individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).
Föllmer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book I characterize a “major development in Europe’s political history,” namely, “the dual adoption and expansion of liberalism by social democrats.” By this I mean that important protagonists of European social democracy, from the 1900s to the 1970s, argued that an active state was necessary to liberate working-class people from the dependencies created by capitalism and authoritarianism. In their view, widening educational access and housing provision amounted to widening choices. Hence, these social democrats adopted key tenets of liberal thought. They did so in a way that took working-class realities into account while also appealing to progressive members of the middle class. What I label “social democratic liberty” was a remarkably successful project, but it was also vulnerable to attacks. After all, it required taxation and standardization, which made it easy to accuse it of reducing choices and stifling citizens. While this critique spanned the entire twentieth century, in the 1970s it was shared by left-wing protesters, cultural conservatives, and market liberals. By the end of the Cold War, the project of social democratic liberty seemed exhausted.Learn more about The Quest for Individual Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.
Page 99 summarizes one of fifteen sections and thus one of a range of specific arguments. Yet it reflects my book’s broader thesis. Europe’s twentieth century was marked by a quest for individual freedom that assumed different shapes and meanings. In their nineteenth-century heyday, liberals might have been able to define individual freedom and impose their definition on others. But they lost this authority in the decades around 1900, and no new consensus formed thereafter. The quest for individual freedom was composed of a variety of claims and occurred in fits and starts. Still, it became so widespread that it even those who were skeptical about individual freedom (as were many socialists) or outright contemptuous of it (as were most communists) had to accommodate it to some extent.
That said, the impression conveyed on page 99 is necessarily one-sided. It privileges political history, whereas my book gives ample space to the quest for individual freedom as it played out in factories and homes, in experiments with drugs as well as discussions of morality. It also focuses on Europe proper, whereas I devote an entire chapter to how individual freedom was defined in relation to the United States and to colonies in Africa and Asia. And it happens to be the conclusion of a chapter and is thus more systematic than the bulk of the book, which pays much attention to ordinary or not-so-ordinary people’s experiences and efforts – including the working-class people who changed jobs to escape the control of a powerful factory owner or made use of what Sweden’s social democratic government had to offer while also insisting on their own choices.
Ultimately, my book is a twentieth-century European history – of the quest for individual freedom but also, even more ambitiously, through this crucial prism. It treats a variety of political currents and systems and offers many glimpses into European lives under often adverse conditions. It is this richness that motivated me to write the book and that I hope to convey to its readers.
--Marshal Zeringue