Contents
Acknowledgements
Editor’s Introduction
I
II
III
Foreword
1 What is a People? The Frankfurt “Germanists' Assembly” of 1846 and the Self-Understanding of the Humanities in the Vormärz
I. Dual Objectives
II. The Worldview of the Early Humanities
III. The Dialectic of Inclusion and Exclusion
IV. From the Spirit of the People to the Nation of Citizens
V. The Unpolitical Self-Understanding of German Philology
2 On the Public Use of History
I
II
III
3 Learning from Catastrophe? A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century
I. The Long Rhythms of the Century
II. Two Physiognomies of the Century
III. At the End of the Welfare-State Compromise
IV. Beyond the Nation-State?
4 The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy
I
II
III
IV
V
5 Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights
I. The Procedural Justification of Constitutional Democracy
II. The Self-criticism of the West
III. The Discourse between the West and other Cultures: “Asiatic Values”
IV. The Challenge of Fundamentalism
6 Conceptions of Modernity A Look Back at Two Traditions Conceptions of Modernity A Look Back at Two Traditions
I
II
III
7 The Differing Rhythms of Philosophy and Politics Herbert Marcuse at 100
8 An Argument against Human Cloning Three Replies
Nature Does not Forbid Cloning: We Must Decide for Ourselves2
The Cloned Person would not be an Injuryto Civil Rights4
Notes
Index
Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001. First published in Germany as Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998.
First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell
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“Globalization”: the term has become indispensable – and unavoidable – for a spectrum of current debates from political economy and democracy, law and human rights to cultural controversies over identity and difference. It seems to be a term destined to provoke only ambiguous reactions. On the one hand, “globalization” evokes the image of proliferating interconnections and interrelationship, of better communication between the most far-flung regions of the world, challenging old prejudices and pointing toward a future where the cultural, geographical, and political sources of social conflicts have become antiques. On the other hand, it calls forth panictinged images of global markets running out of control, of an unguided and uncontrollable acceleration of modernization processes, devastating the political infrastructures of nationstates and leaving them increasingly unable to manage their economies – and the social and ecological crises they generate. On the one hand, globalization hints at the utopian vision of once-hostile strangers coming into peaceable contact through globalized media of all kinds; on the other hand, it hints at the dystopian specter of forced cultural homogenization either by the decrees of a centralized administration or by market fiat – for developing countries, the eradication of the sources of any cultural identities unconducive to the mandatory, marketdriven adaptation to Western-style modes of life, to be replaced only by the bland Americanization of a global consumer culture; for Europe, a bureaucratically imposed, standardized Euroculture offered as the regulatory compensation for obsolete national characters, which live on only in the pallid form of commodities for mass tourism. Finally, perhaps the most glaring and disturbing either/or: “globalization” as the last, mutedly triumphant stage in the halting and frequently derailed process of global political democratization that began with the revolutionary introduction of the principles of popular sovereignty at the end of the eighteenth century – globalization, in other words, as a staggering (in both senses) crossing of the finish line that also makes a bit more plausible the hope that a global democracy could be institutionalized with sufficient strength and sensitivity that global crises of war, injustice and inequity, and ecological devastation could become themes for a worldwide democratic process. Or: “globalization” as that market-driven homogenizing, dominating force that reveals precisely how thin the basis of legitimacy for democratic processes actually is within the current constellation of nation-states; globalization as the end of democratization – not as its culmination but as the defining feature of the historical epoch marking the end of the national-state model for the institution of democracy. Thus globalization pointing (maybe not all that dimly) toward a future where global political and social decisions rest on the only structures capable of accommodating their complexity: highly evolved administrative state mechanisms, and highly dynamic and flexible markets, both of which operate much more efficiently by regarding their populations as clients or customers, and largely dispense with the direct participation of citizens. Mustering these conflicting images, fears, and hopes is not so difficult. Finding a way to sort them out, to confront their ambiguity squarely, and to shed some explanatory light on them – to analyze them as challenges, rather than as overwhelming fate – is not so easy. But this is the taskthat Jürgen Habermas sets for himself in The Postnätionäl Constellätion.