Eva Piirimäe on Herder’s political thought

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eva Piirimäe's Herder and Enlightenment Politics deserves recognition as a landmark study in the scholarship of Johann Gottfried Herder, and of eighteenth-century political thought more broadly. Piirimäe shows us that Herder should be taken very seriously as a political thinker of the eighteenth century. Herder engaged in the central debates of his time and possessed a political programme concerned with the possibility for – and reformist potential of – a distinctive kind of patriotism. The review welcomes Piirimäe's contextualist, historicist approach to Herder's political thought, allowing us to understand Herder “in his own terms”. Piirimäe thereby reveals that the coherence, scope and urgency of Herder's political programme, addressing the particular challenges of his European modernity, has hitherto been underappreciated. Piirimäe suggests that Herder's political objectives provided an important and underappreciated impetus to his cultural thought. Piirimäe also emphasises the significance of Herder's experiences in the distinctive commercial environment of Riga and draws attention to his engagement with the genre of Imperial Reichsgeschichte. These highlight a more modern outlook on history and politics than is often appreciated, particularly in Kantian scholarship, and which must be borne in mind as a qualification to his famous critiques in Another Philosophy of History (1774).