The Dilemma of Unwanted Leadership in Social Movements: The German Example Before 1914

Abstract

In Germany, those grass-roots movements that can at all be qualified as democratic, and which made their appearance at the beginning of the sixteenth century, had as a rule no leader in an institutional form or in a form modern typologies would identify as such. This statement is partly valid for the “Revolution of the Ordinary Man,” as the Peasants’ War of 1525 has recently been termed (Blickle, 1981). It is above all valid for the numerous peasant revolts, above all in Southern Germany, that began at the end of the sixteenth century and extended in an uninterrupted tradition up to the peasants’ liberation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, (Blickle, 1979,1980,1982; Elbs, 1987; Schulze, 1980,1983; Trossbach, 1986); it is equally valid for the journeymen’s strikes during the eighteenth century (Griessinger 1981, 1983; Griessinger & Reith, 1983) and the first half of the nineteenth (Eggers, 1987). The revolts of the burghers and peasants in the first half of the nineteenth century, which came to a head during the revolutionary events of 1830 and 1848, are no exception (Volkmann, 1975; Wirtz, 1981; Reith, 1982).