Contemplating the Revolution
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Contemplating the Revolution: Ethics, Culture, and History in German Political Thought, 1789-1815 Morgan Alexander Golf-French UCL Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 1 I, Morgan Golf-French, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the important roles played by a range of historical works in German political debates during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. It uses texts across a range of genres and focuses on questions around the nature of ethics, culture, political communities, race, progress, and Enlightenment. Engaging with current controversies concerning these themes in the German Enlightenment, this thesis indicates crucial nuances in the relationships between continuity and innovation in contemporary historiography. In addition, it offers significant new understandings of the work of four leading intellectuals: August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809), Christoph Meiners (1747-1810), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), and Charles de Villers (1765-1815). The first chapter analyzes conceptions of the historical role of philosophical thought, and especially the disputes surrounding the works of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Schlözer, Meiners, Eichhorn, and Villers responded to these debates by emphasizing the politicized nature of different approaches to metaphysics and its history. The second chapter examines ideas about natural law, cultural difference, and the concept of 'race'. As well as reappraising the ideas and intellectual relationships of key thinkers on these subjects, this chapter demonstrates that, contrary to previous claims, notions of cultural difference were often closely linked to theories of natural law. The third chapter considers accounts of the emergence of European modernity. It demonstrates how German thinkers responded to the circumstances of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe by significantly revising earlier variations of 'the Enlightened narrative'. 3 Examining these debates reveals the significance of ideas about history, ethics, and culture in German political thought during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. By indicating the different ways that these notions could be conceptualized and politicized, this thesis offers new insights into both the diverse meanings of Enlightenment during a period of European crisis, and the major transformations in contemporary German thought. 4 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Table of Contents 5 Impact Statement 9 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 13 0.1. Protagonists 15 0.1.1. August Ludwig (von) Schlözer (1735-1809) 15 0.1.2. Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) 19 0.1.3. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827) 25 0.1.4. Charles de Villers (1765-1815) 28 0.2. Göttingen and its University 34 0.2.1. The Georgia Augusta University 34 0.2.2. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Period 39 0.2.3. Demography and Economics 43 0.2.4. Continuities 45 0.3. Methods and Concepts 46 0.3.1. Methodological Principles 46 0.3.2. Enlightenment (and Romanticism) 52 0.3.3. Culture 62 0.3.4. History, Historicism, Ethnology, and Ethnography 65 0.3.5. Political Categorizations 71 0.4 Thesis Structure 75 5 Chapter One: Histories of Philosophy Amid European Crisis 78 1.1. Meiners, Villers, and the Atheismusstreit 81 1.1.1. German Philosophy, 1785-1800 81 1.1.2. The Threat of Rationalism: Christoph Meiners' Ethics 87 1.1.3. Charles de Villers' Defence of Fichte, Rationalism, and the Critical Philosophy 95 1.1.4. Two Histories of Philosophy 105 1.1.5. Blockheads and Immoralists: Rhetoric and the Atheismusstreit 113 1.2. Eichhorn, Epistemology, and Ethics 118 1.2.1 Eichhorn and Historical Knowledge 120 1.2.2. Unity and the History of Philosophy 126 1.3. Schlözer's Political Critique of Ethics and the History of Philosophy 133 1.4. Conclusions 139 Chapter Two: Human Nature and Human Difference 146 2.1. Human Nature and Natural Law 151 2.1.1. Equality, Sociability, and the Natural Law Tradition 151 2.1.2. De la liberté: Villers' Critique of Freedom 155 2.1.3. Pufendorf at the Georgia Augusta: Schlözer's Account of Natural Law 157 2.1.4. Christoph Meiners: Inequality in the State of Nature 160 2.2. Europe and the World: Accounts of Human Difference 167 2.2.1. Race in the German Late Enlightenment 168 2.2.2. Christoph Meiners' Racial Determinism 176 2.2.3. Climate, Philosophy, and Confession in Villers' Cultural Thought 181 6 2.2.4. Schlözer: Monogenism, Technology, and the Ottoman Threat 185 2.2.5. Eichhorn on Human Nature and Human Difference 188 2.2.6. Meiners' Ambivalent Reception 196 2.3. Conclusions 206 Chapter Three: The Enlightened Narrative in Germany, c. 1789-1815 217 3.1. Enlightenment and the Bourgeoisie 224 3.1.1. The Bourgeoisie in Eighteenth-Century German Thought 224 3.1.2. Meiners' Critique of the Historical Aristocracy 230 3.1.2.1. Meiners' Narrative 231 