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, Jürgen Habermas has been among the most vocal and influential advocates for an unashamed universalism in political and moral questions. His sprawling theoretical work, from his theory of rationality, through a theory of “discourse ethics” to a theory of law and democracy, is unified by the simple (and correspondingly ambitious) taskof demonstrating that the range of universalistic intuitions in morality, politics, and law – the heritage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment – is no mere projection of power or local preference. Instead, Habermas argues that universality is embedded in the most basic capacities that we possess as persons capable of speaking, hearing, giving and accepting reasons for our actions, and conducting our lives correspondingly. In the most fundamental and distinctive human capacity – the ability to speakto one another, to decide on the basis of reasons and arguments, to distinguish between understanding and deception – Habermas insists we find a universal, if modest, basis for the great political innovations of popular sovereignty, legally enforceable human rights, democratic procedures, and the inconspicuous but vital solidarity that binds humans together, and makes them accountable to one another, through the mutual recognition of the status of personhood. The central claim of Habermas's theories is that the institutions based on the communicative use of human reason, from our moral intuitions to the institutions of the democratic constitutional state under the rule of law, are reasonable, and not merely the contingent consequences of historical circumstances.
Given Habermas's theoretical commitment to this claim to universality, one might have expected his frequent political interventions to carry on, in concrete terms, his larger theoretical ambitions, and indeed any reader familiar with Habermas's theoretical workwill find in the essays collected in The Postnätionäl Constellätion a clear relation to the theoretical defense of universalism. But to Habermas's credit – and no other fact speaks more forcefully to the current relevance and ongoing importance of Habermas's workas a public intellectual – his theory is never simply imposed on his occasional writings; indeed, for a prodigious theory–writer, Habermas has never fallen into the trap of making the facts fit the theory. While intimately involved with his theoretical ambitions, Habermas's political writings carry on a noticeably tense relation with them. Political developments certainly can and often do disappoint universalist expectations, and in this sense a universalist position in politics and morality can at the very least provide a vocabulary to make clear why the costs of globalization – missed opportunities for popular political participation, for example, or exacerbated social inequities, or the loss of culture – can be registered as “costs” in a normative, and not merely in a value-neutral, sense. In their complexity and persistence, however, political and social crises also challenge the theoretical position itself, urging the theoretical clarification of “our” universalistic normative intuitions toward a heightened degree of self-criticism, openness, and flexibility.
The resulting dialectic between universalist theory and pointedly particular and up-to-date political writing is nowhere more clear than here, where Habermas confronts the ambiguous consequences of globalization in their full range. Rather than take the simple step of emphasizing the “good,” universalistic reading of globalization, the essays collected here derive much of their value from their unflinching analyses of the “bad”; including the real possibility that the bad might win, all our universalistic sympathies notwithstanding. That globalization oüght to be the harbinger for a renewed impulse toward global democracy and human rights is uncontested. That market-driven globalization processes in themselves will provide such an impetus, however, is a highly questionable assertion which no amount of theoretical commitment by itself will decide. Following the arguments presented in The Postnätionäl Constellätion does not require any particular expertise in Habermas's theories; in fact, taken together they provide a lucid and concise political introduction to why, now more than ever, a broadly ambitious but realistic and flexible theoretical explanation of the ambiguities of social modernization has become indispensable.
