the mist of the near-present, even as the network now becoming visible in the
middle distance begins to take on familiar contours.The German Idealist Movement
In retrospect, everything is familiar. German Idealism does not surprise us
because we know it happened. But from the perspective of 1765, what followed
could only be a huge surprise. The themes of the Enlightenment were the death
of philosophy and its replacement by empirical science, above all the death of
metaphysical speculation and anything in it that smacked of supernatural
religion. Yet the following generation was to make one of the most intense
outpourings of philosophical creativity in world history, moreover taking the
form of the strongest claims of Idealism ever seen. To be sure, Kant, who
opened the door to this outburst, was not totally unprecedented, insofar as he
continued the pro-science and anti-theological themes of the Enlightenment;
yet his radical means were soon taken up by a movement that, far from
destroying speculative philosophy, drastically widened its claims.
How can we account for this reversal in the self-perceived trend of the
times? To label it a Romantic reaction is question-begging hindsight. The
Idealist revolution provides a particularly clear example of the three layers of
causal grounding for the social production of ideas. We consider first, in our
usual way, the clustering of ideas and the social networks among those who
produced them; second, the changing material bases of intellectual production
which undergirded the Idealist movement; and third, the surrounding politi-
cal-economic context which generated these organizational changes. From
inward to outward, we will examine the outpouring of Idealist philosophies
by a dense network of creative thinkers, from Königsberg to Jena-Weimar to
Berlin; surrounding these, the crisis and reform of the German university
system; and at the outmost layer, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars, which cracked the religious and political authority of the north German
states and unleashed the period of reform.
One layer does not reduce to another; least of all do the contents of the
philosophies reduce to the outermost material and political conditions. Intel-
lectuals maneuver within their own attention space, reshaping the tools at hand
from past and current controversies internal to their own sphere, while ener-
gized by the structural opportunities opening up in the material and political
world surrounding them. Like pegs through the stack of concentric rings, Kant
and Fichte are intellectual revolutionaries as well as network stars; again, prime
movers in the struggle to reform the universities to the advantage of the
philosophical faculty; still again, shapers of the German ideological response
to the French Revolution. Idea ingredients flow inward from each surrounding
622 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths