along with Schleiermacher’s and Schelling’s students, they were to fill up most
of the creative activity for the following generation. (See the networks in
Figures 13.1 and 14.2.) As this reality became apparent, Schopenhauer gave
up the contest and retired to Frankfurt to live off his personal fortune, never
to lecture again. His fame would come only in his old age, when the collapse
of Hegelianism and Naturphilosophie opened up the reputational space again.Philosophy Captures the University
I have not yet explained why the Kantian movement should have appeared at
the time it did, nor indeed why it should have appeared at all. We see the older
networks transforming and taking on a new content; for a time this content
stirred enormous enthusiasm and generated a panoply of opportunities for
creativity. To understand this, we must move to the underlying material base
which supports the networks. During the time of the Idealists, this base was
expanding and transforming in Germany in a change that was laying down
the conditions for the modern intellectual.
Before the academic revolution, the most important and best-known phi-
losophers had for several centuries been non-academics. The chief material
base for intellectual creativity was patronage. One might include in this self-
patronage of individuals such as Descartes or Bacon, wealthy enough to
support their own writing, or Spinoza, a frugal middle-class version of the
same. Most typical was personal dependence on the aristocracy: Hobbes,
household tutor in a Royalist family, and Locke, personal physician to the
opposition leader Lord Shaftesbury, are structurally in the same position. After
1690 or 1700, there was some shift toward collective forms of patronage.
Leibniz, an intellectual and organizational entrepreneur par excellence, spread
the organizational form called the academy through central Europe, by which
a prince established a material endowment for a group of intellectuals, thereby
giving a measure of autonomy and permanence to their activities. Another such
form of patronage was the custom of rewarding intellectuals with posts at the
disposal of the government. This was particularly prominent in Britain as the
political spoils system set in with parliamentary dominance. Berkeley and
Hume both did a good deal of chasing patronage appointments, the former in
the church, the latter most successfully in diplomatic service. In Germany of
the Kleinstaaterei, apart from the Academy at Berlin, prominent intellectuals
found positions as government officials under sympathetic princes (e.g., Lessing
as a court librarian, Herder as superintendent of Lutheran clergy, Goethe as
court counselor).
This is not to say that academic positions did not exist. But they were
low-paying, low-prestige, and generally trammeled by pressures for religious
638 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths