Fifty Major Political Thinkers

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.There is nonatural harmony of purposes or values.Within each national communityan endless accommodation and adjustment is necessary to ensure anorganic unity is maintained, and can be negotiated or imposed.The basic units of history and the basic divisions of humanity Herdersaw as national cultures, every one of which had the right to develop inits own way.He was deeply hostile to any form of imperialism or racismand was thus as much opposed to European domination of non-whiteraces as he was to the multinational empires of Central and EasternEurope.God favoured no race and no nation.Herder was the most important intellectual founder of nationalismin general, but his nationalism is very different from that of revolu-tionary France or that which subsequently developed in Germany.InFrench revolutionary nationalism what constitutes the nation was rathertaken for granted.All the theoretical emphasis was upon the state, as anexpression of the single will of a united sovereign people.The tradition ofGerman nationalism as it developed after Herder combined his culturalnationalism with a glorification of the state amounting in some cases tostate worship; this could hardly be further from Herder s intention.Hegel, whom Herder influenced enormously, certainly glorified thestate as morally superior to the individual and saw the Prussian state ofhis day as the final pinnacle of the state s development.German nation-alists of the late nineteenth century took xenophobic German nation-alism to extremes, insisting upon the superiority of German culture.They would gladly sacrifice the individual for the state, as well as beinghighly chauvinist and racist.However, Herder s most direct influencewas upon a group of thinkers known as the German Romantics.TheGerman Romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and AdamM�ller (with whom Herder is often linked), followed Herder s emphasison culture and history, and the political necessity of forming a uniqueharmony of disparate elements.However, in sharp contrast to Herder,theirs was a backward-looking vision that idealised medieval feudalismand looked for social leadership to a traditional aristocracy, albeit oneadvised by scholars like themselves.92MARY WOLLSTONECRAFTAs a political thinker Herder does have limitations.He can be vague andinconclusive and his anarchist pluralism is not very convincing (althoughno less so than other versions of anarchism).Nevertheless, he was oneof the most creative and influential minds of the age.He changed theway we understand our history and ourselves, profoundly influencingmajor intellectual movements, such as Romanticism, German idealismand nationalism, that have shaped the modern consciousness.His centralidea of cultural nationalism, when combined with French nationalistideas of the sovereignty of the people expressed through the nationalstate, created the form of nationalism that has shaped much of worldpolitics over the last two centuries.Further readingPrimary sourcesReflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press, 1968).Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed.F.M.Barnard (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1969).Secondary sourcesBarnard, F.M.: Herder on Nationality, Humanity and History (Montreal; Ithaca,NY: McGill-Queen s University Press, 2003). : Herder s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).Berlin, I.: Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).Norton, R.E.: Herder s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1991).MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759 97)Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London.Her father, JohnEdward, was a weaver who made several unsuccessful attempts to sethimself up as a farmer in various parts of the country.Mary s childhoodand early adulthood were disrupted by her family s frequent migrations.In 1775, she met a young woman called Frances Blood.The two becamedevotedly attached, and in 1784 opened a school in Islington, at whichMary s sisters Eliza and Everina also taught.At this time, Mary began tocome under the influence of the rational dissenters Richard Price andJoseph Priestley, thus entering the circle of radical nonconformists towhich her future husband, William Godwin, also belonged.(She and93MARY WOLLSTONECRAFTWilliam Godwin first met in 1791, though at first neither much likedthe other.) In February 1785 Frances Blood married.In November ofthe same year she died in Mary s arms while giving birth to a child, whoalso died.Overcome with grief, Mary closed the school and began tothrow herself into a literary career.Her first work, a pamphlet calledThoughts on the Education of Daughters, appeared in 1786 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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