Two Forgotten Studies in Political Psychology

Extract

While it is true that every writer on politics has been to some degree an observer of psychological facts, the significance of this has never been so apparent to systematic students as it is today; otherwise, writings of considerable merit in political psychology could scarcely have suffered the fate of the two books referred to in the present study and have disappeared from sight. Dr. J. G. Zimmerman's Essay on National Pride, published at Zürich in 1758, might very well have been the point of departure for extended research into the nature of patriotism and international attitudes; Gottfried Duden's inquiry, Concerning the Essential Differences of States and the Motives of Human Nature, published at Cologne in 1822, stated problems and suggested methods for the examination of the realities of political power which ought to have inspired a century of minute research. Both books fell flat, and it is only in this day of numerous soundings in psychological politics that it has become worthwhile to disinter them.

That a book about national pride should have been published two years after the beginning of the Seven Years' War is a sharp reminder that European politics had undergone a transformation. The Reformation was undoubtedly a nationalist movement in many of its phases, but it introduced a series of sectional and party disturbances which intercepted the progress of nationalism. These had subsided, and by the eighteenth century the clash of competing imperialisms became not only a basic fact but a fact of which the men of the age were aware.