‘A FRIEND TO RATIONAL PIETY’: THE EARLY RECEPTION OF HERDER BY PROTESTANT DISSENTERS IN BRITAIN

Abstract

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) already had an attentive British readership in 1800, when the first translation of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91) was published in London. This curious episode in Anglo-German literary relations and the reasons why there was a market for this German philosophical book at the turn of the nineteenth century have not been analysed in detail before. The article examines how Herder was first received in Britain as an intellectual ally of liberal Presbyterians and ‘rational’ dissenters and later attacked and rejected on political grounds by the conservative Anglican establishment. An overview of the earliest reviews of Herder’s Abhandlung uber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) in the Monthly Review in 1775 and 1784 is followed by an analysis of how Herder’s theology, Biblical studies and philosophy of history were first received in journal reviews, usually in small fragments and often prior to the availability of English translations. By the time Thomas Churchill’s translation of the Ideen appeared in 1800, Herder and some of his ideas were already the subject of intense discussion in intellectual Presbyterian and Unitarian circles in the politically heated aftermath of the French Revolution.