# The politics of voluntariness in modern history:
introduction

Jürgen Martschukat, Alexandra Oeser

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Jürgen Martschukat, Alexandra Oeser. The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction. Rethinking History, 2024, 29 (1), pp.1-11. 10.1080/13642529.2024.2426953. hal-05468482

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# The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction

Jürgen Martschukat & Alexandra Oeser

**To cite this article:** Jürgen Martschukat & Alexandra Oeser (2025) The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction, Rethinking History, 29:1, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2024.2426953

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# The politics of voluntariness in modern history: introduction

Jürgen Martschukatª and Alexandra Oeserᵇ

ªHistory, University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany; ᵇSociology, University Paris-Nanterre, Nanterre, France

## ABSTRACT

The introduction to the theme issue on the Politics of Voluntariness in Modern History starts by discussing the origins and uses of the liberal discourse on voluntariness in the seventeenth century. It was during this period that philosophers and politicians began to present voluntariness as specific to liberalism. By the same token, voluntariness and authoritarian rule have been declared incompatible. This introduction and the papers in the theme issue critically discuss the exclusive linkage of voluntariness and liberalism – an interpretation that fails to capture authoritarian governing in its entirety, while ignoring compulsory and exclusionary practices in liberal societies. This theme issue shows voluntariness to be essential to policies and political practices in both liberal and illiberal societies. Political practices are at the core of our articles: amid a web of actors, institutions, discourses, and expectations, the individual means and capacity to act voluntarily, make choices, and overcome constraints are historically and socially variable. The introduction and the theme issue explore this variability to illuminate how voluntariness operates as a driving force for political practices in liberal and illiberal societies, drawing on case studies from German, Swiss, and U.S.-American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

**ARTICLE HISTORY** Received 25 August 2023; Accepted 26 October 2024

**KEYWORDS** Voluntariness; liberalism; dictatorships; politics; Germany; Switzerland; United States

In 1792, Thomas Paine, a leading political thinker in the age of democratic revolutions (Griffin 2023; Palmer 2014), claimed in his book on The Rights of Man that ‘there is no power but the voluntary will of the people’ (Paine 1792, 509). In making this claim, Paine was commenting on recent revolutionary political changes in France and America, and he built on a liberal discourse that had been unfolding since the beginnings

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of the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth century. This discourse depicted the human capability to act voluntarily as central to the new and visionary understanding of the body politic and, at the same time, as defining the very essence of what it meant to be a human being. As John Locke had put it in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1689:

> We [as human beings] find in ourselves a power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions of our minds, and motions of our bodies. [...] The actual exercise of that power [...] or its forbearance [...] is called voluntary. (Locke 1824, book II, chap. XXI, § 5)

Thinkers from Locke to Paine conceptualized the voluntarily acting, decision-making, agency-bearing individual as the only rightful source of political power. As claimed by liberal discourse and underscored by the recent and widespread revolutionary upheavals, any legitimate political formation had to be grounded in the voluntary consent of the people (Locke 1823).

Henceforth, voluntarily acting individuals, endowed with the right to self-government as a human right, were envisioned as constituting the core of liberal democracy. This vision represents nothing less than liberal democracy's self-image, even though – in Thomas Paine's newly founded United States of America, for instance – most people were in fact excluded from political participation. Their human faculties and their capability to act voluntarily were viewed as profoundly deficient (Simplican 2015). Furthermore, statements extolling 'politic societies' that were supposedly built on 'a voluntary union and the mutual agreement of freely acting men', as John Locke put it in his *Treatises of Government* (1823, book II, chap. II, § 102), were not necessarily seen as contradicting the enslavement of Black people in the British colonies and the United States (Armitage 2004; Foner 1994; Martschukat 2023). The liberal self-image tends to ignore and negate exclusion, domination, antagonism, and conflict, which, as the articles in this special issue show, are often related to the role of voluntariness when it comes to the governing of societies. As sociologist Mitchell Dean (2007, 1) writes, the governing of societies involves multifarious political practices 'concerned with power, confrontation, and appropriation, with struggle, resistance and combat, and [also] with the use and the threat of force'.

Evidently, voluntariness is more than a philosophical theory of human will and action (Hyman 2015) and reflecting on voluntariness means more than playing intellectual games. Even the most basic and broad understanding of voluntariness as 'a state or condition of being
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unconstrained [...] in respect of choice, determination, or action' (OED 2022) reflects how politically charged and significant the concept is. The relation between – on the one hand – a person's liberty to choose freely and to act without constraint, and – on the other – the limitations they face in exercising their liberty, is central to the art of governing and to the associated exclusions and inclusions. Voluntariness is fundamentally bound up with 'the rights, powers, and obligations of citizens and their governments' (Kazin 2010, vii), and it is therefore deeply political on every level of the term 'political'.