3.1.2.2. The Aristocracy in Late Enlightenment Europe 235 3.1.2.3. Positioning the Geschichte der Ungleichheit and its legacy 240 3.1.3. Mittelstände and Historical Progress in the work of Eichhorn 243 3.1.3.1. Unity and Mittelstände in the Middle Ages 246 3.1.3.2. The Emergence of the Bourgeoisie 250 3.1.3.3. Enlightened Modernity 254 3.1.3.4. Excluding France 256 3.2. Religion and Enlightenment 260 3.2.1. Villers' Confessional Narrative 260 3.2.1.1. Catholicism and the Middle Ages 261 3.2.1.2. Kant, Luther, and Dialectical History 266 3.2.1.3. Charles de Villers as Conservative Republican 269 3.2.2. Russia and Europe in Schlözer's Russische Annalen 271 3.2.2.1. Schlözer's Turn to Russia and Napoleonic Geopolitics 274 3.2.2.2. Russia's Path to Enlightened Modernity 275 3.2.2.3. Positioning Schlözer's Narrative 279 7 3.3. Conclusions 285 Conclusions 291 4.1. Protagonists: Schlözer, Meiners, Eichhorn, and Villers 293 4.2. Specialist Genres in Late Enlightenment German Political Thought 302 4.3. The Enlightenment: Master Narratives, Continuities, and Transformations 307 Bibliography 313 Archival Sources 313 Published Primary Sources 314 Secondary Literature 339 8 Impact Statement This thesis represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the European Enlightenment, a key term that continues to inspire public debate. Focusing on the work of four important – but under- researched – thinkers active during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, this thesis examines many of the most important and controversial concepts of the Enlightenment in their original contexts. As well as 'Enlightenment' itself, these include culture, ethics, human nature, European modernity, and race. The present- day forms of these ideas have continuing relevance in both academia and beyond. As this thesis shows, these concepts were hotly contested in the Enlightenment. Authors debated not just what these terms referred to, but also how they should be studied and what their social and political implications were. The multiplicity of different approaches to these problems reflects the diversity of contemporary thought and the need for caution when making claims about the legacy of the Enlightenment. Crucially, the distance between how contemporaries conceived these ideas and how they are conceived today reflects the problematic nature of projecting present-day concerns on to earlier periods and movements. By focusing on historical works across a range of genres, this thesis also reveals the prominence of history-writing in German political thought in this period. It stresses the diverse ways that 9 history could be harnessed in response to pressing political concerns, such as debates about slavery or the nature of Europe. Indeed, this thesis indicates how innovative methods for the study of the past were often closely tied to profound political concerns. While examining a period of European crisis and upheaval, this thesis also emphasizes continuity: the novel approaches of the German late Enlightenment continued to utilize and adapt older ideas and methods. This has important implications for how we think about the transformations of Enlightenment thought, and yields a nuanced interpretation of contemporary intellectual innovation. The European Enlightenment remains a controversial notion both inside and outside academia. This thesis aims to contribute to on-going scholarly debates on the historiography of the Enlightenment, as well as offering insights into the emergence and transformation of crucial concepts with relevance to broader public discourse. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest thanks to all of the people who have made finishing this thesis possible. My primary supervisor, Professor Avi Lifschitz, has offered incredible support and advice since I first met him in 2013. His insight, encouragement, and wisdom have been essential in the transformation of this project from scattered ideas to final draft. My second supervisor, Professor Axel Körner has consistently offered important and challenging perspectives on my work that have been crucial to my growth as a researcher. My interest in intellectual history began in 2010 with a course taught by Dr. Angus Gowland on the history of political 10 thought. The opportunity to teach on that same course during my PhD has been invaluable, as has been his steadfast support and encouragement. Funding from the UCL Postgraduate Research Scholarship made this thesis possible in the first place. Parts of the second and third chapters of this thesis have been published by Cambridge University Press as Morgan Golf-French, 'Bourgeois Modernity Versus the Historical Aristocracy in Christoph Meiners's Political Thought', The Historical Journal, Vol. 62, Issue 4 (December 2019), 943-966, reproduced with permission (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X18000456). I would like to thank the editors Bruce Bruschi and Emma Griffin for accepting this article, and both them and the copy-editor Linda Randall for their patience in bringing this article to publication.