ABSTRACT
Marcus Gräser Any reasonable attempt to analyse the relationship between social class and political power will question a monolithic idea of power and will recognise that different classes had different ways of accessing or exerting political power.1 This chapter will try to avoid giving a clear-cut answer to the question ‘Who ran Chicago?’ It may be quite possible, however, to find an answer to another question: ‘Who did not run Chicago?’ and such an answer may help clarify the city’s power structure. But how does ‘power’ need to be conceptualised if the focus is not on the proximity to, but on the distance from power? It seems that a slightly modified version of Max Weber’s famous definition may be useful for this purpose: not ‘the chance of a man or of a number of men to realise their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others’,2 but instead, the chance of men and women
1 A previous version of this work was delivered at the Sixth International Conference on Urban History, Edinburgh, September 2002 (Main Session: Who Was Running the Cities? Elites and Urban Power Structures, 1700-2000), and as a lecture at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University, Staffordshire, in the same year. It is a somewhat sketchy by-product of a larger comparative study of middle class(es) and welfare state building in Germany and in the United States, 1880-1940 – a study in which both the incapacity and the unwillingness of the American urban educated middle class to transform the political cities and its administrations into proactive agents for social reform is a key, especially when compared with the powerful German middle class (Bürgertum) and its civic hegemony. My research, which has a special focus on Chicago and Frankfurt am Main (as two intellectual centres of middle-class social reform), has been generously sponsored over the years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I would like to thank the colleagues who read, heard, critiqued and improved the original version of this work: Sven Beckert, Axel Jansen, Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Ralf Roth and Axel R. Schäfer.
