The rise of modern learned professions and their representative organizations in Germany did not follow the same patterns as in the English-speaking world any more than German history paralleled that of England or the United States. Nor can one convincingly argue that professionalization in Germany took a “special path,” despite the clearly closer ties between professional groups and public authority (as elsewhere on the European continent). We might now reflect on comparisons and contrasts by way of conclusion. Having begun this book with questions about how modern professions come into being and develop, and having then surveyed the empirical realities of various professional groups and associations in Germany, we may now reflect further on the correspondence of that experience to, and divergence from, major social science conceptions of professionalization.

A first question concerns the degree to which occupations became modern and professionalized in Germany. Certainly, by one measurement, the creation of large and powerful professional organizations, the process began in the German states only shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century but, owing to persistent government mistrust, effectively only in the 1860s and 1870s. The early bureaucratization of so many occupations, not only in administration and justice, but in medicine, teaching, and the clergy, was in some ways an alternative to modern, independent, professional organizations; certainly determining standards for recruitment and training were set principally by the state through its virtual monopoly over the educational system.