Nationalism and Culture (27 page)

machinery.' To hear some men talk of government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation and kept the planets in their place."

Abraham Lincoln warned the Americans against trusting a government to safeguard their human rights: "If there is anything that it is the duty of the whole people never to intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions."

From Lincoln come also these significant words: "I have always thought that all men should be free, but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others."

Ralph Waldo Emerson coined the well-known words: "Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well." Emerson, America's poet-philosopher, had in general an outspoken aversion for the fetishism of the law and averred: "Our mutual distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. The law of self-preservation is a surer policy than any legislation can be."

This spirit permeates all the political literature of America of that day until the rising capitalism, which led to entirely new conditions of life, by its corrupting intellectual and spiritual influences forced the old traditions more and more into the background or made them over to suit its uses. And as the same currents of thought in England reached their culminating point in the Polit ical J ustice of \Villiam Godwin, so here they ripened to their highest' perfection in the work of men like Henry D. Thoreau,^ Josiah .Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews and many others who courageously dared to take the last step and to say with Thoreau:

I heartily accept the motto—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—That government is best which governs not at all.

But these ideas were not confined to England and America, even though in these countries they penetrated most deeply into the consciousness of the people. Everywhere in Europe where an intellectual life had revealed itself on the eve of the French Revolution, we come upon its traces. A longing for freedom had seized upon men and had brought under its spell many of the best minds of that time. These ambitions received a powerful impulse from the revolutionary occurrences in America and later in France. Into Germany, too, where a select body of outstanding thinkers was at that time striving to lay the foundations of a new intellectual culture, libertarian ideas found their wayj and out of the misery and degradation of a reality ruled by a shameful despotism they

rose like glittering horizons of a better future. Let one think of Lessing's Erziehung des MenschengeschlechtSy of Ernst und Falky and of the Gesprach iiber dte Soldaten und Monche. Lessing followed the same paths as, before and after him, the leaders of political radicalism in England and America. He, too, judged the relative perfection of the state according to the amount of happiness which it assured to the individual citizen. But he also recognized that the best state constitution, being a product of the human mind, was of necessity defective and perishable.

Suppose the best state constitution that can be conceived to be already invented; suppose that all the people in the world have accepted this constitution; do you not think that even from this best constitution there must arise things that will be most detrimental to human happiness and of which man in a state of nature would have known nothing at all?

In support of this view Lessing adduced various examples which reveal the utter futility of the striving after the best form of state. Aroused by his warfare with theology, the bold thinker always returned later to this question, of which apparently he never again for an instant let go. This is proved by the concluding sentences of his Gesprach iiber die Soldaten und Monchey as brief as it is rich in content:

B, What are soldiers then?

A. Protectors of the state.

B. And monks are props of the church.

A. That for your church!

B. That for your state!

A, Are you dreaming? The state! The state! The happiness which the state guarantees to every individual member in this life!

B. The bliss which the church promises to every man after this life!

A. Promises!

B. Simpleton!

This is a deliberate shaking of the foundations of the old social order. Lessing divined the intimate connection between God and the state, between religion and politics. He divined at least that the inquiry about the best form of the state is just as meaningless as the inquiry about the best religion, since it carries its own contradiction. Lessing touched here on an idea which Proudhon later thought out logically to the end. Perhaps Lessing did so, too. The crystal-clear form of his Gesprach indicates this. But he had the misfortune to drag out his days under the yoke of a miserable petty despot and perhaps could not venture to give publicity to his ultimate thoughts. That Lessing was perfectly clear as to the far-reaching importance of these lines of thought is shown by the report of his friend Jacobi in 1781:

Lessing had the h'veliest perception of the ridiculous and mischievous in all political machinery. In an interview he once became so excited that he declared that bourgeois society must yet be completely done away with, and as crazy as this sounds, just that close is it to the truth: Men will be well governed only when they no longer need government.

Along similar paths traveled Herder, who especially in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschkhte der Menschheit made the attempt to understand historically the origin of the state. He regarded the state as a product of later times, traceable to quite different assumptions from those giving rise to social combinations in the natural state of humanity. In that condition man knew only a "natural government," which was based neither on overlordship nor on the separation of society into various ranks and castes, and which, therefore, pursued quite different aims from those of the state, with its artificial structure.

As long as a father ruled over his family he was a father and permitted his sons to become fathers, too, and sought to control them by counsel. As long as several families by free deliberation chose judges and leaders for a particular matter, so long were these office-holders just servants of the common purpose, chosen leaders of the assembly; the names lord, king, absolute, arbitrary, hereditary despot, were to the people with this organization a thing unheard of.

But this changed, as Herder thought, when "barbarian hordes" fell upon other peoples, seized upon their dwelling places and enslaved the inhabitants. With this, according to his notion, arose the first state of compulsion, and there developed the beginnings of the present governments in Europe. Principalities, nobility, feudalism and serfdom are the results of this new status and supplant the natural law of past times. For war is the introduction to all later enslavement and tyranny among men.

History proceeds along this kingly path, and facts of history are not to be denied. What brought the world under Rome? Greece and the Orient under Alexander? What set up the great monarchies back to Sesostris and the legendary Semiramis and then overthrew them? War. Conquest by violence thus took the place of right, and later by the lapse of years or, as our state theorists say, by silent contract, became law. The silent contract in this case, however, means nothing more than that the strong takes what he wants, and the weaker gives and endures, because he can do nothing else.

