A master-concept used by many historians in recent decades has been of the Germany's Sonderweg—its special or peculiar path of historical development. Whatever heuristic value this concept may have had, there is little doubt that it has been very much over-applied. Germany after all is not Russia. The German experience included: the free towns of the Middle Ages; scholasticism and the doctrine of natural law taught in the universities; the Renaissance and the Reformation; the rise of modern science; and an outstanding role in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
The twelve-year experience of National Socialism, with all its atrocities, was terrible. But it should not lead us to forget that for a thousand years before Hitler, Germany was an integral part of western civilization.
Dietheim Klippel is a leading scholar of German liberalism in the later eighteenth century.[10] He has suggested some of the political factors that have at different periods conditioned the acceptance of either a negatively—or sometimes a positively—charged concept of the German Sonderweg, or special path of historical evolution. In particular, Klippel has effectively criticized the view of Leonard Krieger, author of an influential work on German ideas of freedom.[11] This book, Klippel complains, pitted "a peculiar German attitude towards liberty" against an (undefined) "western" conception. But the fact is, that, besides the publicists and scholars influenced by the French Physiocrats, there existed in Germany in the eighteenth century "a wide stream of democratic and liberal ideas in all possible shadings."
Klippel has paid particular attention to the younger German school of natural law, which succeeded the older, absolutist-oriented natural-law doctrine of the school of Christian Wolff. Methodologically under the influence of Kant and contentatively inspired by John Locke, this school provided a theory of the priority of civil society as against the State; of private property, private enterprise, and competition as the essence of the self-regulating society; and of the need to protect social life against state usurpation.
It's getting late, and my brain is frying, but let me throw in this section, and perhaps I'll think of good editorial comments to throw in tomorrow.
Given this flowering of liberal ideas in eighteenth century Germany, what happened to change things? Why did such a reversal of opinion occur in German political culture?
There is no doubt that a major—perhaps the major—reason for the change lies in the political and military history of the period: basically, the attempt of revolutionary France to conquer and rule all of Europe.
The Jacobins who rose to power during the Revolution undertook to force their ideas onto Europe at the point of French bayonets. The rights of man, popular sovereignty, the French Enlightenment with its hatred of the age-old traditions and religious beliefs of the European peoples would be imposed by military might. To this end, the victorious, irresistible French armies invaded, conquered, and occupied much of Europe.
In the nature of things, these invading armies, bringing with them an alien ideology, produced hostility and resistance against that ideology, a militant nationalist reaction. That is what happened in Russia and in Spain. Most of all, that is what happened in Germany. Individualism, natural rights, the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment—these became identified with the hated invaders, who subjugated and humiliated the German people. This identification was a burden that liberalism in Germany had to carry from that time on.
The lesson that one could reasonably draw from that experience is this: if you wish to spread liberal ideas to foreign peoples, in the long run example and persuasion are much more effective than guns and bombs.
Like most of Raico's articles, it's a wonderful bibliographical essay.
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