This chapter discusses Herder’s Fragments: On Recent German Literature. In this work, Herder provided a comprehensive ‘patriotic’ assessment of the current situation of the German language and literature, including also excerpts from several smaller essays on the origins of poetry, language, and society. Previous scholarly discussions have mainly focused on Herder’s evolving historicism, aesthetics or philosophical hermeneutics as set out in these early essays. However, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that Herder’s theory of German linguistic and literary patriotism rested on a philosophical history of humanity, which he devised in dialogue with several other such histories. Engaging with Iselin’s and Goguet’s ideas, Herder sought to provide a response and alternative to Rousseau’s account of early human history. His own account closely paralleled that of John Brown. Both Brown and Herder traced all human culture and politics back to humans’ original creative agency, while Herder also drew rather optimistic conclusions from this. If it was the human capacity for poetry that demonstrated the dignity of human nature and had, from the earliest times, sustained human societies, one could hope that some form of poetry could also supply a remedy to the ‘current malaise of the world’.

This chapter juxtaposes This Too a Philosophy of History with Herder’s treatises On the Origin of Language and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul to specify the specific targets and the theoretical foundations of his radical criticisms directed at European societies and morality in the 1770s. It also explores his alternative account of moral psychology and modern moral virtue. A fundamental continuity exists between Herder’s writings of the 1760s and the Treatise as far as Herder’s views on human nature, morality, and sociability are concerned. The significant changes include Herder’s embrace of Ferguson’s account of the unsocial sociability of tribal groups, and his claim that Providence had foreseen that mankind would be reunified at a higher mental level thanks to the process of Bildung. Herder’s ridicule of modern liberty, ‘love of mankind’ and linear moral progress in This Too should not be seen as a full-scale rejection of these values; rather, he cautioned against modern self-complacency and ethical and political blind spots. In This Too, Herder emphatically drew attention to historical forms of human sociability, whilst he in On the Cognition highlighted human freedom and self-determination as the core of Christian virtue.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.