletarian revolution would necessarily result in a dictatorship over the proletariat. To forestall such an empty victory, it was necessary for the proletariat to be socially mobile, and Stein saw education and a rising standard of living as the main avenues of social mobility. It was the responsibility of the state to safeguard these avenues. However, Stein did not actually advocate major welfare legislation, and for this reason he later opposed the German academic social reformers.
As early as 1852, Stein repudiated the economic determinism of his own History. Henceforth he devoted himself to the systematic study of public administration and finance in France, England, and Germany, and in the academic circles of his time this part of his work became more influential than his History. Today, however, his earlier insights into the sources of class conflict and the preconditions of political stability appear as an impressive contribution to the study of industrialization and democratization.
Guenther Roth
[See alsoMarxismand the biography ofSAINT-SIMON.]
WORKS BY STEIN
(1842) 1848 Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreich: Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte. 2d ed., 2 vols. Leipzig: Wigand.
(1850a) 1959 Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frank-reich von 1789 bis auf unsere Tage. 3 vols. Edited by Gottfried Salomon. Hildesheim: Olms. ? Volume 1: Der Begriff der Gesellschaft und die soziale Geschichte der Franzosischen Revolution bis zum Jahre 1830. Volume 2: Die industrielle Gesellschaft, der Sozialismus und Kommunismus Frankreichs von 1830 bis 1848. Volume 3: Das Königtum, die Republik, und die Souveränität der französischen Gesellschaft seit der Februarrevolution 1848.
(1850b) 1964 The History of the Social Movement in France: 1789-1850. Introduced, edited, and translated by Kaethe Mengelberg. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press. ? An abridged version of Stein 1850a.
1852-1856 System der Staatswissenschaft. 2 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus. ? Volume 1: System der Statistik, der Populationistik und der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 1852. Volume 2: Der Begriff der Gesellschaft, 1856.
(1860) 1885-1886 Lehrbuch der Finanzwissenschaft. 5th ed., 4 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus.
(1865-1868) 1869-1884 Die Verwaltungslehre. 2d ed., 3 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta.
(1870) 1888 Handbuch der Verwaltungslehre und des Verwaltungsrechtes mit Vergleichung der Literatur und Gesetzgebung von Frankreich, England und Deutschland. Stuttgart: Cotta.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Angermann, Erich 1962 Zwei Typen des Ausgleichs gesellschaftlicher Interessen durch die Staatsgewalt: Ein Vergleich der Lehren Lorenz von Steins und Robert Mohls. Pages 173-205 in Werner Conze (editor), Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormarz. Stuttgart: Klett.
Grünfeld, Ernst 1908 Die Gesellschaftslehre von Lorenz von Stein. Halle: Kaemmerer.
Marcuse, Herbert 1954 The Transformation of the Dialectic Into Sociology: Lorenz von Stein. Pages 374– 388 in Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. 2d ed. New York: Humanities Press.
Weiss, John 1963 Dialectical Idealism and the Work of Lorenz von Stein. International Review of Social History 8, no. 1:1-19.