Radicals and the State

Abstract

This article argues that ideas of the state are crucial for understanding contemporary politics in so-called “state-societies” like West Germany. It argues that the recent protracted and divisive political battle over state employee personnel policy in the Federal Republic needs to be understood as a conflict involving the power of two nineteenthcentury ideas of the German state, on the one hand, and the general modernization of the West German state and transformation of West German elite and mass political culture, on the other.