This latest installment in a series of political essays dating back to the 1950s nevertheless marks a decisive break from Haber mas's previous writings as a public intellectual, as the title already announces. For over forty years, Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most influential and astute observers of the political developments of the Federal Republic of Germany. In a strong sense, indeed, Habermas has been the intellectual figure of the Federal Republic, not just because of the broad influence of his theoretical workin the academic world, but through the depth of his engagement with Germany's ongoing taskof developing a political culture of freedom and democracy from the ashes of the Second World War and history's unparalleled moral and political catastrophe. The political and social consequences of that catastrophe for Germany – a divided nation, and a decidedly mixed role as a political and ideological focal point of the Cold War – contain, in miniature, virtually all of the crisis tendencies of postwar Europe. For the unified Federal Republic of Germany, however, the political history of the postwar era continues to reverberate in contemporary debates over nationhood, the role of the state, and the bases of democratic legitimacy. Because pre-unification West Germany's postwar “Basic Law” was imposed by the Allied powers without any popular referendum, the Federal Republic of Germany found itself in the unparalleled situation of standing under a strikingly liberal political constitution without any corresponding basis in a liberal political culture. Much of the politicalcultural history of that nation, then, consisted in the unique taskof growing a political culture to match institutions already in place. This fact certainly explains Habermas's understandable concern with the “bases of legitimacy” for the democratic process. It also underlies his unwavering attention to the unstable relationship between the democratic process and “the nation,” understood as a pre-political form of collective association based on the supposedly organic categories of language, shared history, or common culture. The rhetoric of nationalism – in itself the perfect contradictory to universalism, as it is based virtually entirely on acts of exclusion – was effective in justifying Germany's descent into fascism; for Habermas nothing is more painfully characteristic of the pitfalls of modernization – and the ambiguities and tensions of globalization – than the fact that global problems and challenges frequently provoke renewed forms of nationalism as their response.
Habermas's role as an engaged public intellectual in the political public sphere of the Federal Republic of Germany has largely consisted in helping to cultivate a “postconventional,” post-nationalist, post-particularist political culture, in which the abstract principles of mutual recognition, collective will-formation, and popular sovereignty expressed in the constitution and in the political infrastructure could acquire a broader basis in the attitudes and feelings of citizens. He has been an unflagging critic of any efforts to “renationalize” Germany's political life: he bitterly opposed neoconservative efforts to relativize and lessen the unique burden of moral reflection imposed on Germany by the Holocaust, efforts that culminated in the debacle at Bitburg. He was a harsh critic of the cynical appeals to national feeling that the Kohl administration used to grease the skids of a largely bureaucratically managed unification of Germany, and he fought against the nationalist-inspired sleight-of-hand used to tighten the Federal Republic's liberal immigration and asylum laws by constitutional means. He has continued to be the most forceful and eloquent spokesperson for a conception of “constitutional patriotism” – a sense of shared identity based on the abstract principles of democratic procedure contained in the Federal Republic's Basic Law, and against all efforts to “substantialize” Germany's political culture by any uncritical reappropriation of naturalized categories of nation, language, culture, shared eth-nicity, and so on.
All of this, of course, is not without a certain irony: in his passionate defense of a post-traditional, post-nationalist conception of Germany, Habermas had remained, predominantly, a Germän intellectual, in the sense that his universalistic interventions remained intimately tied to the particular issues and problems of his own country. As a moral and political principle, Habermas recognizes, universalism can only be plausibly realized through the very particular history, traditions, and forms of life that continue to characterize national cultures, even as those national cultures begin to buckle under the pressure of social, economic, and political globalization processes.
And this is where the essays collected in this volume marka decisive turning point for Habermas's role as a politically engaged public intellectual. Rather than mobilizing universalistic orientations and arguments to address specifically German issues and problems, Habermas reverses himself: now German history and specifically German experiences serve pedagogically to provide some instruction about problems that have, like it or not, become global. Globalization has also globalized the political public spheres of citizens, and has thus globalized the focus of public intellectuals operating within those public spheres as well. The end of the nation-state also obliges intellectuals to “universalize” themselves, their subjects, and their audiences, in an unprecedented way.
