¹ States and Morals (London, 1946), 34.Google Scholar

² See, for example, Morley Roberts, who stresses this identity to the point of absurdity. Whereas Herbert Spencer eventually recognized the difficulties in a too literal interpretation of the organic metaphor (see Simon, Walter M., “Herbert Spencer and the ‘Social Organism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXI (1960), 294–9)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Roberts is determined to carry the analogy beyond Spencer, “having none of that peculiar dread of analogical reasoning,” as he puts it, “which afflicts English workers.” ( Biopolitics (London, 1938), xii.Google Scholar) “States are,” he writes elsewhere, “really and not metaphorically true organisms.” ( The Behaviour of Nations (London, 1941), 1.Google Scholar)

³ Logically such a dialectic device is not very different from that described by Pareto, in Mind and Society (New York, 1935), 788.Google Scholar

⁴ See Sumner, W. G., Folkways (Boston, 1907), esp. chap. 2, secs. 83–91.Google Scholar

⁵ For an excellent study of Burke's use of imagery see Love, Walter D., “Edmund Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate: A Study in Imagery,” Review of Politics, 27 (04 1965), 184–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ “Mechanism, Organism and Society: Some Models in Natural and Social Sciences,” Philosophy of Science, 18 (1951), 234.Google Scholar

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ For a detailed treatment of this point see Frank, Phillip, Relativity—A Richer Truth (Boston, 1950).Google Scholar

⁹ I am aware that my inclusion of Rousseau among the organicists is open to challenge. But I wonder whether the same is not true of Werner Stark's inclusion of him among the mechanicists ( The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought (London, 1962), 109–23).Google Scholar Without wishing to deny that Rousseau's mode of expression admits of diverse interpretations, I feel that the tenor of his works taken as a whole reveals a far greater affinity with the community organicists than with the individualist mechanicists. No one was more emphatic in stressing the existence of inner social bonds as the necessary condition of a genuine social contract in contrast to the Hobbesian contract of subjection between rulers and ruled. Also, Rousseau, unlike his contemporaries (particularly in France), had lost faith in reason and science as man's supreme power—a feature more characteristic of organismic than of mechanistic thinking. To say this is not necessarily tantamount to classifying Rousseau as a Romanticist. See Cassirer, Ernst, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe (Princeton, 1945 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harper Torchbook ed., 1963), 19 and 31. It is worth noting in this context that the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) was by no means as rationalistically or mechanistically oriented as is commonly thought. The break with the orthodox rationalist tradition can be traced to such leading Aufklärers as Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), often called the “father” of the Aufklärung. Christian Wolff (1679-1754), and Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). For a fuller discussion of this point see my “Christian Thomasius: Enlightenment and Bureaucracy,” American Political Science Review, LIX, (1965), 430–8.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is chiefly known as a literary critic, a philosopher of history, and the “father” of modern nationalism. Two biographies have appeared in English in recent years: Gillies, A., Herder (Oxford, 1945)Google Scholar, and Clark, Robert T. Jr., Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955).Google Scholar My own study Herder's Social and Political Thought (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar, contains a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary literature. To the latter should be added Sir Isaiah Berlin s recent and most stimulating essay “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in Wasserman, Earl R., ed., Aspects of the 18th Century (Baltimore, 1965), 47–104.Google Scholar A further possible reason for Herder's lack of appeal to the modern social scientist was his refusal to reduce his heterogeneous ideas to a neat and coherent ‘ism,’ “to label them and fit them into theoretical frameworks. … The notorious luxuriance and formlessness of his ideas is due at least as much to his sense of the complexity of the facts themselves as to a naturally rhapsodical and turbid mind.” Ibid., 56.

¹¹ Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791), XIII, 377.Google Scholar All referenees are to the Suphan edition of Herders Werke (33 vols., Berlin, 1877–1913).Google Scholar

¹² “It is manifest violence,” Möser maintained, “if members of the lower class unite and attempt to claim the same rights to property as members of the higher class by simply basing such claims on a common human origin.” Möser, Justus, Werke (Abeken, ed., Berlin, 1842–1843), V, 182.Google Scholar

¹³ XIII, 295, 381, and XXIII, 414; see also XVII, 127, where Herder points out that even if equality could be attained in one generation it would scarcely survive it, quite apart from the unforeseeable problems it would pose in terms of freedom.

