Edmund Burke’s German Readers at the End of Enlightenment, 1790-1815 Jonathan Allen Green Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge September 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaborations except as declared in the Declaration and specified in the text. All translations, unless otherwise noted or published in anthologies, are my own. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University of similar institution except as declared in the Declaration and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Declaration and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the Faculty of History Degree Committee (80,000 words). Statement of Word Count: This dissertation comprises 79,363 words. 1 Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation was a challenge, and I am immensely grateful to the many friends and colleagues who helped me see it to completion. Thanks first of all are due to William O’Reilly, who supervised the start of this research during my MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History (2012-2013), and Christopher Meckstroth, who subsequently oversaw my work on this thesis. More broadly I am grateful to the members of the Cambridge Political Thought group, who taught me what the history of political thought is, how to do it, and why it matters. I am especially indebted to Duncan Kelly and Isaac Nakhimovsky, whose 2013 course on Istvan Hont’s ‘history of the history of political thought’ was extremely helpful for placing my own reading of Burke’s reception within the discipline’s wider historiography, and to the faculty members who advised my research informally: John Robertson, Michael Sonenscher, Sylvana Tomaselli, and Joachim Whaley. Outside of Cambridge, my research brought me into contact with the small (but growing!) cohort of scholars interested in Burke’s German protégés. Richard Bourke (Queen Mary, University of London), Raphaël Cahen (Marseilles), Benedikt Koehler (London), Günther Kronenbitter (Augsburg), and Iwan Michaelangelo-d’Aprile (Potsdam) offered helpful advice and suggestions at various stages of the project. Christopher Clark (Cambridge), Ian Crowe (Burke Society of America), Paul Kerry (Rothermere Institute, Oxford), Klaus Ries (Jena), and Michael Rohrschneider (Cologne) generously invited me to present my research at their workshops and seminars. During my time at the Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, Hermann-Joseph Eschbach helped me to navigate Gentz’s Nachlass, and Marlis Herterich (widow of the Gentz researcher Günter Herterich) was kind enough to share some of her late husband’s archival findings with me; my thanks to both of them. Most of all, I am thankful for the Cambridge graduate students, JRFs, and friends who helped me along the way. William Boyce, Hunter Davis, Freddy Foks, Michael Mascindaro, Tom Pye, and Paul Wilford all read chapters in various stages of drafting. Tom Arnold-Forster, Michael Breidenbach, Greg Conti, Ben Hand, Emily Jones, Rhys Jones, Charlotte Johann, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Lucian Robinson, Ben Slingo, James Stafford, Hanna Weibye, and Sam Zeitlin offered encouragement and advice throughout the writing process. Whatever merits this dissertation has, it would have been far more imperfect without their help. 2 For my parents 3 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 6 1. Zisca’s drum 6 2. Prospectus 12 Chapter 2: Das Edmund Burke-Problem in the history of political thought 18 1. Frieda Braune’s Edmund Burke-Problem 18 2. Shaping the canon 23 3. Competing conservatisms 30 4. Postwar afterlives 38 5. Conclusion 47 Chapter 3: August Wilhelm Rehberg 48 1. Introduction 48 2. Hanoverian contexts 52 3. Burke in Hanover, before the deluge 58 4. Rehberg, Hume, skepticism 66 5. Burke and the pamphlet wars in Germany, 1790-93 73 6. Burke and the Untersuchungen 88 7. Conclusion 99 Chapter 4: Friedrich Gentz 102 1. Introduction 102 2. Translating Burke’s Reflections 109 3. Gentz’s Burke in the Spätaufklärung 119 4. Gentz’s Burke contra Kant 126 5. Gentz, Burke, perpetual peace 144 6. Conclusion 160 Chapter 5: Adam Müller 166 1. Introduction 166 2. Prussian beginnings 175 3. Der Gegensatz against Fichte 184 4. Burke, tradition, ‘mediating history’ 195 5. Müller’s Elemente der Staatskunst 206 6. Conclusion 212 Chapter 6: Conclusion 216 Bibliography 222 4 We shall have to think away distinctions that seem to us as clear as the sunshine; we must think ourselves back into a twilight. – F.W. Maitland1 1 F.W. Maitland, Township and Borough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), p. 11. 