The dynamic of globalization, ambiguous as it may be, is for Habermas reasonably clear in one respect: it heralds the end of the global dominance of the nation-state as a model for political organization. “Postnational” here means that the globalization of markets and of economic processes generally, of modes of communication and commerce, of culture, and of risk, all increasingly deprive the classical nation-state of its formerly assured bases of sovereign power, which it depended on to fulfill its equally classic functions: to secure peace internally and defend its borders abroad, to set fair conditions for a domestic market economy and to exert what influence it can on domestic markets via macroeconomic policies, to raise taxes and allocate budgets to assure the maintenance of a minimum social standard and the redress of social inequities, to enforce individual rights and take measures to secure conditions for their effective realization. By undermining each and every one of these capacities, Habermas argues, globalization fundamentally challenges the relevance of the nation-state as a continued political model.
Hence the ambiguity of globalization. Market- and technology-driven processes undermine the stability of a form of political organization that itself is, from a normative point of view, incapable of being harmonized with basic universalistic principles: the nation-state is fading, and a good thing too. But at the same time, there is no guarantee that the nation-state will be replaced by anything better. Globalization processes themselves offer few clues about how the basis of legitimacy for democratic processes can be broadened, in a postnational world, beyond the partial (and in a sense conceptually incoherent) particularist bases that nation-states have so far been able to generate. Taken as a whole, the central essays in The Postnätionäl Constellätion all respond to this ambiguous situation with an unambiguous message: if the democratic process is to secure a basis for legitimacy beyond the nation-state, then neither state structures nor market mechanisms, but popular processes of collective will-formation alone will have to provide it. Bureaucratic initiatives and market dynamics may succeed in palliating some of the harshest crises that arise from modernization processes. But only effective popular sovereignty – subsisting in transnational networks of communication, in the proliferation of interconnected public spheres, in cooperative non-governmental organizations, in popular political movements with a global outlook– will be able to generate a mode of popular legitimacy broad and strong enough to enable transnational, regional, or global political regimes to carry out binding political decisions and enforce binding social policies. Social solidarity, in other words, which like it or not can no longer coherently subsist within the particular perspective of nation-states, will have to take a further “abstractive step.” As opposed both to the administrative state and to global markets, solidarity will have to emerge as a truly cosmopolitan phenomenon; a global sense of shared responsibility and shared commitments to inclusion and participation will have to develop in the effective attitudes of citizens of the world, if democracy is to survive the demise of the nation-state.
Such a call for a “compulsory” cosmopolitan solidarity, beyond the affective ties of nation, language, place, and heritage, may itself sound hopelessly abstract, and Habermas harbors no naive hopes concerning the difficulty of shifting popular sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and shared interests to such a thin atmosphere. But the difficulty, he insists, is itself an empirical matter and not one of principle, and will thus have to be tested in the choppy political waters of the postnational constellation, rather than dismissed out of hand. Cosmopolitan solidarity is itself nothing other than the mode of sociality demanded by the abstract constitutional principles of equal freedom for all under equal rights, the principles that democratic constitutional nation-states themselves rest on.
And here the lessons of German history can help illuminate the pitfalls and potentials of such a project. The first essay of this collection analyses intellectual aspects of the German Vormärz (literally, the period of republican foment in German history from 1815 to the failed republican revolution in March 1848) in which German intellectuals struggled to find a vocabulary for appropriating the “ideals of 1789” in the politically and culturally fragmented German context. By focussing on the “Assembly of the Germanists,” in 1846, Habermas shows how German intellectuals were simultaneously energized by the universalizing dynamic of the principles of popular sovereignty, and hobbled by the belief that the realization of such principles could only come about in a political environment defined by “the nation” as the expression of a Volk, a people with a prepolitical, organic form of shared identity rooted in place, descent, and language. The conceptual incoherence of this belief, which Habermas teases out of the details of the protocols and proceedings of the convention itself, would have enormous consequences, both for the immediate future of German republicanism and for the subsequent train of catastrophes that mark modern German political history. The myth of the “organic” nation turns out, consistently, to be the product of a concerted effort at historiographical construction – and historical fantasy. In the end, such a belief in the supposed need for a scholarly recovery of “national identity” or “the spirit of a people,” which German historians, legal scholars, and philologists understood as their special responsibility, proves impossible to reconcile with the constrüction of a constitutional regime based on citizens who live under equal freedom and equal rights. The second essay here, “On the Public Use of History,” reprints Habermas's controversial defense of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Execütioners, a bookwhose startlingly simple thesis – Germans committed the Holocaust because they were anti-Semites through and though, in a way different from any other European society – sparked bitter debates in a newly united Germany still struggling with the use or abuse of its recent history. Habermas's essay shows the persistence, and the persistent attraction, of the belief that professional history has a special responsibility to intervene in public debates over collective identity, on behalf of a sense of national belonging based on approved history. The role of historians as uncritical caretakers of national heritage as a source of national health, like the notion of scholars as nation-builders in general, Habermas implies, is an especially poor one for any country wishing to engage in a critical collective dialogue over its collective past, and to move forward with any deserved confidence into its political future.
