THEORY

Everyday History, Everyday Racism

Racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are likely to increase during critical periods in the history of a society. Racism appears not only in written or spoken texts but also in acts. David Theo Goldberg has argued that there is no generic racism and that therefore one has to historicize the different racisms:

Racism is more than just a reaction to problems and difficult passages in the life of individuals and groups. It is a fact of life, even in stages of relative economic stability and social equilibrium. Two examples that stem from different historical backgrounds explain this. According to a poll taken by Der Spiegel, in 1992 one-third of Germany's population believed that Jews are at least partly responsible for the hate crimes committed against them. Studs Terkel's book Race has demonstrated how deeply the “American obsession” with racial matters is ingrained into everyday culture. Racist assumptions about people believed to be the “Other” are tenacious and often lie below the surface of conscientious behavior.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Comparative history is a much debated field and it does not attract only positive comments and warm recommendations. The late Cologne historian Erich Angermann warned that comparative history requires more than just access to the right information about two societies or periods, and his warnings are echoed in the debate on comparative history in its modern guise, that is, the debate on American exceptionalism in an age of international or world history. To German historians, who remember the discussion on the German Sonderweg (unique path toward modernity), as well as to British historians, who have come to accept an English exceptionalism - not to mention the historians of lagrande nation - this debate seems quite familiar and the arguments exchanged seem to echo each other. Evidently, there is no scholarly comparative reception of the others' exceptionalism, so that we seem to be condemned to listen to the same emphasis on national history over and over again. In this chapter, I argue that there is no other way to determine whether there is exceptionalism in one's own national history than by doing comparative history and that, therefore, anybody making the claim to national exceptionalism ought to probe the deep and troubled waters of comparative history first.

Few quotations from Karl Marx's writings demonstrate more clearly how low one can sink into a theoretical pit in order to explain the existence of crimes, criminality, and a penal system from the perspective of the state. Taken literally and transferred onto the field of the history of confinement in general, Marx's aperçu would mean not only that the criminal produced the prison, but that the patient created the hospital and the mentally ill invented the insane asylum. Being a trained jurist, Marx of course had a theory on crime and criminality, but it tended to be explicit only in areas such as property law, whereas the lower classes- les gens sans feu et sans aveu, the classes dangereuses, or the Lumpenproletariat - were nothing more than aberrant proletarians who had sunk into what Marx called the bohème. He even speaks of “this passive rot of the lowest strata of the old society” and predicts that, at best, this part of society has a tendency to form an alliance with reactionaries.