riding the subways of gemeinschaft

Riding the Subways of GemeinschaftAuthor(s): Peter BaldwinSource: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1998), pp. 378-380Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4201102 .

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378 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 1998 VOLUME 41

the social democratic parties continued the Lutheran tradition in the construction of the welfare state (Osterg?rd 1997:69)!

These insights and suggestions for further research would enable us to root the Scandi- navian welfare state in a large institutional and historical context. One could even argue that the fusion of state, society and church has been instrumental in creating a specific Scandina- vian 'organization society' (Selle 1996:86), permeated by social organization in which

explicitly formulated 'democratic' rules and

obligations regulate people's lives perhaps more than anywhere else. The state is only the highest level or stage in this process of

organization. It is really a 'membership associa- tion' (Brubaker 1992:71-72), which guaran- tees equal treatment, respect for everybody's needs, etc., but for club members only. The

pervasiveness of the organizational principle heightens the distinction between inclusion and exclusion that holds true for all modern states. No wonder that nationalistic exclusion in Scandinavia focuses precisely on the entitle- ment to welfare benefits, as Sorensen remarks.

What I have suggested does not deny the

stimulating main point of Sorensen's essay, namely the importance of 'Lutheran Pietism' in the creation 'of obedience and of respect for the

good intentions of the ruler and his agents' and of 'the belief in the efficacy of rules and intentions'. But its role should be analysed in a larger framework in order to get a meaningful idea of the sense in which the 'origin' of the Danish or Scandinavian welfare state can be ascribed to Pietism. In fact, there is a curious

disparity in Sorensen's scheme of interpretation. On the one hand, he sees the roots of the Scandinavian welfare state in a very concrete chain of historical events, but in explaining its crisis he invokes a more or less natural (!) inclination to rent-seeking, plus a most abstract

sociological view of the modernization process (individualism, 'true' capitalism, etc.). I think that both the emergence of the moral basis for the welfare state and its possible erosion should be analysed above all at an intermediate level -

at the level of historically specific institutional and structural processes - and that this

analysis should be done on both large and small scales.

Risto Alapuro

Department of Sociology, P.O. Box 18,

University of Helsinki, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland

References Brubaker, R. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and

Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Osterg?rd, U. 1997. The Geopolitics of Nordic Identity - From

Composite States to Nation States. In 0. Serensen & B. Str?th (eds.), The Cultural Construction of Norden, pp. 25-71. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Selle, P. 1996. Norsk (skandinavisk) frivilligdom i endring (Norwegian (Scandinavian) Voluntary Action in Transformation). In E. T. Rasmussen & I. Koch-Nielsen (eds.), Den tredje sektor under forandring (The Third Sector in Transformation), pp. 69-83. Copenhagen: Socialforsknings- instituttet.

Serensen, 0. & Str?th, ?. 1997. Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Norden, in 0. Sorensen & B. Str?th (eds.), The Cultural Construction of Norden, pp. 1-24. Oslo: Scandi- navian University Press.

Stenius, H. 1997. The Good Life is a Life of Conformity: The Impact of Lutheran Tradition on Nordic Political Culture. In 0. Serensen & B. Strath (eds.), The Cultural Construction of Norden, pp. 161-171. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Thorkildsen, D. 1997. Religious Identity and Nordic Identity. In 0. Sorensen & B. Strath (eds.), The Cultural Construction of Norden, pp. 138-160. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Riding the subways of Gemeinschaft

PETER BALDWIN

Anyone who has spent much time on mass transit will have been struck by at least one national peculiarity. In the nations of northern

Europe, above all Germany and Scandinavia, access to transit is controlled internally by a

system of voluntary compliance, enforced by surreptitious spot-checks of tickets. Everywhere else in the world, even in allegedly groupthink Japan, access is gained by showing or buying a ticket and then passing a barrier, after which the passenger need fear no further control. Those who have experienced the nerve-jangling process of surprise control, as an otherwise innocuous band of fellow passengers suddenly morphs into ID-flashing transit authorities,

demanding tickets, hauling off miscreants, while a smug sense of communal recognition settles over the dutiful, know how powerful an enforcement mechanism this honour-cum-sur-

prise-checks system can be. In comparison, the control-at-entrance (and sometimes exit) mechanism in effect everywhere else bares its

fangs up front, but leaves a realm of blessed freedom within the transit network itself. The honour system is based on communal groupthink, a sort of mass transit superego that avoids the free-rider problem in its most literal sense and keeps passengers in line with an

unspoken but obviously firmly ingrained cultural ethos.