Taken together these two essays on “the national context” draw lessons for the challenge of globalization. The next three essays apply them to the contemporary world situation. “Learning from Catastrophe?” paints in broad strokes the trends and tendencies that have culminated in the current political constellation, and crystallizes in the call for a new mode of solidarity beyond the nation-state if the crisis tendencies of the twentieth century are to be made into resources for collective learning, rather than omens for the return of old catastrophes.
At the heart of this collection, the long essay on “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy” spells out Habermas's position in detail. I have already provided some introductory summary of the themes and arguments of this essay, which clearly stands as one of Habermas's most significant and sweeping analyses of the contemporary political scene.
The fifth essay, “Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights,” provides some fine-tuning of one of the basic arguments of the collection, the current political challenge of shifting the basis of legitimacy for constitutional democracies onto the level of abstract principles. The sixth, “Conceptions of Modernity,” provides a sweeping overview of the development of conceptions of rationality and reason in modern philosophy and sociology, demonstrating how the project of providing a theory of modernity through the means of a critique of reason became bogged down into conceptual dead ends, which Habermas traces to contemporary postmodern theory. By situating his own conception of a discourse model of human reason as a plausible way out of this dead end, the essay also illuminates the internal connections between Habermas's theory of rationality and his political diagnoses.
The final section of the volume collects some of Habermas's occasional pieces; his brief contributions to the ongoing debate on the ethics of human cloning, in particular, show how moral intuitions must constantly workto keep pace with technological change.
Chapter 5, “Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights,” was translated by William Rehg. The translation of chapter 3, “Learning from Catastrophe? A LookBackat the Short Twentieth Century,” is based on an earlier translation by Hella Beister. The translation of chapter 6, “Conceptions of Modernity: A LookBackat Two Traditions,” is based on an earlier English version by Professor Habermas. My thanks to Peter Gilgen at Cornell University for consultation, and Lynn Dunlop at Polity Press.
“Flow and boundary” – a suggestive image for a new constellation of border crossings. The Frankfurt “Assembly of the Germanists” of 1846 set out to construct national borders; today those same borders are increasingly fading away. The two introductory essays to this volume illuminate German nationhood from two mutually opposed perspectives. The Germanists of the mid-nineteenth century looked out upon the nation's republican beginnings; today we look back somberly at its catastrophic end.1
The diagnostic retrospective on the short twentieth century is an attempt to explain the feeling of enlightened helplessness that seems to predominate in these times, and to direct our attention to a genuinely disturbing problem that we will all face in the coming century: can democracies based on the socialwelfare state survive beyond national borders? The title essay of this volume explores the alternatives to the dominant neoliberal positions – and dispenses with any naive trust in the rhetoric of a “third way” beyond neoliberalism and social democracy.2
A unified European monetary policy marks the beginning of a reversal of old alliances: satisfied Market Europeans have now formed common cause with nationalistic Euroskeptics to freeze the status quo of an economically integrated but still politically fragmented Europe. But the price for this status quo is paid in the coin of growing social inequities. It is a price that is almost certainly too high, according to the standards of civility that we have already achieved. In the current context, the claim that democratic legitimacy cannot be secured without social justice has itself become a conservative principle. However dubious the utopian fantasies of both the Left and the Right have become, it is clear that “revolutionaries” and “conservatives” have exchanged roles: a “revolutionary” attempt is underway to defamiliarize the population with the standards of egalitarian universalism, and to trace socially generated inequities back to the natural characteristics of “winners” and “losers.”
