This dissertation examines the evolution of federal government in the German Empire from the unification in 1871 to the collapse of the monarchy in 1918. The story of how the imperial federal state changed over the years has hitherto been hidden from view by disciplinary biases and methodological limitations. While concentrating on how Germany’s peculiar form of government oscillated between a Western-style constitutional monarchy and a semi-absolutist autocracy, historians have failed to make sense of deeper systemic issues. In order to move these to the centre of analysis, the thesis combines different perspectives from history, law, and political theory. This approach exposes an extraordinary development. The 1871 constitution left Germany’s organisational nature largely undefined. The new national state possessed only very few institutions and competences. There was not even a national government. The Reich completely depended on the constituent states. This weakness was no coincidence. Bismarck’s plan was to secure the dominance of the Prussian monarchy by giving the union enough flexibility to develop either into an integrated composite state or a loose cooperative assembly of states. But the decades after unification turned out differently. By seizing control over the Prussian administration, the federal bureaucracy gradually acquired so many competences that by the outbreak of the First World War Germany had changed into a centralised state. Rather than by the collaboration of the monarchical state governments, national decision-making was now shaped by the competition and cooperation of the federal parliament – the Reichstag – and the newly emerged federal government around the Chancellor. This transformation came about, the thesis argues, because both monarchical and democratic actors – above all the Prussian government, the federal bureaucracy, and the national parliament – saw federal structures primarily as an instrument of power to be manipulated for their own purposes, namely for the preservation of princely prerogatives or for the expansion of parliamentary rights. There was little respect for federalism as an organisational principle that was beneficial per se. Rather, most executives, administrators, and parliamentarians understood Germany’s federal organisation – albeit for different reasons – as a necessary evil and a means to an end. This attitude had a lasting impact on German political culture, with federal structures remaining at the mercy of power interests throughout the twentieth century. The dissertation is woven from three different strands. By combining them, it can draw connections that would not come into view if it concentrated on just one of these themes. First, it is a history of German federalism that focuses on the key question of the political history of the Empire: who or what actually governed Germany? As it thus exposes the anatomy of power in the imperial state, it is also a contribution to one of the biggest controversies in modern European history, namely the debate on Germany’s alleged ‘special path’: where did Germany go wrong? Thirdly and lastly, the thesis offers a systemic analysis of federal structures whose observations are relevant for federal orders – such as the European Union – more generally.

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This thesis surveys the sounds of everyday street and work life to argue for a reassessment of the way historians have understood community, space, materiality and identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany and Britain. It will demonstrate that sound played an important role in the organisation of urban space and social order. Furthermore it will show how the historical subject as listener emphasises the volatility of identity, place-making and community. Sounds either defined a community through positive responses or created conflict where one group heard the sounds of another group as noise. Sound helps to define the social groups that this thesis focuses on, such as experts, intellectuals, local administrators, immigrants or factory labourers. The ephemeral nature of sound and the subjectivity of listening, however, also pull apart such neat definitions and reveal the fractures within each of these social groups. Throughout this thesis, differing reactions to everyday sounds in the conurbations of Manchester and Düsseldorf will demonstrate how communities sought to define themselves and their environments through the production and reception of sound. What emerges is a re-composition of everyday life in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century that challenges examinations of it based on images of class, sociability and culture. Düsseldorf and Manchester were substantial cities that grew during the period studied here and underwent similar processes of technological change that affected both the social order and the physical environment. This thesis demonstrates that the audibility of specific technologies, buildings and machines physically affected listeners, and that working classes, middle-class professionals and local administrators all created regimes of noise intent on controlling behaviour in streets and workplaces. One of the key tropes within studies of sound is that listening places the historical subject at the centre of their environment while seeing places them outside of it. Using this idea, this thesis will make an original contribution to a number of debates. First of all, sounds broke down visual boundaries between street and workplace and this dissertation examines how that changes historical notions of place and space. Secondly, this thesis establishes how sound exposes the lines of fracture and cohesion within and between social groups that historians of popular street culture have tried to emphasise through class relations. Thirdly, sound allows for a re-examination of the power structures in which factory labourers and immigrants worked and lived as it presents practices of listening and sound production that breathe new life into ‘histories from below’ and challenge the top-down approaches associated with governmentality. Finally, this thesis will challenge the notion of noise as unwanted sound, prevalent in the growing number of histories on urban noise by demonstrating the diversity of everyday and medical reactions to ‘noise’ and exploring the problem of ‘silence’ in negotiations of migrant and worker identity and the development of road technologies. Overall, this thesis will determine that the role of sound in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century complicates historical debates on the physical and social organisation of urban space. Different communities transformed their identities around shared listening practices and adapted their rhythms of everyday life to sounds that resonated between street and home, work and leisure.