Commentaries 379

Sorensen has provided an interesting and

potentially fruitful pointer to such questions of the cultural bases on which social policy rests. He thus not only suggests a shift of focus from the relentlessly quantified, and therefore inter-

nationally comparable, factors so common to

analysis of welfare state development, he even

proposes that an answer to why such cultural

underpinnings differ be sought not only in

history, but in the distant past of the early modern period. Historians can only be grateful.

On the other hand, what he offers us here is more stimulating than worked-out. The

paper amounts to a potted history of Danish social policy development, coupled to the claim that its peculiarities are best explained in terms of the Pietism that was central to the ideology of the local variant of absolutism.

A number of issues spring to mind: The

argument seeks to account for a very specific and precise outcome by means of a large and

general cause. It is not the Scandinavian, the northern European or the Protestant welfare state, but the Danish one, that Sorensen wants to explain. This requires, first, convincing the reader that there is something to account for. Is Danish welfare development really that different from that found elsewhere in Scandinavia? Other than a polemical allusion to the alleged perfection of the Danish welfare state compared to the Swedish (which we may discount as the understandable product of Danish irritation at the Swedish ability to monopolize the concept of Scandinavia prevalent abroad), we are offered little to chew on in this respect. Second, it means adjusting cause and effect to each other. Why should Pietism, an ideology of

foreign import and hardly exclusive to Den- mark, explain a peculiarity allegedly limited to this nation? The general question of the influence of religion, and especially Protestant- ism, on the culture of welfare policy is a

potentially fascinating topic, but it is likely to

prove most fruitful if dealt with in the broader terms of northern Europe, or at least Scandi- navia.

Third, there is the question of proximity of cause and effect. Sorensen wants us to believe that Pietism explains not just a general will-

ingness to seek solutions from the state, nor a belief that authority should be obeyed, but

specific reforms, like those of 1976. While not inconceivable, this is, of course, less plausible, or at least something for which the reader still awaits the evidence. Germans are equally concerned to wait for traffic lights, despite

their allegedly different social policy traditions, and, indeed, one of the few other places where street crossing regulations are as punctiliously obeyed as in northern Europe is southern California - not (needless to say) because of Pietist traditions, but because laws against jaywalking are actually enforced. Sick days, a classic example of rent-seeking behaviour, are more frequently claimed in Sweden than anywhere else in the world, approximately seven times as often as in Japan. If religion is the answer, then perhaps Sorensen has the wrong one. More likely, such differences are due to the absence of penalty in the Swedish system for

malingering. Laws in Denmark requiring com-

pulsory treatment of the venereally ill had to be carried out by force against popular resistance late in the 18th century, but were quietly accepted by the early 20th (Harrison et al.

1938:114). Pietistic belief in the benevolent

authority of the state was growing stronger? My point is not that the religious context is

unimportant, only that it will be hard for Sorensen to show that so general and nebulous a background factor is the cause of any particular reform of the late 20th century.

One factor that Sorensen touches on only tangentially concerns cultural homogeneity. There is clearly a trade-off between the informal control possible to hamper rent-seeking behaviour within a culture and the degree of access

granted to outside elements. Reliance on internal controls is possible only to the extent that common standards of behaviour can be taken for granted. Already now in Berlin, to return to the original example, there are major problems with Schwarzfahrer who give false identities and thus cause fines to be levied on innocents (usually friends or family of the

culprits, whose names and addresses they know offhand). A system based mainly on informal processes of control is thus spilling over, in an era when such communalities are

breaking down, into major formal control

problems for innocent bystanders. If the Danish welfare state is, in fact, as distinct as Sorensen

suggests, this is made possible by the fact that Denmark has now sharply restricted access to outsiders and that the People's Party, the Nordic version of Le Pen, has just become the third largest in parliament.