In the national context, of course, it is harder than ever for politics to keep pace with global competition. I see the only normatively satisfactory alternative as a socially and economically effective European Union, constituted along federalist lines – an alternative that points to a future cosmopolitan order sensitive both to difference and to social equality. Only a Europe in which the domestication of violence engages each and every form of society and culture would be immune from the postcolonial relapse into Eurocentrism. And an intercultural discourse on human rights provides the terms in which a truly decentered perspective must prove itself.
The final three chapters provide a rough sketch of the philosophical background for my analyses of the challenges of the postnational constellation in the volume's central section. Finally, a concept of autonomy that lies at the heart of the self-understanding of modernity forms the basis for an argument against human cloning.
J.H.
Starnberg, June 1998
The Frankfurt “Germanists' Assembly” of 1846 and the Self-Understanding of the Humanities in the Vormärz
The dual objectives that the organizers of the “Germanists' assembly” had in mind can be seen clearly enough, both from the letter of invitation “to an assembly of scholars at Frankfurt a.M.”, as well as the short introductory text to the Proceedings of the Germanists,1 the assembly's official record. On the initiative of the Tu bingen jurist Reycher, prominent scholars such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Leopold Ranke, Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Georg Beseler, and Karl Mittermaier gathered with the goal of founding a union of the three disciplines of German law, German history, and German language. Their primary objective was the institutionalization of an improved mode of scholarly and professional communication. Until that time, any professional exchanges beyond the normal medium of books and newspapers depended entirely on personal acquaintance and correspondence. This was true not just for interdisciplinary communication between jurists, linguists, and historians, but also for communication within the disciplines themselves,particularly among German philologists. There was thus a keenly felt need for more robust forms of personal contact, for mutual understanding and learning – “in free speech and unforced conversation” and “without prepared lectures.” The earliest German disciplinary congresses of physicians and natural scientists (beginning in 1822), and classical philologists (beginning in 1838), served as preliminary models. The organizers of the Germanists' assembly were, of course, well aware that a collective assembly of Germanistic scholars would itself be understood as a political act.
The second objective went beyond any disciplinary needs. It was to stage a subtle demonstration on behalf of the unification of a politically fragmented Fatherland:
It would be asking too much of a meeting of scholars if . . . its goal were to be set as the direct intervention in life; yet we expect no mean task from this assembly if, standing on a firm foundation of scholarly research, it acknowledges both the importance and the gravity of these times, and will satisfy, for each individual, the enthusiasm that animates us all.2
The course of the assembly itself would confirm this expectation. Re-reading these protocols, even those of us in later generations, who feel bound through profession and biography both to the humanities and to the republican traditions of this country, can sense the strength of emotion that had moved these speakers. In hindsight, of course, we can also recognize the unpolitical dimension in the passions of these heroes of the German Historical School. Nevertheless, no amount of criticism can entirely remove the peculiar charm of these voices, animated as they are by the spirit of Romanticism. Their interest in “Germanic antiquities,” the objects of their work, coincides in a virtually unconscious way with the political tendencies of their times.
The assembly itself is surely colored by a tragic irony: what was celebrated so enthusiastically as a new beginning signified, in objective terms, an end as well – both politically and in the history of the humanities. The assemblies of the Germanists, in Frankfurt in 1846 and in Lübeck the following year, constituted both the first and the last attempts to unify the three disciplines that had formed the core of the early humanities. Fifteen years later, both the German jurists and the German philologists would found their own independent associations, entirely in keeping with the normal differentiation of scholarly disciplines.
