Disciplining the state: Organized civil servants, state formation and citizenship in the United States and Germany, 1880-1925.

Abstract

In this dissertation I analyze the intersection of structural shifts and institutional transformation in the expansion of the state's functions as employer in the United States and Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on archival research in these countries, and utilizing a wide range of unpublished and published sources, I combine a close comparative study of the civil service as an institution constructed in politics, in law and in history with a detailed comparative analysis of organized postal civil servants and the state response to these organizations in both nations. It is the pattern of similarities between these cases which this study exposes and seeks to understand. In each country organizations of postal civil servants emerged at moments of political, structural and institutional change that significantly affected their relationship to the state. In each case these organizations followed a similar trajectory in the movement from local groups through national associations and toward trade unionism. Likewise, in each case and regardless of the particular political regime, the state responded in kind to these organizations in its attempts to contain or to destroy them. From the restriction of certain citizenship rights (including freedom of speech, assembly, petition and political activity) to the surveillance of these organizations and certain of their members, leaders and other activists, each state made clear that it would not tolerate challenges to its prerogatives as employer or as sovereign from those it had employed to serve and not to question. In this study I show that this process, and its outcome in the construction of a powerful sovereign-employer, is mediated by agency and by ideology in each case in ways that at least partially transcend the boundaries of difference between them. And it is the widely recognized differences between these cases across law, politics, civil service institutions and culture that make the parallels uncovered here so compelling, and which contributes a significantly different perspective for our understanding of state formation in the United States and Germany both separately and in comparison for this period.