Finally, Sorensen's claim that the Danish welfare state and its characteristics had little to do with the working class or industrialization can hardly come as a surprise any longer. My own version of this argument has stressed



380 ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 1998 VOLUME 41

peasantism rather than Pietism, and seems to have found a resonance (Baldwin 1990; Christensen 1992; Christensen 1994; Svallfors 1996; Petersen 1997). The influence of patern- alist civil servants (whether Pietists or not) was also the bugbear of J?rgen Dich (Dich 1973).

Peter Baldwin

Department of History, University of California,

6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473,

Los Angeles, CA, USA, 90095-1473

References Baldwin. P. 1990. The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of

the European Welfare State. 1875-1975. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press.

Christensen, J. 1992. Socialpolitiske Strategier 1945-1972 (Strategies of Social Policy. 1945-1972). Phi) dissertation. University of Copenhagen.

Christensen, J. 1994. P? vej mod velfaerdsstaten: Folkeforsik- ringskommissionen 1948-1955 (On the Way to the Welfare State: The Social Insurance Commission, 1948-1955). In B. N. Thomsen (ed.), Temaer og braendpunkter i dansk politik efter 1945 (Themes and Focal Issues in Danish Politics after 1945). Odense.

Dich, J. 1973. Den herskende klasse: En kritisk analyse af social udbytning og midlerne imod den (The Ruling Class: A Critical Analysis of Exploitation and the Means to Oppose It). 4th ed. Copenhagen: Borgen.

Harrison, J., Dudley, C. L. W., Ferguson, T, Rorke, M. 1938. Report on Anti-Venereal Measures in Certain Scandinavian Countries and Holland. London: HMSO.

Petersen. K. 1997. Fra ekspansion til krise: Udforskning af velfaerdsstatens udvikling efter 1945 (From Expansion to Crisis: Studying the Development of the Welfare State after 1945). Historisk Vdsskrift, 2.

Svallfors, S. 1996. Valfardsstatens moraliska ekonomi: Valfard- sopinionen i 90-talets Sverige (The Moral Economy of the Welfare State: Public Opinion on Welfare in Sweden in the 1990s). Stockholm.

A lack of systematic methodology

PETER GUNDELACH

Like all political sociology, a Weber-inspired analysis such as Sorensen's should meet the four core criteria of Weber's general approach: it should study social phenomena from a

macro-sociological point of view, do it histori-

cally be empirically comparative and focus on theory-building (Nedelmann 1997:157). Ideally, this comment should relate to all four

criteria, but due to limited space I confine this remark to Sorensen's interpretation of Danish

history and his lack of sufficient data.

History: Sorensen's top-down approach leads him astray. Like many other scholars (cf. Lauridsen 1996), Sorensen is more interested in social reforms than the social problems these reforms were intended to solve. Two hundred

years ago, the main social problems were

beggary and extreme poverty. It is difficult to conceive of anyone rent-seeking under those circumstances. It is correct to say that the state

bureaucracy around 1800 initiated several reforms, but it should also be noted that most of these reforms were not carried out, and that there was a lot of variation from one part of the

country to another. Many of the social reforms in the countryside were directed at the local

opposition, and did little to help the poor. Provisions for the poor were decided in local committees of farmers and representatives of the church, who were very reluctant to allot

any kinds of benefits to poor people (Jorgensen 1940).

In emerging modern society, the workers

organized co-operatives, trade unions and

political parties. The ideology of these organiza- tions was solidarity. If anything, the social reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries were reactions against the farmers' reluctance to

support the poor and the impact of the liberals on welfare state policy. The workers insisted that benefits should depend on citizens' rights and not on the discretion of state officials. This focus on individual rights was part of the

working class project and clearly distinct from the alleged authoritarian attitudes of Danish civil servants.

Comparison: The references to Germany and the UK are unsystematic. A more careful

analysis reveals several problems. One is the idea of authoritarian values towards the state as part of a national habitus. Elias (1995) argues that German authoritarianism was

mainly a result of state formation. Sorensen maintains that authoritarian attitudes also can be found in Denmark. He argues that Danish

political culture is characterized by the assump- tion that the citizens would obey "the rule in letter as well as in intent". Since the state formation processes in Denmark and Germany are quite different it does not seem likely that

they have produced the same kind of authoritarian attitudes.

Data: Sorensen's empirical problem is that sufficient data do not exist to support his



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