From the end of the eighteenth century, new humanistic disciplines had arisen alongside the older, established fields such as classical philology or art history. Initially, at least, a common basis of shared historicist convictions had kept these new disciplines from separating from one another; they were still far more than mere background environments for each other. But this early period was already nearing its end in the 1840s. Among the participants in the 1846 Germanists' assembly, we find only four of the figures that the historian Erich Rothacker counts among the founding fathers of the humanities in Germany: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Leopold Ranke, and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. They are the last in the illustrious line of Herder, M
ser, Wolf, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Niebuhr, Savigny, Eichhorn, Creuzer, Grres, Bopp, and Boeckh.3 Rothacker sets the parameters for this founding phase, during which the different scholarly disciplines still spoke a common language, with two famous quotations from the eighty-year period between 1774 and 1854: “Every nation contains its own central point of felicity, just as every sphere has its center of gravity” (Herder); “Every epoch stands in an immediate relation to God, and its value lies not in what it produces, but in its existence itself” (Ranke). The Frankfurt assembly, which sought to open a new chapter in the history of the humanistic sciences, actually marked the end of this founding period. Seen from the perspective of the history of the humanities, it was exactly suited for such a translatio nominis; indeed at that time the honorary title of “Germanist,” which Jacob Grimm had claimed for linguistics alone, was also entering into general usage by legal historians and modern philologists.4
The role that the Germanists believed they could play as the natural interpreters of the spirit of the people in the political public sphere proved equally illusory. As is well known, two years after the Frankfurt assembly, the attempt in the neighbor ing Paulskirche to achieve national unification through a liberal constitution ended in failure. Roughly 10 percent of the participants in the Germanists' assembly met once again in the first German National Assembly in 1848, most of them as centrists. Wilhelm Scherer would later describe the Germanists' assembly as “a sort of precursor to the Frankfurt parliament.”5 The Vormärz period was both the first and the last time that leading representatives of the humanities possessed the political will to make public use of their professional knowledge as intellectuals and citizens. What could still appear in my own teachers' generation – before, during, and after 1933 – as an attempt to exercise a political and intellectual influence obviously does not fall into this category of civil engagement. The role of intellectuals is utterly dependent on the sounding board of a liberal public sphere and a political culture grounded in freedom. With their demands for freedom of the press, the Germanists in the Frankfurt Kaisersaal 150 years ago understood this clearly. One cannot say the same of Julius Petersen, Alfred Baumler, Ernst Bertram, Hans Naumann, or Erich Rothacker.
The Paulskirche movement failed due to historical circumstances that are not my theme here. But the Germanists, who are of interest to me as a part of this movement, did not fail due to external circumstances alone. A political self-understanding that was shaped by the philosophy of the early humanities was also a decisive factor. There was, first, the desire to place themselves beyond any disciplinary boundaries, no matter how rapidly and clearly those boundaries emerged. But equally problematic was the unselfconscious fabrication of political relationships based on shared descent, which were intended to give the German nation the appearance of a natural phenomenon. Following the lead of Jacob Grimm, I will briefly sketch the philosophical background of the Historical School (II). I will use the contradictions that emerge from this sketch to show how the idea of a “spirit of the people,” a Volksgeist, always directed toward a real or imagined past, poses insurmountable difficulties for the future-oriented intentions of liberal republicanism (III). Gervinus avoids the fatal dialectic of inclusion and exclusion through a historically dynamic reading of the doctrine of the spirit of the people. But at that time, it was only democrats who remained unrepresented in the Germanists' assembly, people such as Julius Frbel, who were willing to pay attention the precarious relationship between the culturally defined “people” and the “nation” of citizens (IV). I will conclude by recalling the factors internal to scholarly disciplines themselves that disposed the Germanists to an unpolitical self-understanding.