First, on a systemic level, voluntariness appears as the mode of action that defines a liberal *polity* at its core. Liberalism's self-description as grounded in the voluntary decision-making of freely acting and self-determined citizens has operated by establishing a juxtaposition with illiberal societies governed by authoritarian rule and featuring a sovereign type of power.¹ Authoritarian government has been depicted as opposed to human nature, and therefore as illegitimate and requiring elimination. By the same token, voluntariness and authoritarian rule have been declared incompatible, an interpretation that fails to capture authoritarian government in its entirety, as laid bare in several of the following articles.

Second, however, when it comes to *policies and the strategies and tactics of governing*, liberal governing has also relied on coercion and force to pursue interests and achieve goals, as Florian Wagner shows with regard to West German migration policies. Authoritarian governing, meanwhile, has relied on the voluntary participation and consent of citizens. In Germany under National Socialism, for instance, citizens were systematically and pro-actively involved in the regime's policies, from supporting the National Socialist People's Welfare organization to implementing genocide (Browning 1992). Many people who belonged to what the National Socialists called the *Volksgemeinschaft* (the National or People's Community) participated voluntarily in the exclusion of Jews, Sinti, and Roma, the disabled, homosexuals, trans people, political opponents, the unemployed and the homeless. More generally, authoritarian rule is built on and deliberately induces the active and voluntary participation of the people. Jürgen Martschukat and Alexandra Oeser (in their co-authored article) and Malte Thießen argue that voluntary participation has served as an expression of people's solidarity with the system and as a means of legitimizing authoritarian rule.

Third, to comprehend the political power of voluntariness, in addition to polities and policies we need to consider the vast array of daily *political*
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*practices*. Understanding voluntariness as political transcends the traditional conception of politics and reaches beyond the decision-making processes and practices of elected representatives and office-holders. Instead, we need to think of power and domination as a ‘social practice’ (Lüdtke 1991), and in this issue, we understand the political as both a realm of freedom and choice as well as ‘a space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (Mouffe 2005, 9). In this space, historical actors strive to make themselves heard in their daily struggles for meaning, power, representation, and participation, as Matthias Ruoss argues in his article on the abortion assistance provided by Margarethe Hardegger, and as they do so, they encounter manifold enabling and constraining conditions (Bröckling and Feustel 2010; Butler 2005; Martinsen 2020). Amid a web of actors, institutions, discourses, and expectations, the individual means and capacity to act voluntarily, make choices, and overcome constraints are historically and socially variable. This variability needs to be explored to understand how societies are governed through voluntariness. For instance, in the era of neoliberalism, the logic of the market has become pervasive, rendering fluid the boundaries between work and leisure. As Silke van Dyk, Stefanie Graefe, and Philipp Lorig show in their article, voluntary engagement in everyday life can be appropriated by others, as in the case of digital free labor performed, for example, by clickworkers and prosumers.

Rethinking the history of voluntariness as a political force – and keeping in mind this threefold understanding of the political, with a particular focus on daily practices amid the struggle for participation and power – prompts us to follow a number of analytical trajectories. First, rather than exploring voluntariness as ‘a state or condition’ (OED 2022), we scrutinize it as a power that is in itself political, and that finds articulation in, and is simultaneously shaped by, political practices. A praxeological perspective on voluntariness leads us to probe voluntary actions and their significance to the functioning of societies, but also to examine their historical embeddedness and conditionalities (Lüdtke 1991; Schatzki, Cetina, and von Savigny 2001).

Second, and related to this, we do not preconceive liberal voluntariness as juxtaposed to authoritarian coercion. Rather, we examine how voluntary practices, in both liberal and illiberal societies, are performed under constraining and enabling conditions (Butler 2005). It is these conditions that we need to analyze if we wish to come to terms with the politics of voluntariness and the complexities of human agency at different levels of society, be it government, economic and judicial practices, or everyday
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life. We explore how voluntariness is triggered, guided, and employed as a liberal governing mode, and how authoritarian governing draws on the voluntary support of the people who actively participate in authoritarian rule.

