The Politics of Enlightenment: Friedrich Gedike and German Professional Ideology

Abstract

Liberal and Marxist historiographies have assigned radically different values to the seemingly inexorable advance of bourgeois modernization in eighteenth-century Europe. But until recently the opposed camps have at least concurred that by the close of the century the German route to modernity, measured against the routes taken by England and France, was becoming eccentrically retarded, if not irreversibly deviant. The backwardness of eighteenth-century German society was assumed to lie in the absence of a politically conscious bourgeoisie drawing strength from an expanding capitalist economy and challenging the feudal aristocracy and the absolutist state with liberal demands for legal equality, civil liberties, and political participation. Instead, the university-educated core of the German Buirgertum exhibited two early variants of the unpolitical German. One was the man of letters who retreated into aesthetic or metaphysical inwardness (Innerlichkeit), in effect conceding the impotence of the bourgeois intelligentsia. The other-more relevant here-was the dutiful official of state or church. He was likely to be an enthusiast of enlightened reform; hence, his overriding concern was not with checking the power of the absolutist state, but with bringing it to bear on a tradition-bound society. In some ways recent trends in French historiography can be said to have heightened the contrast between French and German modernization. We are now in a position to understand how Jansenist militancy and the corporate legal traditions of the parlements fueled the development of a self-conscious constitutional opposition to the French crown. While conflict at this level occurred within the establishment, the Grub Street literary underworld of Paris became a breeding ground for the gutter Rousseauism that would fuse with sans-culottes populism in the early 1790s.' Juxtaposed to this