policies were extended or more fully implemented. When Kant proposed to
make the philosophical faculty arbiter of the other disciplines, he was carrying
out a line which made academic careers in themselves superior to careers within
the church; it simultaneously raised the power and prestige of those who
practiced academic science, and elevated their salaries to equal those of the
other higher faculties. When Fichte envisioned university philosophers as a new
species of philosopher-king, he was putting in the most flamboyant form the
tendency for academic degree holders to monopolize entry into government
administration. The basis for these arguments had to be worked out in the
concepts of philosophical discourse; but the motivation for creating these
concepts came from the realistic assessment that the structure was moving in
a direction favorable to a self-governing academic elite. When other German
states emulated the Prussian model after 1810, there were no more university
failures, and enrollments rose fairly steadily.^30 The entire system went into a
period of controlled expansion that lasted into the 1900s.
Idealism as Ideology of the University Revolution
The contents of Idealism supported the claim of intellectual autonomy and
dominance by the philosophical faculty. The initial phase of Kant’s critical
philosophy destroyed the claims of theology to know ultimate reality. It is
impossible to know the thing-in-itself, and any such claims lead to inescapable
antinomies. There is no justification for religion except that which is provided
by transcendental critique demonstrating the necessity of moral and teleologi-
cal categories of thinking. Kant’s critical philosophy also demonstrates that no
field can know the validity and limits of its own claims of knowledge until
they have been examined by the transcendental methods of philosophy. Kant’s
revolution simultaneously downgraded theology and raised philosophy to ar-
biter of all knowledge. Kant did not cut off the validity of any phenomenal
field of inquiry so long as its practitioners stuck to their delimited sphere. He
encouraged empirical research as well as philosophical investigations to reveal
how laws of specific fields are related to the transcendental categories.
Kant’s argumentation was a precipitate of conflicts within the networks
surrounding his career. Prominent was a three-way conflict among Pietists,
Wolffians, and the Berlin Academy. Since the beginning of the century, Wolffian
rationalists had made Leibniz’s position the dominant philosophy in German
universities. The splits typical of intellectual life followed. A lineage of Pietists
and Thomasians, rival academics from the same Leipzig connections which
had produced Leibniz, accused the Wolffians of determinism and atheism.
Wolff and his follower Bilfinger were expelled from Halle in 1723 under the
attack of Budde, Rudiger, and Francke. In 1740, with the accession of Frederick650 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths