The Intellectual Origins of the German Model: Rethinking Democracy in the Bonn Republic

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs how the West German intellectual and political establishment envisioned the conditions for democratic renewal in the early decades of the Federal Republic of Germany. I examine how theoreticians as well as actors with practical engagements in economics, law, and politics experienced the problem of democratic reconstruction and what solutions they proposed. I argue that many of the defining—and now often lauded—features of the Federal Republic’s political and socio-economic model were forged within the establishment’s concern for stability and social peace. This intellectual and political sensitivity underlies a distinctive understanding of democratic governance primarily concerned with countering the alienating effects of mass democracy and the market economy so that individuals might come to feel at home in their polity. I reconstruct how this concern informed proposals for administrative and territorial reform intended to foster civic belonging through local self-government, conceptions of industrial democracy and corporate governance, or justifications for the place of religion in a modern democracy.