ABSTRACT
In the second half of the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie attained the position of power it had coveted. In the hundred years that separated the middle of the nineteenth from the middle of the twentieth century it consolidated this position and strove to fortify it against the rising claims of the working class to share in it. Perhaps not surprisingly bourgeois society was therefore marked ‘by a concern for equilibrium conditions, dynamic stability, and a playing down of progressivist and perfectionist elements. The rise of National Socialism must be regarded as the result of the successful exploitation by a group of political opportunists of the failure of the bourgeoisie to satisfy the material expectations of the German people – the material expectations to the fulfillment of which the bourgeoisie had itself attributed moral and social status.
