Germany 701
might be threatened. For this “humanist” school, while their critique fell on the
betrayals of liberty, it was essentially the doctrine of equality—whether interpreted
to mean more equality of wealth, political participation, legal rights, career oppor-
tunities, or education—that they found incomprehensible or distasteful.
The thought of Herder, as of Wilhelm von Humboldt, while not expressed in
belligerent terms, exerted an influence in an anti- French and anti- Revolutionary
direction, since it represented human affairs as moving forward—not by taking
thought, nor by setting up the abstract goals of justice, and still less by learning
from foreign countries—but by a process of organic or plant- like growth, in which
each people or culture went through an experience of which the germ was some-
how inherent in itself. A similar insistence on national peculiarity, and on uncon-
scious historic growth as preferable to deliberate planning, could be found in
Burke, who was widely read in the 1790’s in Germany. At the level of disputatious
journalism these ideas were developed by others, many of them Hanoverians, and
so especially susceptible to English influence, such as Ernst Brandes and A. G.
Rehberg.^38 The ultimate tenor of such a position was to argue that Germany was
altogether different from France, and indeed from the whole of Western Civiliza-
tion, by whose influence its true and deeper character might be corrupted. It was
not until later, however, with the development of German nationalism in the nine-
teenth century, that these implications made themselves evident, superseding the
eager cosmopolitanism of the Weltbürger.
Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were all warmly sympathetic to revolutionary republi-
canism. Of Kant, it has been said^39 that he understood the French Revolution
better than any other German philosopher, both on its everyday level, since he as-
siduously read the newspapers while living quietly as professor at Königsberg, and
on the more abstract level where his own thought moved. Acknowledging a deep
indebtedness to Rousseau, he saw the Revolution as a moral act, an attempt to cre-
ate a society in which the worth and freedom of the human personality could be
unobstructed. There was a strong note of equality in his famous ethical maxim, that
each man should so live that the principle of his action might become a universal
law. Kant was distrustful of the English, to whom, like many others in Germany,
he mainly attributed the continuation of the war. His project for Perpetual Peace,
written in 1795, was used in Prussia to support the argument for neutrality. In his
insistence on the need of moral education for a free society Kant was not alto-
gether different from Robespierre, and Kant himself never ceased to explain the
violence of the Terror by the threats of the counter- revolution; but his philosophy
became so widely accepted that conservatives in Germany made use of it also. In
its conservative form, the argument held that no great improvement in society
could occur, and surely no “revolution” should be undertaken, except under the
guidance of high- minded and unselfish leaders, and after moral education of the
whole citizenry was well- advanced—a simplified “moral” interpretation that Kant
himself did not maintain. The criticism to be made of Kant, in which the French
38 On Brandes and Rehberg see Droz, Allemagne, 348–70. Droz also has chapters or sections on
the more eminent thinkers. See also parts of W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar,
1775–1806 (Cambridge, Eng., 1962).
39 Droz, Allemagne, 155.