MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 275(“Germanic”) world formed, in some way, a unity, and that Germany had a privileged role as a
world-historical nation within that unity.
The heart of this world-historical role rested on the widespread idea that the Germans enjoyed
a privileged relationship with the Greeks. Philhellenes remained constantly on the lookout for
additional ways to demonstrate and strengthen the Greek/German connection, pressing the paral-
lel to ever more extreme lengths, until “in effect, the Germans were the Greeks; they represented,
as it were, the Greeks to modern Europe” (Gress 1998, 65–66, emphasis in original). Particularly
useful in this respect was the conservative Catholic concept of the Abendland, literally, the “evening
country,” or the place where the sun goes down, which gained currency among Catholic intellec-
tuals after the French Revolution. The Abendland was an entity of its own, with a cultural and
moral essence distinguishing it from other groupings of human beings; one could not simply
“join” the Abendland, nor could one leave it—although one could betray it by abandoning one’s
heritage and embracing revolutionary or decadent ideas. Thus, the contemporary Germans could
continue as the spiritual and civilizational heirs of the Greeks, united by their common participa-
tion in the Abendland—“Western Civilization.”
These haphazard, contingent processes resulted in a novel commonplace—the notion of “West-
ern Civilization” as one entity among others—being made available for use in discussions from
the late nineteenth century onward.^19 From its specific history the commonplace acquired three
basic characteristics that would be tapped in subsequent policy debates. First, “Western Civiliza-
tion” was a supranational entity, in which other states and nations were “nested” (Ferguson and
Mansbach 1996, 47–51). Larger and older than its component states, it was also somewhat supe-
rior to them; “civilizational” concerns trumped merely national ones. Second, “Western Civiliza-
tion” was an exclusive, essential community: Not everyone was “Western” and not everyone
could or should be “Western.” There was thus a modicum of recognition of other civilizations,
and some kind of civilizational coexistence was conceptually possible.^20 Third, “Western Civili-
zation” was already linked to a series of other commonplaces, such as the defense of freedom and
an opposition to Russia; hence it was no great trick to draw out those connections in the ensuing
debates. These aspects of the commonplace are quite prevalent in the policy debates about post-
war German reconstruction.
Deployment: The Singular Causal Analysis of Strategies and Tactics
The final step in analyzing how rhetorical commonplaces shape outcomes involves a focus on the
historically unique combinations of and interactions between notions operative in a given histori-
cal situation. It is not possible to remain consistently true to the vague and ambiguous character of
a commonplace, or to the space for agency (understood here as contingent interpretations by
historical actors) to which this ambiguity gives rise, by seeking to subsume situations under one
or another covering law describing inevitable connections between inputs and outputs. Instead of
this neopositivist search for generalizable regularities, the analysis of commonplaces lends itself
to “singular causal analysis” of the sort advocated by Max Weber:
In the given historical constellation certain “conditions” are conceptually isolatable which
would have led to that effect in the presence of the preponderantly great majority of further
conditions conceivable as possibly occurring, while the range of those conceivable causal
factors whose presence probably would have led to another result... seems very limited.
(1999b, 286; emphasis in original)