Third, we examine voluntariness as a means of citizen and subject formation in the hands of the governing and the governed. Voluntariness assigns responsibility to people, provides and promises the power to make an impact, and is at the same time embedded in multiple power relations in society, often iterated along the lines of race, class, gender, and other categories of difference. It creates opportunities as well as demands and expectations, and it is a resource for participation and recognition as well as for loyalty and support. Voluntariness contributes to the distinction between those who are acknowledged as able to act in what is considered ‘the right way’, and those who are not, and between those who are acknowledged as political subjects and citizens, who are capable of using their liberties properly, and those who are not (Simplican 2015). Describing certain actions as voluntary not only underlines an agent’s freedom to decide and to act. It also evaluates individual conduct and allows for either praise or criticism, what has been described by philosopher John Hyman (2013, 685) as the ‘basic function of the concept’. Yet we need to keep three things in mind. First, in one way or another people can ignore or resist calls for voluntary action. Second, at times, people seem to comply voluntarily with the demands made of them or even go beyond what they have been asked to do, but still proceed according to their own intentions and purposes (Lüdtke 2015). Third, praise or criticism are a matter of perspective and depend on the political context of both an action and its interpretation. For instance, denunciation as a form of voluntary participation was considered praiseworthy by the National Socialist government. Since the 1980s, meanwhile, the historiographic and public discourse on voluntary participation in the National Socialist dictatorship has radically shifted the interpretation of the role and responsibility of ordinary Germans and has highlighted the voluntariness of their participation (Bajohr 2013; Gellately 1988).

In this special issue, five articles present a variety of perspectives on the politics of voluntariness and on different dimensions of voluntariness as a governing mode in liberal and illiberal societies. Taken together, the articles bring out the conditionalities, contingencies, and ambivalences of voluntary engagement from a number of vantage points. They reveal how voluntariness has operated as a political tool, for instance in German
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vaccination politics since the nineteenth century (Malte Thießen) or in West German migration politics after World War II (Florian Wagner). Other articles in this issue discuss how voluntary participation was activated in Nazi Germany and New Deal America (Jürgen Martschukat and Alexandra Oeser) and explore the power relations that facilitate or impede voluntary action, as in the biopolitics of early twentieth-century Switzerland (Matthias Ruoss). They also shed light on how voluntary engagement is coopted and exploited by a capitalist politics of appropriation (Silke van Dyk, Stefanie Graefe, and Philipp Lorig). All of these articles explore voluntary practices of ordinary people while also illuminating efforts by liberal and illiberal governments, NGOs, companies, and markets to induce, regulate, and appropriate voluntariness.

In their article, Jürgen Martschukat and Alexandra Oeser interrogate the significance of voluntary participation to both liberal and illiberal societies, merging two case studies of court cases in New Deal America and Nazi Germany. Both cases bring out how liberal and illiberal societies depend on, rely on, motivate, inculcate, demand, and try to enforce their citizens' voluntary participation, which is best captured by the German term *mitmachen*. In both New Deal America and Nazi Germany, it was evidently the voluntariness of participation that constituted what was perceived as a good citizen-subject. Yet both cases show citizens' reluctance and even refusal to comply with the state's demand for voluntary participation. They also exhibit differences in this regard. Whereas the defendants in the American court case succeeded in denying the state the right to enforce their participation against their will, for the German defendant, accused of undermining the war effort, his voluntary engagement for the Nazi state in other respects had only mitigating effects.

Malte Thießen's article explores voluntary and compulsory vaccination programs in German history from the nineteenth century to the present. The many fundamental changes in German politics and society throughout this period provide the opportunity to gain a better understanding of voluntariness itself and of how it has unfolded in the relationship between bodies and social orders. From the introduction of compulsory vaccination in the German Empire in 1874 until today, the associated debate and politics oscillated between the demand for obedience to a paternalistic state and the self-image of a liberal society and of liberal subjectivity. Against this backdrop, it is surprising that the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, rejected voluntary vaccination, whereas National Socialist Germany was very much in favor of it,
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flanked by ads in the media, pamphlets, and the social pressure of the *Volksgemeinschaft*. After World War II, West Germany adopted the principle of flanked voluntariness, interpreting the success of voluntary vaccination programs as 'plebiscite by syringe'. East Germany, in contrast, operated through compulsion, though it was not strictly enforced. Finally, the article juxtaposes the liberal ideal type of the 'preventive self', which gained momentum from the 1970s onward, with the most recent debate on the return of mandatory vaccination programs, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the case study of Margarethe Hardegger, a Swiss feminist and women's rights activist who was charged with abortion assistance in 1915, Matthias Ruoss's article explores voluntariness that antagonized the hegemonic social order. Hardegger illegally helped pregnant women to have abortions. She conceived of her actions as voluntary, but also as necessary, and she defended herself before the criminal judges through a form of political speech that amounted to open opposition to the rule of law. In-depth examination of the interrogation protocols, held at the State Archives in Bern, Switzerland, demonstrates how her conception of feminist voluntary engagement by women for women came into conflict with patriarchal thinking and economic conceptions of order, which the prosecution drew on to insinuate that she had acted to commercial ends. Ruoss's paper thus highlights different interpretations of a voluntary social practice and illuminates how voluntary action can serve as a form of resistance to the prevailing hegemonic conditions. This notion of voluntariness as resistance is a fundamental element that the article brings to this special issue.

