<論説>プロイセン憲法紛争と国民自由党の成立

Abstract

複雑な内部矛盾を孕みつつも、そこに長期にわたる政治的安定が切り開かれたとき、その安定のメカニズムの解明に関心がそそがれる。ここでは、十九世紀六〇年代のプロイセン憲法紛争の収拾事情を、国民自由党の成立に焦点をしぽって問題とした。国民自由党の成立は、自由主義の体制内化の完成を意味すると同時に、自由主義党の圧力団体化の起点となるものであった。このような「正」「負」の間題性の脱史的究明は、ドイツにおけるその後の政治的安定のメカニズムと、それを主体的に支えたビスマルクのレアル・ポリティークの構造を解明する悲礎作業の一つとなろう。

As one of the features of our historiography, an emphasis has been laid on the relations between political stability and the role of the statesmen. This paper, from this point of view, aims at understanding the character of liberalism in Prussia on the eve of German unification. In 1866 an essay, "Der Deutsche Liberalismus Eine Selbstkritik" by Hermann Baumgarten was published. It is one of the most remarkable --though today largely forgotten-- documents in the history of German liberalism. Like most liberals, Baumgarten had opposed Bismarck and the King. But in the essay he declared that he and his fellow scholars had been wrong, and that they had been beaten by Bismarck's Realpolitik. Such a change of opinion among the liberals was one of the outcomes of the Constitutional Conflict and it led to the formation of the National Liberal Party. Therefore, by analysing the political process, we shall be able to clarify the character of liberalism on the eve of German unification. The ideal of the National Liberal Party was to be that only the traditional upper class could govern, and that henceforth the citizen should give up trying to win political power and abandon himself to pursue only bourgeois interests. Baumgarten also concluded in the essay that the citizen had been born to work but not to be a statesman. After 1866 Germany did not know liberalism as it was developed in England. A Gladstone and a Mill would be out of place in the modern history of Germany.