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Parte significativa dos escritos de Marx Engels sobre política internacional são marcados por uma dificuldade teórica, que não deixou de causar desconforto na própria tradição marxista: diante dos êxitos da contra-revolução após 1848, e de uma perspectiva revolucionária plasmada na crítica ao sistema internacional herdado do Congresso de Viena em 1815, as categorias centrais do materialismo hitórico pareciam perder capacidade de formulação política. Se o avanço da concorrência capitalista no mercado mundial possibilitava que as contradições sociais dos países mais avançados fossem universalizadas, por meio da universalização das relações de produção burguesas, o sistema internacional parecia atuar em sentido contrário, permitindo que os tempos sociais do atraso arbitrassem o ritmo das transformações políticas na Europa. Negada pelo sistema internacional, a marcha da história social em Marx e Engels dá lugar a uma teorização negativa. Suas categorias clássicas dão lugar a outras. Classes sociais cedem terreno, em Engels, aos povos sem história. Em Marx, a causalidade é substituída pela analogia; processos, por indivíduos; realidades sociais concretas, por encarnações abstratas. A contemporaneidade política de tempos sociais divergentes que caracteriza a complexa duração do absolutismo na Europa fornece o terreno em que os problemas da teorização negativa eclodem. O fato de que o Estado absolutista de tipo oriental por excelência, a Rússia czarista, pudesse de alguma forma empregar, por meio de sua diplomacia, a coerção de tipo feudal encarnada em sua própria formação para arbitrar o ritmo das revoluções burguesas no ocidente, em pleno século XIX, constitui a principal negatividade com que Marx e Engels se depararam ao pretenderem retomar a marcha revolucionária interrompida em 1815. / An important part of Marx and Engels\'s writings on international politics is characterized by a theoretical difficulty, one which has been the cause of significant uneasiness in the Marxist tradition itself. Faced with the strides of counter-revolution in Europe after 1848, and departing from a revolutionary standpoint centered on the criticism of the international system as set forth by the Vienna Congress in 1815, the core categories of dialectic materialism seemed to loose power of political formulation. If the advancement of capitalist competition in the world market was bound to universalize the social contradictions of the most advanced countries, by the universalization of bourgeois production, the international system, on the other hand, appeared as the medium by means of which the social temporalities of backwardness managed to impose themselves on the European political order. Denied by the international system, the march of social history in Marx and Engels gives room to the a negative theorization. Its classic categories give way to new ones. In Engels, social classes give way to nonhistorial peoples; in Marx, causality is replaced by analogy, processes by individuals, concrete social realities by abstract representations. The international coexistence of different political temporalities that characterizes the complex duration of absolutism in Europe sets the stage for the problems of the negative theorization. The fact that the most typical form of oriental absolutist State, czarist Russia, could successfully deploy its feudal coercion, through its diplomacy, to dictate the rhythm of bourgeois revolutions in the West in the nineteenth century constitutes the main negativity with which Marx and Engels are faced in their quest to resume historys course after its interruption in 1815.

Parte significativa dos escritos de Marx Engels sobre política internacional são marcados por uma dificuldade teórica, que não deixou de causar desconforto na própria tradição marxista: diante dos êxitos da contra-revolução após 1848, e de uma perspectiva revolucionária plasmada na crítica ao sistema internacional herdado do Congresso de Viena em 1815, as categorias centrais do materialismo hitórico pareciam perder capacidade de formulação política. Se o avanço da concorrência capitalista no mercado mundial possibilitava que as contradições sociais dos países mais avançados fossem universalizadas, por meio da universalização das relações de produção burguesas, o sistema internacional parecia atuar em sentido contrário, permitindo que os tempos sociais do atraso arbitrassem o ritmo das transformações políticas na Europa. Negada pelo sistema internacional, a marcha da história social em Marx e Engels dá lugar a uma teorização negativa. Suas categorias clássicas dão lugar a outras. Classes sociais cedem terreno, em Engels, aos povos sem história. Em Marx, a causalidade é substituída pela analogia; processos, por indivíduos; realidades sociais concretas, por encarnações abstratas. A contemporaneidade política de tempos sociais divergentes que caracteriza a complexa duração do absolutismo na Europa fornece o terreno em que os problemas da teorização negativa eclodem. O fato de que o Estado absolutista de tipo oriental por excelência, a Rússia czarista, pudesse de alguma forma empregar, por meio de sua diplomacia, a coerção de tipo feudal encarnada em sua própria formação para arbitrar o ritmo das revoluções burguesas no ocidente, em pleno século XIX, constitui a principal negatividade com que Marx e Engels se depararam ao pretenderem retomar a marcha revolucionária interrompida em 1815. / An important part of Marx and Engels\'s writings on international politics is characterized by a theoretical difficulty, one which has been the cause of significant uneasiness in the Marxist tradition itself. Faced with the strides of counter-revolution in Europe after 1848, and departing from a revolutionary standpoint centered on the criticism of the international system as set forth by the Vienna Congress in 1815, the core categories of dialectic materialism seemed to loose power of political formulation. If the advancement of capitalist competition in the world market was bound to universalize the social contradictions of the most advanced countries, by the universalization of bourgeois production, the international system, on the other hand, appeared as the medium by means of which the social temporalities of backwardness managed to impose themselves on the European political order. Denied by the international system, the march of social history in Marx and Engels gives room to the a negative theorization. Its classic categories give way to new ones. In Engels, social classes give way to nonhistorial peoples; in Marx, causality is replaced by analogy, processes by individuals, concrete social realities by abstract representations. The international coexistence of different political temporalities that characterizes the complex duration of absolutism in Europe sets the stage for the problems of the negative theorization. The fact that the most typical form of oriental absolutist State, czarist Russia, could successfully deploy its feudal coercion, through its diplomacy, to dictate the rhythm of bourgeois revolutions in the West in the nineteenth century constitutes the main negativity with which Marx and Engels are faced in their quest to resume historys course after its interruption in 1815.