Friedrich von Wieser, “Über die gesellschaftlichen Gewalten” (1901)

Wieser’s rectorial address turns Adolf Exner’s concern with political education into a wider sociology of power. Its central claim is that modern public life cannot be understood by legal formulas, liberal slogans, or technical analogies alone. Political forms are made out of living masses, inherited habits, organized minorities, leaders, parties, classes, and media; they therefore obey a different rhythm from machines or markets.

Technischer und politischer Fortschritt folgen nicht den gleichen Gesetzen.

English translation: Technical and political progress do not follow the same laws.

Against contractarian political theory, Wieser insists that the state is not simply a voluntary association enlarged from private agreement. It begins in domination, command, discipline, fear, imitation, and the capacity to bind scattered persons into a public body. Law and constitution describe only part of this process; beneath them lie the techniques by which masses are rendered capable of action.

Der Staat ist Herrschaft, und die Herrschaft ist nicht durch Verträge in die Welt gekommen.

English translation: The State is dominion, and dominion did not come into the world through contracts.

The address repeatedly returns to “mass technique.” Large numbers cannot deliberate, initiate, or decide as small groups do. Armies, meetings, parties, churches, scientific publics, and even anarchist organizations require selection, representation, leadership, routine, and obedience. Wieser does not reduce this to cynical elitism: leaders need followers, while masses need form if they are not to remain inert. But he denies that equality of persons automatically produces equality of political efficacy.

Es ist dies eine der Notwendigkeiten der Massentechnik, um die schwerfälligen Massen beweglich und handlungsfähig zu machen.

English translation: This is one of the necessities of mass technique, in order to render the unwieldy masses mobile and capable of action.

From this premise Wieser develops a layered account of “gesellschaftliche Gewalten.” Power arises from organization, personal superiority, class position, custom, and inherited authority. Genius is the most legitimate form of leadership when it articulates what a people dimly needs; class rule is more ambiguous, because property and education can stabilize public life while also protecting mediocrity and exclusion. Custom preserves language, law, patriotism, religion, and civic continuity, but it can also preserve servility and intolerance.

This realism shapes Wieser’s constitutional argument. Written constitutions are not magic instruments that can be copied from abroad; they presuppose social habits, parties, administrative capacities, and political education. The real constitution of a people lies in the living distribution of organized powers. Where parties fail to organize the nation, bureaucracy and government regain dominance; where parties become disciplined social organs, they mediate between mass will and state action.

Wieser gives special attention to the press as a modern social power. Newspapers do not merely report public opinion; they organize attention, repeat some facts, silence others, and train imagination. Freedom therefore cannot mean simple exposure to print. It requires a plurality of organized publics able to judge, resist, and choose among competing channels of influence.

The historical arc of the address moves from conquest and military rule through Christianity, towns, bourgeois education, Enlightenment society, and constitutional politics. Wieser presents progress as morally tragic: wider association has often been forced into being by domination before it can be purified by rights, culture, and education. Christianity appears as a counterforce to ancient violence, while modern civil society works to subordinate older military and aristocratic powers without wholly abolishing the need for organization.

The final application is industrial capitalism. The entrepreneur, like the conqueror, organizes dispersed energies into a large social machine; the factory gives technical progress institutional form. Yet the private labor contract can conceal relations of command that resemble public authority. Workers’ movements therefore repeat in economic life the older struggle for civic standing within the state. Wieser neither romanticizes class conflict nor dismisses it: industrial power must be morally and politically socialized.

The address remains important as an early sociological text by an economist because it links mass psychology, constitutional realism, class analysis, media theory, and industrial organization. Its normative endpoint is not domination for its own sake, but the education and moral purification of social powers. The highest political task is to make organized power answerable to culture, rights, and the whole people.

Aber ihr Wort bohrt sich in Hirn und Gewissen der Menschen, ringt mit diesen, bekehrt zuerst die Besten und mit deren Hilfe endlich die anderen und alle.

English translation: But their word bores into the minds and consciences of men, wrestles with them, converts first the best, and with their help finally the others and all.