From general estate to special interest

the long version

The easy success of National Social "coordination" of German lawyers in private practice in 1933 has puzzled historians. Within five months, a profession that had been considered a bulwark of civil society bowed to the demands of a party whose leader viewed lawyers with contempt and valued race over right. Through a detailed empirical study of the practicing bar in Germany, Ledford traces the history of German lawyers from the heady days of reform to 1878 to their abject defeat in 1933. In the 1870s, lawyers basked in the widespread assessment of their profession as a sort of Hegelian "general estate," representing the general interest and entitled to respect, deference, and leadership. Many believed that reform of the legal profession was the key to success in the project of the liberal Burgertum. Liberal reformers and lawyers achieved almost all of their aims in the great legislative reform of 1878, carving out space for the bar to create its own institutions, to govern its internal affairs, and to assume the public role that theory ascribed to it. But developments between 1878 and 1933 did not turn out as expected. Lawyers brought with them inherent limitations of conceptual vision, professional structure, and social flexibility. Their training installed in them a belief in the primacy of procedure that linked them with liberalism but constrained their imagination as they faced the massive changes of the era. They built elite professional institutions that became the terrain of intraprofessional power struggles. Reform attracted new social groups to the bar, creating tensions that rendered it unable to represent professional interest or even to maintain the claim that a unitary professional interest existed. By the 1920s, lawyers' claim to be the general estate was no longer tenable, instead they were merely one of many special interests in a society and state that to increasing numbers of Germans appeared dangerously fragmented. This trajectory, from general estate to special interest, explains their paralysis and inaction in 1933 more than any putative betrayal of liberalism or of professional ideals.