In his article, Florian Wagner discusses how voluntariness operates as a political tool, expressly employed by West German politicians and migration experts in the decades after World War II to dissociate themselves from fascism and distance themselves from the Nazi policy of forced deportations, pay lip-service to a liberal migration policy, and yet uphold a nationalist and racialized German self-understanding as a homogenous non-immigration society. In particular, migrants from African and Asian nations in the Global South were forced to repatriate to their home countries 'voluntarily', and returning home was presented discursively as the natural desire of every human being. As Wagner argues, West German postwar migration policies were embedded in a voluntariness *dispositif* of global reach in an anti-totalitarian era in Western politics, a *dispositif* that served to legitimize violent anti-migration policies, making forced deportation seem acceptable and
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even morally imperative. Voluntariness was thus at the center of an amalgam of discourses, practices, and their material manifestations such as borders, international institutions, NGOs, and the alleged genetic disposition of belonging, which seemed to naturalize the need for voluntary return to one's place and group of origin while serving to perpetuate a racialized vision of a pure German nation.

Silke van Dyk, Stefanie Graefe, and Philipp Lorig argue that the wide-spread binary understanding of voluntariness versus compulsion is more misleading than helpful, as it tends to obscure the complex character of voluntariness as a mode of governing, that is, as a form of management, control, and legitimization. This is particularly evident in the history and sociology of modern work. Wage labor is usually understood as the opposite of volunteering. Particularly in post-Fordist modes of production, however, workers must provide individual competences as a voluntary surplus, such as self-organization, motivation, creativity, initiative, and so on. Moreover, unpaid domestic and care work is essential to the everyday reproduction of labor and life, but is framed as a voluntary 'labor of love' mostly performed by women and serving the family or society. Finally, even in the realm of leisure and recreation, boundaries between voluntary engagement and wage labor are blurred, for instance when it comes to phenomena such as prosuming or clickworking. In our contemporary capitalist society, volunteer work, wage labor, reproductive work, and leisure activities all assume a formal freedom of action and voluntariness, yet are concurrently characterized by structural constraints and necessities, which are embedded in and legitimized by the political frame of neoliberalism.

**Note**

1. In this text, we use the notion of illiberal societies to refer to societies that do not feature independence of the press or freedom of speech. We refer to authoritarian rule to designate governments that in practice do not include regular change in governmental personnel through free elections and do not separate legislative from executive and judicial powers. The term also refers to governments that use violence as a regular practice of governing directed against the political opposition. In distinguishing liberal from illiberal societies, we are aware that the borders between them are not as clear as the terminology suggests (Dabène, Geisser, and Massardier 2008; Mérieau 2019). We have decided not to use the concept of totalitarianism in this issue for several reasons, above all because the concept underlines the efficiency of totalitarian rule in all areas of society; conversely, we are interested in the workings of individual agency and participation in illiberal societies too. The
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practice of governing through voluntariness undermines the very idea of totalitarian rule. Traverso (2001) has developed the most extensive account of uses of the concept in the twentieth century, as well as the most convincing critique. For a summary of his main arguments in English, see Traverso (2017). See also Geyer and Fitzpatrick (2009). For a typological distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, see Linz (2000).

## Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the German Research Council for funding the research for this article.

## Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

## Funding

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - project number 413222647.

## Notes on contributors

Jürgen Martschukat is professor of North American History at Erfurt University in Germany and speaker of research unit 2983: Voluntariness, funded by the German Research Council. Among his most significant publications are *American Fatherhood: A History*, New York University Press 2019 and *The Age of Fitness*, Polity Press 2021.

Alexandra Oeser is full professor for sociology at the University of Paris Nanterre, France and currently a research fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. She works on political sociology, gender, and social inequalities in France and Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries, in dictatorships and democracies. Among her most significant publications are *When will we talk about Hitler*, Berghahn Press, 2019 and *Comment le genre construit la classe*, Editions CNRS, 2022.

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