Edward Shorter's Manipulation

After reading and discussing Edward Shorter’s “Middle Class Anxiety in the German Revolution of 1848” I found it hard to ignore the devious and clever manipulation Shorter uses in proving one of his main theses. Shorter, “attempt[ing] to modify existing scholarship,” proposes that “the principle source of unrest [was] not the docile lower classes but the disaffected middle classes.” After discussing the role that student organizations and educated liberals played in the revolution, as well as the loyal sentiments of the more conservative lower classes, the thesis is likely valid. Shorter however, opting against painting a portrait of the role these groups played in the events leading up to the revolution, decides instead to base the entirety of his argument on one source, Bavarian King Maximillian’s “royal essay contest” of 1848. The question in its translated entirety reads, “Through what means can the material distress of the population of Germany and especially of Bavaria be most purposefully and lastingly alleviated?” Trying to manipulate the question in favor of his thesis, Shorter rewords this question one paragraph later as “what has caused the poverty of the lower classes?” Shorter then pretends to act surprised when the six-hundred and fifty-six essay responses hardly discuss the lower classes. Instead, the responses “bear on the problems of the writers themselves, rather than upon those of the lower classes alone.” Shorter acts as if this failure to address the lower classes is a problem. But why would the middle classes – generally the ones writing these responses – write about the lower classes when the essay prompt explicitly asks about the general “material distress of the population,” not the material distress of the lower classes? Obviously, if the question did explicitly ask for opinions concerning the problems of the lower classes, then the responses would likely reflect the prompt. To put it bluntly, Shorter acts surprised that the answers answered the question. With this clear manipulation, it is hard to justify the rest of his argument – that because the essays reflect only middle class problems, the middle class are the “principle source of unrest.”