5 Chapter 1: Introduction I. Zisca’s drum Shortly before he died, Edmund Burke (1730-1797) begged to be forgotten. By 1796, he was arguably the most famous politician in England. Over the last decades of his life, Burke had made his name as one of Parliament’s most jealous defenders of the British Constitution – a vociferous opponent of royal prerogative, a critic of ministerial corruption in the Empire, a friend of American Independence and the cause of religious toleration, and, in recent years, Europe’s most famous (or infamous) denunciator of the French Revolution. But now, at the end of his life, Burke wished only to be left in peace. ‘Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction?’ he complained of his relentless critics: Are they apprehensive, that if an atom of me remains, the [revolutionary] sect has something to fear? Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca’s, my skin might be made into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle, against a tyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe, and all the human race? … ‘Leave me, oh leave me to repose!’1 In the years and decades after his death in July 1797, his compatriots were largely obliging. For a brief period, he was eulogized in the British press as a talented orator and a historically significant figure; his erstwhile colleagues recalled his fiery personality and his strength of principle; and posthumous writers debated the alleged ‘inconsistencies’ of his career.2 But afterwards, he was set aside. No political party took up Burke’s mantle in the years after his death, and early nineteenth-century political theorists roundly ignored him (presumably on the grounds that an ‘inconsistent’ mind like Burke’s would not reward careful scrutiny).3 As 1 Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord [Feb. 1796]; in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke [hereinafter W&S], ed. Paul Langford et al., 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970-2015), vol. 9, pt. 1, pp. 145-87, at pp. 147-8, italics removed from orig. Burke alludes here to the Hussite general Jan Žižka (1360-1424) who, according to legend, ordered that if killed, he was to be flayed and his skin made into a drum so that he could continue inspire his army in battle. Burke’s plea for ‘repose’ is a quotation from Thomas Gray’s Descent of Odin (1768). 2 This question of ‘consistency’ was the leitmotif of Burke’s first biography: see Robert Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke…, 2 vols. (London: Cawthorn, 1798). 3 Cf. James Sack, ‘The Memory of Pitt and the Memory of Burke: English Conservatism Confronts its Past, 1806-1829’, The Historical Journal, vol. 30, no. 3 (Sept., 1987): pp. 623-40; Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), passim. Burke had admirers 6 Chapter 1: Introduction Emily Jones has recently shown, it was not until the 1880s and ’90s – amidst heated debates over Irish Home Rule and in the face of a growing socialist movement – that Burke’s Tory- Unionist admirers christened him the founder of modern conservatism, a label he still wears today.4 If it took nearly a century for Burke to regain relevance in Britain, his canonization in America was even more belated. Though he was sporadically invoked by nineteenth-century politicians to warn of the dangers of revolutionary violence, this did not amount to a confrontation with his ideas: before the Cold War, Burke was more a badge to be worn than a mind to be understood.5 This changed in the 1940s, when an enterprising coterie of anti- communists, neo-Thomists, and Christian traditionalists – America’s so-called ‘new conservatives’ – discovered Burke and situated him as the founder of their shared creed.6 For Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Frances Canavan, Burke’s campaign against the politicized atheism of the French revolutionaries paralleled their own war against the threat of Stalinism abroad and, more subtly, of moral exhaustion and ennui at home.7 This Cold War reception forced political scientists to circle back to Burke’s thought, in an effort to make sense of the new conservatives who imagined themselves his progeny. Like their Victorian predecessors, American thinkers like Samuel Huntington soon uncovered a stable ‘Burkeian ideology’ of conservatism – a coherent philosophical tradition stretching from the 1790s to the present.8 On the European mainland as well, there failed to materialize any serious reception of Burke’s political thought in the early-nineteenth century. His political thought was attractive among the English Romantics, but here his influence was aesthetic, not political: on this reception, see Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century: A Study of the Political and Social Thinking of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey (London: Allen & Unwinn, 1929).