¹⁴ Kant, , Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (1784)Google Scholar in Schriften (d. Wissenschaften, Preuss. Akad. ed., Berlin, 1923), VIII, 23.Google Scholar

¹⁵ XIII, 383. Even Rousseau, the great advocate of a new social order where a moral ethos was to take the place of rulers, urged the Poles to venerate their ancient nobility as the surest safeguard of maintaining their political freedom as a nation (Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne, chap. xi). It was, of course, the Rousseau of the Social Contract and Political Economy who inspired Herder no less than Kant.

¹⁶ Herder's contribution to the theory of national self-determination has of course been adequately recognized. It is surprising that Herder scholars, and in particular those interested in Herder's political ideas, have failed to detect the political import of one of Herder's most mature works which he published in 1783 under the title Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry). This surprising neglect had the unfortunate result of causing Herder's political thought to be judged almost exclusively on the basis of his better known Ideen, in particular its chapter on government which, in view of the political censorship, Herder had to rewrite several times. His most radical political views, therefore, are not to be found in the published version of the Ideen, but rather in this work on Hebrew poetry where he managed to give expression to them under literary and theological disguises. For a fuller account see my “Herder and Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, XXVIII (1966), 25–33.Google Scholar

¹⁷ V, 516. Clearly, legitimacy matters more to Herder than effectiveness, to speak in current sociological terminology.

¹⁸ Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1793–1797), XVII, 116.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Voltaire, , Oeuvres (Lequieu, ed., Paris, 1820), XI, 19.Google Scholar

²⁰ IV, 38.

²¹ V, 509.

²² V, 524–5. Here Vico had anticipated Herder, but Vico was virtually unknown at the time in Germany, and all available evidence seems to suggest that Herder reached a similar position quite independently. Vico is not mentioned by Herder before 1797; even then Herder seems to have been only superficially acquainted with his thought.

²³ For more detailed discussion see my “Herder's Treatment of Causation and Continuity in History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIV (1963), 197–212.Google Scholar

²⁴ XVII, 119.

²⁵ XIV, 227.

²⁶ XIII, 196.

²⁷ XIII, 346; see also XIV, 227; XVI, 119, 551; XVII, 116; XVIII, 302, 408; XXIV, 375; and XXIX, 133, 139. This faith in the attainability of harmony between conflicting interests is by no means absent from modern pluralistic ideology.

²⁸ Herder's arguments against enforced consensus in his essay, Vom Einfluss der Regierung auf die Wissenschaften, und der Wissenschaften auf die Regierung (The Reciprocal Influenee of Government and the Sciences) (1780), esp. IX, 354–62Google Scholar, go well beyond Milton's pleas in defence of freedom of expression in his Areopagitica (1644) and anticipate those of J. S. Mill in his essay On Liberty. Likewise Herder's treatment of conflict significantly foreshadows modern theories, in particular those of Georg Simmel.

²⁹ XIV, 87.

³⁰ I am indebted on this point to Gilbey's, Thomas Between Community and Society (London, 1953), esp. 113–23.Google Scholar

³¹ XXI, 182. Herder's philosophy of organism is most coherently developed in the Metakritik (1799), a study that was intended as a criticism of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

³² XXI, 152.

³³ XIII, 346–8.

³⁴ XIV, 84.

³⁵ Stark, Fundamental Forms of Social Thought, chaps, II and III.

³⁶ Love, , “Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate,” 187.Google Scholar

³⁷ XVIII, 332.

³⁸ XIII, 347.

³⁹ XIV, 89. This view has recently been expressed in similar words by George Grant in his lament over the supposed demise of the Canadian nation. “A nation,” Grant writes “does not remain a nation only because it has roots in the past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present. There must be a thrust of intention into the future.” Lament for a Nation (Toronto, Montreal, 1965), 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Although political Romanticism did not represent a solid and unified ideology, the features that we shall single out for discussion were common to the views of most leading representatives of this school. The men we chiefly have in mind here are Novalis, the brothers Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Müller, Schleiermacher, and Savigny in Germany, Bonald, Lamennais, and De Maistre in France, and Coleridge in England.

⁴¹ See, for example, Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 86–92 Google Scholar; Popper, K. R., The Open Society and its Enemies, 2nd ed. (London, 1952), II, 52 Google Scholar; Reiss, H. S., The Political Thought of the German Romantics (1793-1815) (Oxford, 1955), 2 and 8 Google Scholar; Rouche, Max, La Philosophie de l'Histoire de Herder (Paris, 1940), 554 Google Scholar; or (approvingly) von Wiese, Benno, Volk und Dichtung von Herder bis zur Romantik (Erlangen, 1938), 18 Google Scholar and his “Der Gedanke des Volkes in Herders Weltbild,” Oie Erziehung (1939), 121 and 137.Google Scholar

⁴² Novalis, , Werke (ed. Seelig, Carl, 5 vols., Zürich, 1945), IV, 158 Google Scholar; see also II, 193: “The State is a person like any individual”; and similarly III, 298.

