Although it is not clear from the title, this book is about managerial ideologies in the Saar. The account begins in the reign of Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, the steel baron whose name became synonymous with a “paternalist” system of labor relations, which combined comprehensive supervision and extensive benefits—from wage bonuses to factory housing—in order to discipline the workforce. Sweeney then analyzes a series of challenges to this tutelary regime, as Protestant liberals, Catholics, and Socialists attempted at the end of the nineteenth century to organize workers in the Saar. In response, employers fostered company unions and, in support of this enterprise, embraced a new ideology of industrial relations. Its basis was a “corporatist vision of a world composed of ‘occupational estates’” (p. 168) that appealed to the scientific imperatives of productivity and bio-racial health in order to discipline workers. An epilogue to the account then charts the place of this vision in the genealogy of “fascist corporatism” in the 1930s.

Sweeney's is an ambitious intellectual exercise. In some respects it resembles the Marxist or Marxisant histories of German interest-group politics that were produced in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s; but now, after the cultural turn, the author has resorted to a different set of methodological tools to analyze the influence and significance of these employer ideologies. The theoretical premises of this effort are the issue of a marriage between Gramsci and Habermas. Sweeney's object is to locate the roots of employer hegemony in the discourses that constituted the public realm in the Saar. The first section of the book, which is devoted to the ways in which employer paternalism was both discursively and institutionally established, is vivid and persuasive enough to suggest the potential rewards of this theoretical approach. Sweeney shows that the paternalist vision of industrial relations entailed more than a thoroughgoing regime of regulation and supervision on the factory floor; it resonated in the federal legislation that established social insurance in Germany, and it effectively prescribed patterns of behavior for workers at home and in the places where they socialized. It was anchored as well in the bureaucratic offices (the Prussian state ran the mines of the Saar), deliberative bodies, and associational networks that made up the Öffentlichkeit in Saarbrücken and the region's other urban centers. Employers or their representatives dominated these institutions, where rules, traditions, and discursive practices threw up tall boundaries to aberrant views and fortified workers' deference to their employers (and women's deference to men). The fact that Catholics were more successful than Socialists in organizing workers in these circumstances was due to the greater discursive congruity between their views and the “paternalist hegemonic order” (p. 49).

Once it turns to the breakdown of this order and the emergence of a corporatist alternative, the account becomes more diffuse and less persuasive. The problems are several, and not all are the author's. Confessional loyalties have not fit easily into Habermas's thinking about the public sphere. Sweeney's response to this problem is to posit a proletarian “counterpublic,” drawing on the work of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. The idea of “socio-cultural milieus,” one possible consequence of this solution, he rejects, although at the price of some confusion as the relationship among the various “forms” of this counterpublic, like their relationship to the hegemonic bourgeois public realm, remains murky. Part of the difficulty lies in the opacity of the language in pivotal places. The public sphere in the Saar, Sweeney explains in one passage, “was not a uniform, even, or plural social-discursive space, but, rather, an ideological field structured in relations of social inequality and discursive hierarchy”; access to it was determined furthermore by a “specific constellation of discursive relations and institutions, including the state” (p. 112).

Another order of problem attaches to the author's determination to emphasize the primacy, if not the autonomy of discourse as an explanatory force—to ignore or deprecate the weight of demographic change, technical innovation, economic development, and “milieu-based considerations of confessional geography” (p. 112), in this case the fact, noted in passing, that Catholic workers inundated the Saar industrial region at the end of the century. Ideological change functions in the analysis instead as the outcome of “discursive articulations.” In later sections of the book, the institutional dimensions of Öffentlichkeit thus retreat before the discursive. The public sphere operates as a “‘cross-citational field’ of discursive interaction, a general ‘criterion’ of openness, and a collective political subject” (p. 15). The treatment of the new racist corporatism, an “ideological rearticulation,” features the ideas of Alfred Hugenberg and Alexander Tille, leading figures in several prominent employers' organizations. The impact of these new ideas on workers—the question of what, if anything, changed in their daily lives—remains open. Sweeney's analysis abandons the shop floor and voluntary association in the Saar region for the kind of national interest-group alliances—analyzed now in light of “a multiaccentual discourse” (p. 170)—that were the focus of earlier monographs by Dirk Stegmann and others. Only at this level does the “radical right,” figure in Sweeney's account, primarily as the national executive committee of the Pan-German League.

The attempt to engage important questions at this theoretical level results in some intriguing insights but no little frustration for the reader. In the end, the empirical foundations of the study are not strong enough to sustain its claims, including its conclusion that the Saar employers and their allies brought about a “fundamental transformation of public culture” (p. 184).