the intellectual movement. History is an endless round of battles going no-
where; the Kantian sphere of ideas is a higher ground, not for scientifically
comprehending the empirical world, but for transcending its change. Against
the moral religion of Kant, the activism of Fichte, and the constitutional
legalism of Hegel, Schopenhauer propounded a religion of escape. This posi-
tion coincided with the social and political biases of Schopenhauer’s network;
his earliest contacts were with conservative French émigré circles, and his origin
was in the salon society of the wealthy rather than the Idealist milieu of pastors
and tutors struggling to shape academic career paths. But Schopenhauer was
no typical representative of the conservatives, and his position was creative in
precisely the way it used the concepts of the intellectual core.
These outer ideological resonances add something to the explanation of the
movement of ideas; but they are carried by vehicles whose technical core is
inside the structures of the intellectual community itself. The university revo-
lution was the overwhelming impetus because it was a conscious struggle to
take control of the immediate conditions of intellectual life.
The Spread of the University Revolution
Comparisons confirm that it was the university revolution, and concomi-
tantly the changing position of orthodox theology within the educational
system, that produced Idealism, rather than political revolution per se. For
there were several upsurges of Idealist philosophy outside of Germany which
did not coincide with similar political upheavals. These Idealist movements
were hardly matters of keeping up with international philosophical fashion,
since Idealism had long since fallen into neglect and disrepute in Germany.
What they did coincide with was the reform of the English and American
universities along German lines: the adoption of the reform carried out in
Berlin in 1810, the transformation of the old medieval college (in America,
the center of denominational piety rather than the state church) into the
research-oriented graduate school, and the upgrading of philosophy into an
upper-level subject based on intellectual innovation. British and American
academics flocked to Germany for advanced training; what they brought back
was not Idealist philosophy but a version of university structure that had the
effect on philosophy of encouraging the re-creation of Idealism. Modern Ide-
alism was an intellectual response to internal reforms in the structure of their
university base.
Idealist Generations in England
The structure of the English universities was very different from that of the
German universities before their reform. The medieval higher faculties had long
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^663