12 - Herder and Politics

Summary

Gewalt und Macht sind nicht Gerechtigkeit.

— Herder, “Der entfesselte Prometheus”

HERDER'S VIEWS ON POLITICAL TOPICS such as liberty and tyranny, sovereignty, the constitutions of states, statecraft, and international relations were largely theoretical, the product of wide-ranging studies in history, theology, philosophy, and the emerging discipline of comparative anthropology. Due to his vocation as a theologian and Protestant clergyman, Herder was virtually precluded from holding political office or commenting frankly on public affairs, except as mediated by the established church. Thus he stands in contrast to Goethe, whose training as a lawyer and long years of service managing the affairs of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach gave him practical insight into the problems of government. Nevertheless, of the two, Herder has had a more significant impact on the history of political thought. Herder's analyses of key concepts such as nation, state, and the obligations of government are still cited, debated, and deployed by historians and political scientists down to the present. Care must be taken, however, not to confuse the reception of Herder’s views with what he actually said. Above all, blaming Herder for the extreme xenophobic nationalism that was sponsored by embittered German intellectuals after the shock of defeat in the First World War is anachronistic, an instance of what Hans Adler has termed “retro-semanticizing.”

The Reception of Herder as a Political Thinker

The two most widely held opinions about Herder's politics are inaccurate. One was that Herder was apolitical, a position summed up by Reinhold Aris:

Herder […] was not a political thinker in the true sense of the word and political ideas form a very small part of his vast intellectual output. […] We do not even find that he attempted to determine the relation between the individual and the State, and we seek in vain for proposals as to how the State ought to be organised.

The other is that Herder's primary contribution to political thought was providing the concept of Volk to the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and thereby undermining the universal claims of the Enlightenment. Neither position is tenable any longer. Michael Forster puts the revised view of Herder's politics strongly:

Herder is not usually thought of as a political philosopher.