Thus there arose, according to Herder, a new structure of society and with it a new conception of law. The political government of the conqueror supplants the "natural government" of the freely formed alliances J natural law yields to the positive law of the legislator. The era

of the state begins, the era of the nations or state-peoples. According to Herder's notion the state is a coercive institution. Its origin can, it is true, be explained historically, but it cannot be justified morallyj least of all where an alien ruling caste of conquerors holds an oppressed people under its yoke.

Herder's whole conception shows plainly the influence of Hume, Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, and especially of Diderot, whom Herder re'spected highly and whose personal acquaintance he had made in Paris. Herder recognized in the state a thing that had arisen historically, but he felt also that by its standardizing of human personality it could but become a cancer on the cultural development of mankind. Therefore the "simple happiness of individual men" seemed to him more desirable than the "expensive state-machines" which made their appearance with the larger societies welded together by conquest and brute force.

Schiller also, despite his being strongly influenced by Kant, in his conception of the state followed the views of the natural rights school, which would acknowledge the propriety of any activity of the state only in so far as it furthered the happiness of the individual. In his Brieje uber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts he puts his attitude toward man and the state in these words:

And I believe that any single human soul developing its powers is more than the great human society, when I regard this as a whole. The state is a matter of chance, but man is a necessary being, and through what else is a state great and venerable except through the strength of its individuals? The state is only a product of human strength, but man is the source of the strength and the creator of the idea.

Also characteristic of Schiller's view is the aphorism, "The Best State" in the votive tablets:

How do I recognize the best state? Just as you recognize

The best woman—just, my friend, because no one speaks of either.

In its meaning this is merely a paraphrase of the Jeffersonian idea: "That government is best which governs least." A similar idea underlies also the aphorism, "The Best State Constitution":

I can recognize as such-only that one which each can easily Think good, but which never requires that he shall think so.

This innate resistance to the idea of a state which could prescribe for men the manner of their thinking, even when the thoughts could be called good, is characteristic of the intellectual attitude of the best minds of that time. People then would not have understood the patent model

citizen of the state advanced today by the supporters of "nationalism" as a patriotic ideal which, they believe, can be artificially created by "genuinely national legislation" or a "strictly national education."

Goethe viewed the political problems of his time with apparent indifference, perhaps because he had recognized that "liberties" do not constitute the essence of liberty, and that liberty cannot be reduced to a political formula. As privy councilor, courtier, minister, Goethe was often shockingly narrow-minded and guilty of shameful meanness. This may be attributed in no small measure to the distressing restraints of the German social life of the day. No one felt the gulf between himself and his people as deeply as did Goethe himself j he never got close to that people, and remains to this very day on the whole a stranger to them. Just because his view of the world was so many-sided and all-embracing he was of necessity all the more painfully aware of the complete repressiveness of the social life in which he was enmeshed. Goethe's roots were not in his people. "Among the German people there prevails a sort of spiritual exaltation that is alien to my nature," he said to the Russian Count Stroganoff. "Art and philosophy stand divorced from life, abstract in character, remote from the natural springs which should feed them."

In these words is reflected the gap that divided Goethe from his German contemporaries j he merely sunk his roots deeper into the first cause of everything human. The silly twaddle about the "inner harmony of soul of the great Olympian" has long been recognized as a conventional lie. A cleft ran through Goethe's whole nature, and the vain effort to master this cleavage was perhaps the most heroic side of this strange life.

But Goethe the poet and seer, who in the far-reaching vision of his genius embraced the culture of centuries, the man who roared at the world in his "Prometheus"—"the greatest revolutionary poem that was ever written," as Brandes justly said—was too great an admirer of human personality to be willing to surrender himself to the dead gearing of an all-leveling machine.

Folk and conqueror and thrall, These in every age we see: Best fortune to Earth's child can fall Is just his personality.

At the very bottom of his being Goethe was always faithful to this view. In the first part of the Faust he had penned the impressive lines:

All rights and laws are still transmitted Like an eternal sickness of the race— From generation unto generation fitted And shifted round from place to place.

Reason becomes a sham, beneficence a worry. Thou art a grandchild; therefore woe to thee! The right born with us, ours in verity, This to consult, alas! there is no hurry.

As an old man he still proclaimed:

Yes, I am altogether of that mind;

That is wisdom's final view:

Freedom and life that man alone should find

Who daily conquers them anew.

And so, while dangers round them rage.

They fight through childhood, manhood and old age.

Such a throng I'd like to see

Stand on free soil amid a people free.

In hardly any other sense than this can we understand the saying in the Maximen: "Which government is the best.'' That one which teaches us to govern ourselves."

The political radicalism of the English, and the French literature of enlightenment, had a strong influence also upon Wieland, whose conception of the relation of men to the state rested entirely upon natural right. This finds expression especially in his Der Goldene Spiegel and Nachlass des Diogenes von Sinope. That Wieland chose just this ancient sage of Corinth as the spokesman for his ideas is in itself highly indicative of the school of thought that he followed.

We shall mention here also G. Ch. Lichtenberg, whose intellectual attitude derived from Swift, Fielding, and Sterne, and who was therefore keenly sensitive to the misery of German conditions; likewise, J. G. Seume; and above all, Jean Paul, that firm defender of freedom who, like Herder, traced the origin of the state to conquest and slavery, and whose works had such a compelling influence on the best of his contemporaries. The manly words which he shouted into the ears of the Germans in his Declaration of War Against War are, alas, forgotten in Germany today; but are not, for that, the less true.