Jacob Grimm officially opened the second public session of the assembly with remarks on the relation between the natural and the human sciences. Chemistry and physics served as examples of exact sciences based on calculation, which conceive of nature as a mechanism, deconstructing it into its component parts and reassembling it for technical objectives. The “inexact” sciences, on the other hand, operate quite differently, thanks to a finely developed and highly sensitive disposition (“a rare device of exceptional natures”) for penetrating into the organic multiplicity and interiority of the historical creations of humankind. The human sciences are not characterized by the “levers and contraptions that awe and astonish the human race,” but rather through the inherent worth, the dignity of their objects: “That which is human, whether in language, poetry, law, or history, is closer to our hearts than animals, plants, or elements. . . . It is with the same weapons,” Grimm concludes with a startlingly militant turn of phrase, “that the nation triumphs over all that is foreign.”6
At the heart of this elliptical formulation is the claim that the observational and explanatory natural sciences encompass general phenomena and lawlike states of affairs, while the human sciences, based on understanding, are dedicated to the cultural uniqueness and the distinctive individuality of their objects. Grimm had more in mind than the contradiction between general and particular, between “nomothetic” and “ideographic” science, as Windelband would later describe them. He relates this contradiction to the contrast between the foreign and the familiar, and thereby sharpens a hermeneutical claim concerning the prejudicial structure of understanding, according to which we understand what is closest to us better than what is foreign. Like must be recognized by like. This is most evident in poetry, which “can in reality only be understood in the mother tongue,” as well as “Germanic antiquities.” Understanding such historical documents of the “spirit of a people” is no neutral scientific operation; it is deeply rooted in feeling. To understand truly is to bring the whole of one's subjectivity into play, a process of recognition whose ultimate goal is the enthusiastic moment of self-recognition in the other. Hermeneutical understanding appears to live from the pathos of appropriation:
The chemical crucible will come to a boil under any flame; newly discovered plants, baptized in cold Latin, will grow in any similar climate everywhere; but we are better pleased by the unearthing of a long-lost word of German than by the rediscovery of a foreign one, because we can reappropriate it into our own country: every discovery in the history of the Fatherland directly benefits the Fatherland itself.7
For Jacob Grimm, the inclusive character of scientific and scholarly communication itself leads beyond the cool universalism of the natural sciences: “The exact sciences encompass the whole earth, and foreign scholars stand to benefit from them as well. But they do not seize the heart.”8 The human sciences, by contrast, are so deeply embedded in their own respective cultures that their results are of interest primarily to members of those cultures. The “German sciences” are thus addressed to a German public.9
The spirit of a people, which provides the ultimate referent for this differentiation between the familiar and the foreign, expresses itself most purely in its poetry. And this, in turn, is immediately connected with a “native language.” Jacob Grimm could thus answer the apparently simple question, “What is a people?” with the claim that “a people is the essence of all those who speak the same language.”10 Despite what appears at first glance to be a purely culturalistic determination, “a people” is thus reformulated in substantialist terms. It is no coincidence that all the metaphors for language, in which the spirit of the people expresses itself, are borrowed from natural history and biology.
As Jacob's brother Wilhelm Grimm reported to the assembly on the collective project of the Dictionary of the German Language, he described the cultural desolation in the wake of the Thirty Years War with the imagery of a natural landscape and its flora:
Language too, wilted and the leaves fell one by one from the boughs...at the beginning of the eighteenth century, dark clouds still hung over the ancient trees, whose life force seemed to have all but vanished . . . only Goethe's staff, striking the face of the cliff, let loose a fresh spring to stream over the barren drought lands; once again they turned to green, and the spring flowers of poetry appeared anew.11
This organic vision of language, in turn, implies a protective role for the caretakers of language. Their defensive attacks against foreign admixtures are intended to purify their native tongue without putting it in the chains of standardization.
Do not think that the Dictionary, because it undertakes the historical transformation of language, shall for that reason also prove itself to be casual or lenient. It will rebuke all that which has unjustly penetrated, even if some of it must be patiently borne; because in every language there will be individual shoots that grow poor and deformed, and which can no longer be weeded out.12
ancient13Volksnation14