⁴³ Novalis, ibid., V, 32–3.

⁴⁴ Müller, Adam, Elemente der Staatskunst (3 vols., Berlin, 1809), III, 327.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See, for example, Coleridge, S. T., The Constitution of Church and State (London, 1829), 20–32 Google Scholar, and his Lay Sermon (London, 1817), 414.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Lamennais, , Oeuvres (Brussels, 1839), II, 150–1Google Scholar, cited in Nisbet, Robert A., “Conservatism and Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, LVIII (1952–1953), 170.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Müller, , Elemente, I, 62–8Google Scholar; II, 85. See also Novalis, , Werke, IV, 225 and 274.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Müller, , Elemente, I, 63.Google Scholar In speaking of the state as an idea, Müller wished to distinguish it from a concept. The latter, he held, was susceptible to rational analysis; the former was not. For concepts refer to purely static conditions, to the composition of events at any particular point of time. Ideas, on the other hand, refer to dynamic phenomena, to objects that “move and grow.” To gain true knowledge of the state, therefore, the analytical method of the sciences is wholly out of place. What is required is not observation, classification, the construction of hypotheses and the formulation of definitions, but direct intuitive insight. (See Müller, , Elemente, I, 20.Google Scholar)

⁴⁹ Schleiermacher, F., Vorlesung über den Staat (1829)Google Scholar, translated in Reiss, , Political Thought of the German Romantics, 198.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Müller, , Elemente, I, 27.Google Scholar

⁵¹ I feel indebted here to McCloskey's, H. J. article “The State as an Organism,” Philosophical Review (07 1963), 309–24.Google Scholar

⁵² For Herder neither the nation or Volk, nor the nation-state, has an exclusive claim on man's loyalty. It is the very task of Bildung to reconcile patriotism with a respect for mankind at large, with Humanität. Herder's “categorical imperative” decrees: “Serve the State, if you must, but serve humanity if you can” (XIII, 456). Herder decisively repudiates national chauvinism and treats with the utmost contempt the belief that any one nation can claim superiority over another. There is no such thing as a “historical nation” (as Hegel would have it) for Herder. No nation can claim to be a Favoritvolk at any time (XVIII, 248). “There must be no order of rank: … the Negro is as much entitled to think the white man degenerate as the white man is to think of the Negro as a black beast” (ibid.). The idea of master-nations or master-races simply has no meaning for him. (See XIII, 252, 257, and XVII, 115.) Herder's distaste for the very concept of race provoked a rather severe stricture from Kant who castigated him for his “inadequate and unsympathetic treatment of race” ( Kant's review of the Ideen in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of 15 Nov. 1785).

⁵³ The contrast between the Herderian and the Romanticists' approach to the problem of “mass society” can be seen to parallel the distinction which William Kornhauser makes between the democratic and the aristocratic critique of mass society in The Politics of Mass Society (New York, 1959).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Herder's insistence on the diffusion of power between diverse sectional bodies and interests is in marked contrast to Rousseau's open hostility to any form of pluralism. Since Herder has at times been called “the German Rousseau” (see, e.g., Korff, H. A., Geist der Goethezeit (Leipzig, 1923), I, 74 Google Scholar), this point is not without interest. It is indeed remarkable how consistent Herder was in his hostility to the institution of central administrative bodies. For he opposed it on both the national and international level. Herder did not recommend the abolition of nation states in favour of the creation of a world government, since he believed that even the mere attempt to institute such an international organization would exacerbate rather than reduce international tension. Whilst aiming to unite people, it would actually divide them further. Such “utopian phantoms” only deceive people into thinking that international unity was merely a matter of political organization (see XVII, 125; XVIII, 283, 346).

⁵⁵ XIV, 227.

⁵⁶ See XIII, 149 and XVIII, 339.

⁵⁷ XIV, 217.

⁵⁸ It is of interest that recent thinking on administrative processes come significantly close to Herder's notion of co-ordination free from norms of centrality and hierarchy. See, for example, Lindblom, Charles E., The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making through Mutual Adjustment (New York, 1965), 293–310.Google Scholar