2. The concept of the nation had changed fundamentally.43 Herder’s nationalism was still cosmopolitan in spirit. Each nation contributes to the richness of human life. Nationalism links the nations to each other rather than separates them. Herder optimistically believes that the nationalization of political life contributes to international peace. “Cabinets may betray each other.… But fatherlands will not move against each other. They will rest peacefully by each other’s side and stand by each other like members of a family. Fatherlands at war with each other would be the worst barbarism of the human language.”44 In 1806, Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation could distinguish the Germans as an original nation that, unlike others (e.g., the French), had not lost touch with the original genius transmitted through its speech. The French had then become a superficial nation, who, as Humboldt wrote in 1814, lacked “the striving for the divine.”45 Nationalism no longer united, it divided. In Ernst Moritz Arndt’s poetic definition of the war winter of 1812-1813, the German fatherland was to be found “where every Frenchman is called foe, and every German is called friend.”46
3. Finally, the state occupies a very different role. Herder wrote in 1784 that it is “inconceivable that man is made for the state.” He considered the state an artificial institution, and held it to be generally detrimental to human happiness.47 Humboldt argued for the limitation of state powers in very similar terms in 1792. The activities which mattered, he wrote, were carried on by civil society. The state, which he and Herder held to be a mechanical device without real ties to society, restricted the free development of the individual wherever it exceeded its minimum function of preserving order. Along with Herder or Schiller, he viewed Germany as a cultural rather than a political nation. But by 1813 he came to identify “nation, people and state.”48 Similarly, Fichte who wrote in 1794 that “the aim of all government” is “to make government superfluous,”49 by 1800 in his The Closed Commercial State50 bestowed extensive economic functions on the state. In his Addresses to the German Nation of 1806, he raised the state to the role of the moral and religious educator of the German nation.51 Moreover, the state was increasingly viewed in power-political terms. Humboldt did so in his famous “Memorandum on a German Constitution” of 1813. Fichte, in his Machiavelli essay of 1807, warned that in the relation between states “there is neither law nor right except the right of the stronger.” This condition placed the prince, who was responsible for the interests of the people, “in a higher ethical order whose material substance is contained in the words, ‘Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ “52
This assumption implies that, in following its own interests, the state acts not only in accordance with a higher morality than that represented by private morality, but also in harmony with the basic purpose of history. In its most extreme form, this theory of the identity of raison d’état and cosmic plan probably appears in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1820). “Each nation as an existing individuality is guided by its particular principles,” Hegel writes, “and only as a particular individuality can each national spirit win objectivity and self-consciousness; but the fortunes and deeds of States in their relation to one another reveal the dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits. Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, pronouncing its judgments,” the highest judgment, “for the history of the World is the world’s court of justice.”53 This conception that the struggles of the individual nations are part of a cosmic, rational dialectic violates historicist principles. Nevertheless, even Ranke, who rejected any schematization of history, accepted the idea that generally the victors in a conflict represent the morally superior nation.
Historicism, in the course of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, had thus not only increased its hold upon the educated public, but also had changed its character. An aesthetic, culturally oriented approach to nationality increasingly gave place to the ideal of the national state. The concept of individuality, which Goethe and Humboldt still applied to the uniqueness of persons, now primarily referred to collective groups. The historical optimism of Herder, which saw a hidden meaning in the flow of history, had been fortified by an even more optimistic idea of identity: the assumption that states, in pursuing their own power-political interests, act in accord with a higher morality. A third idea, absent in earlier historicism, now occupies a central place in historicist doctrine: the concept of the primacy of the state in the nation and in society. In the course of Wars of Liberation and even more so after 1815, the political interests of the nation were increasingly identified with the power-political interests of the Prussian state. Together, these three concepts were to provide the foundations for the theoretical assumptions of much of German historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[ CHAPTER III ]
The Theoretical Foundations of German Historicism I: Wilhelm von Humboldt
1.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT’S personality was unique and many-sided,1 so that his intellectual development was not typical of changes taking place in the German intellectual climate of his time. But there are certainly aspects of Humboldt’s life and thought which are highly indicative of these transformations. An aristocrat, cosmopolitan in outlook, a friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller with whom he exchanged over a thousand letters,2 Humboldt on the eve of the invasion of Germany by revolutionary France shared fully in the Humanitätsideal. An active statesman in the Prussian reform administrations of Stein and Hardenberg after 1809, Humboldt participated in the new liberalism, which in the struggle against Napoleon affirmed national values against the principles of 1789. He no longer viewed the German nation as primarily a cultural community, but as one of political power.3 Throughout Humboldt’s life there is a thread of continuity with the cosmopolitan, humanistic orientation of his younger years, as well as a clear shift of emphasis toward the new national values.
Humboldt’s first political writings were stimulated by the French Revolution. He had visited Paris during the crucial months of 17894 and had assessed the developments in France more soberly than many other Germans. They, like his friend Friedrich Gentz, had first welcomed the upheaval with almost unbounded enthusiasm, only to turn as strongly against it. On the surface, his Ideas on an Attempt to Define the Limits of the State’s Sphere of Action of 1791, often considered the classic work on German Liberalism, proposes a state very similar to that of orthodox liberalism since Locke. The state is not an end in itself, but “a subordinated means, to which the true end, man, must not be sacrificed.”5 Its purpose is the protection of the fullest freedom of all individuals; its functions are to be reduced to the absolute minimum needed to protect the rights of the individual against violation from within and to guarantee his security against threats from without.6 Rejecting the totalitarian argument that the state must further the happiness of its citizens, Humboldt denies the state all positive functions, including a role in education, religion, or the improvement of morals.7 These and other functions might be required in society, he admits, but they should be the work of free, voluntary associations, not of the state. The state must not be identified with civil society (Nationalverein), Humboldt warns. The state is marked by coercion and the concentration of power; civil society, on the other hand, consists of a pluralism of groups, freely chosen by the individuals and subject to change.8 Not the state, but the voluntary institutions of a free society preserve and foster cultural values, according to Humboldt. The line dividing state and civil society therefore needs to be a clear one, with the state forbidden from interference in the private lives of its citizens. This assumes a state, governed by standing laws which guarantee the rights of the private individual against official interference.
But the theoretical foundations upon which Humboldt bases his concept of the state were very different from those of classical liberalism. The latter had sought a theoretical justification