688 Chapter XXIX
more concerned with worldly affairs than in England, and more perversely myste-
rious than in France. From the 1770’s or before, there were secret societies of both
progressive and conservative orientation, designed both to advance and to combat
the Aufklärung. The Rosicrucians were conservative on social questions. The fa-
mous Illuminati were radical in their way. Founded in 1778 by Adam Weishaupt,
a professor of natural law at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, the Order of Illuminati was
apparently modeled on the student associations, but in 1780 it became identified
with Masonry and the occultist tradition by A. F. von Knigge of Hanover. It re-
cruited a few hundred members, who were initiated into a private doctrine of
world salvation, quasi- religious and quasi- enlightened; but it had no political pro-
gram, and indeed it spurned mere practical action, while urging its “adepts” to in-
filtrate the governments and the universities, to acquire power without much
thought as to its application. The order was suppressed by the Elector of Bavaria in
- Various of its members turned up as individual revolutionary enthusiasts in
the 1790’s. The fame of the order, however, is ex post facto, a creation of counter-
revolutionary propagandists like the Abbé Barruel, who in the 1790’s attributed to
the Illuminati an importance that they never had. It was true, nevertheless, that
secret associations continued to flourish in Germany, of both revolutionary and
counter- revolutionary persuasion, mostly quite ineffectual so far as their secrecy
permits any judgment of their operations. Examples are the Vienna Jacobins de-
scribed in Chapter XX, and the counter- revolutionary Eudämonists described
later in the present chapter.
The habit of mind engendered both in the secret groups and in the much
broader spheres of public discussion and journalism was increasingly political in
that attention turned more to questions of government and society, but at the same
time remained essentially non- political in an important way.^5 There was an eager-
ness to consider the state in the abstract, but no chance to plan courses of action,
assume responsibilities, weigh alternatives and probable consequences, or form al-
liances with persons of different ideas from one’s own. Political thinking became
idealistic; it fell not on the contending interests of conflicting groups, nor the ac-
tual dilemmas of justice, nor the illogicalities of empirical problems, nor the im-
perfections that attend the result of all human effort, but on the pure essence of the
state itself, or of liberty, right, law, human dignity, perpetual peace, or the general
movement of history. The tragedy of Germany, as an acute Frenchman has ex-
pressed it, lay in the divorce between politics and intelligence.^6 The intelligence of
the Germans went into philosophy; policy was an affair of cabinets, and there was
no politics at all.
The Germans themselves at the time, not unaware of this situation, took pride
in excelling in the realm of thought. No other people showed such a passion for
metaphysics or such a concern for the absolute and the unconditioned. The doc-
trine of Kant, eventually recognized everywhere as a great step in technical phi-
losophy, was of importance in Germany at the more commonplace level of the
5 Valjavec, passim, emphasizes the “politicization” of German thought after 1780; Droz, its non-
political character; but both can be true according to what is meant by “political.”
6 Droz, Rev. hist., Vol. 198, p. 177, and passim in l ’A l l e m a g n e.