19th century was not the norm for Europe; and that even if the liberal German middle class was disempowered at the national political level, it nevertheless dominated the social, economic and cultural life of 19th-century Germany. The embourgeoisement of German social life was greater than in Britain and France, which, in the opinion of Eley and Blackbourn, was more distinctly marked by aristocratic values than Germany. They rejected the entire concept of the as a flawed construct supported by "a curious mixture of idealistic analysis and vulgar materialism" that led to an "exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s". In the view of Blackbourn and Eley, there was no , and it is ahistorical to judge why Germany did not become Britain for the simple reason that Germany is Germany, and Britain is Britain. Moreover, Eley and Blackbourn argued that after 1890, there was a tendency towards greater democratization in German society with the growth of civil society as reflected in the growth of trade unions and a more-or-less free press. From the right, Otto Pflanze claimed that Wehler's use of such terms as "Bonapartism", "social imperialism", "negative integration" and ("the politics of rallying together") has gone beyond mere heuristic devices and instead become a form of historical fiction. The German conservative historian Thomas Nipperdey, in a 1975 book review of Wehler's , argued that Wehler presented German elites as more united than they were, focused too much on forces from above and not enough on forces from below in 19th-century German society and presented too stark a contrast between the forces of order and stabilization and the forces of democracy with no explanation for the relative stability of the Empire. In Nipperdey's opinion, Wehler's work fails to explain how the Weimar Republic occurred since, according to Wehler, prior to 1918, the forces of authoritarianism were so strong and those of democracy so weak. Nipperdey concluded his review that a proper history of the Imperial period could be written only by placing German history in a comparative European and trans-Atlantic perspective, which might allow for "our fixation on the struggle with our great-grandfathers" to end. Many scholars have disputed Eley's and Blackbourn's conclusions such as Jürgen Kocka and Wolfgang Mommsen. Kocka in particular has argued that while the thesis may not explain the reasons for the rise of the Nazi movement, it still explains the failure of