CHAPTER XXIX
GERMANY: THE REVOLUTION
OF THE MINDIn republicanism it is rightly accepted that all men as rational beings are free and
have equal rights.... If power is usurped, abused and oppressive, no objection can
be made, it seems, to the justice of a revolution by which it is done away with. For
man must not be aggrieved in his rights. But since the abolition of one form of
government and introduction of another, if it occurs by force, necessarily involves a
state of anarchy in between, which is in itself contrary to reason and opens the way
to a thousand wrongs, the rationality of revolution certainly seems to have much
against it.
—“WHAT SHOULD THE JUST MAN DO IN TIMES LIKE
OURS?” IN DEUTSCHES MAGAZIN, 1798
The position of Germany was intermediate in more than a geographical sense.
When we take a comparative view, we find in this heartland of Europe neither a
triumph of counter- revolution as in the East, nor yet the setting up of revolution-
ary assemblies and republics as in the West. Not wholly content with the place of
their own country in the world, the Germans could not enjoy the self- congratulating
conservatism of the English, but on the other hand, since they retained a high re-
spect for their existing authorities, they had none of the aversion to their own past
that characterized the revolutionary French. It so happened, also, that these years
of political change coincided with the supreme efflorescence of German thought
and culture. It was the age of Goethe and Schiller, of Mozart and Beethoven, of
Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher, and the Humboldts. Under the in-
fluence of such masters, and at this moment of upheaval, a new German national
consciousness was beginning to take form. An ambivalent attitude to revolution
entered into the national outlook. The Germans neither rejected revolution in the
abstract, nor accepted it in its actual manifestations. Nothing was more character-
istic, in Germany before 1800, than to continue to hail the principles and goals of