academic philosophy and the lay orientation of non-academic intellectuals. The
same thing had happened a century earlier, when Adam Smith wrote on moral
sentiments while he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, but
switched to popular concerns of economics when he moved into Continental
circles as companion to a duke.^24
Academicization promotes technical philosophy; but why should it come
about by way of Idealism, against the grain of virtually every progressive
intellectual for generations? German Idealism was one of the greatest efflores-
cences of Idealist thinking in all of world history. Moreover, in contrast to the
Idealisms of India or of Greek Neoplatonism, or even the reactionary Idealism
of Berkeley, which tends to treat the material world as an illusion, German
Idealism claimed to be able to derive the laws governing the empirical world,
scientific and historical alike, from the principles revealed in the Absolute. This
Idealism was not world-escaping but world-dominating; it made as ambitious
a claim to intellectual power as anything ever proposed.
The key to the puzzle is that Idealism was the ideology of the university
revolution. In support of this premise are four kinds of evidence: (1) the major
German Idealists were among the prime movers of university reform; (2) the
contents of the Idealist philosophies justified the reform, and the succession of
major Idealist positions closely corresponded to contemporary prospects of the
reform movement; (3) the French Revolution, as surrounding context, pro-
duced an Idealist ideology of spiritual freedom only in Germany, where it
meshed with the interests of the university reformers, whereas by contrast in
England and France the chief ideologies of the revolutionary period were
neither Idealist nor university-oriented; and (4) whenever the German univer-
sity reform was adopted elsewhere, a generation of Idealist philosophers ap-
peared, often in indigenous form.
Idealists as University Reformers
The creators of German Idealism were the leaders in the movement to reform
the university. Kant would have preferred for science to become the dominant
subject, but the university structure forced upon him an indirect path of reform.
The low-status philosophical faculty had the largest number of positions; and
within this faculty the most available chairs were in philosophy proper, the
fewest in natural science. Leipzig, the biggest university of the time, had 12
chairs in the philosophical faculty (as opposed to 4 in theology, 8 in law, and
6 in medicine), of which 5 were in branches of philosophy and only 1 in a
science (mathematics); the remaining 6 were in humanistic subjects (Helbig,
1961: 62). Kant’s path was to upgrade philosophy as leader of the sciences
while simultaneously capturing the territory now occupied by theology. In
proposing a Copernican revolution in philosophy, he explicitly identified phi-646 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths