“De-particularizing” a Bourgeois Ethos in the German Empire: A Postcolonial Complement to Bourdieu’s Theory of State-Making

In his sociology of the state, Bourdieu introduces the concept of “de-particularization” to spotlight processes through which those who dominate the state establish their particular lifestyle as a universal cultural norm. While Bourdieu did not elaborate on such processes, the article develops a specific mechanism of de-particularization in articulating his framework with postcolonial perspectives on analogies between race and class. Focusing on the German Empire and drawing on published and unpublished sources, it shows how the Verein für Sozialpolitik , a prominent social policy actor in the emerging welfare state, implicitly analogized the worker question and questions of racial degeneration in a study on European tropical settlement. As the principles of vision and division distinguishing workers from the educated bourgeoisie were transposed onto the difference of colonizers and natives, the ethos regarded as particularly bourgeois in previous investigations of the worker question came to be construed as universally German.