“As necessary as it is for the representative to understand the popular mood, the final decision on important issues can only be made in the silence of the collected spirit,” explained the poet Ludwig Uhland, then also a member of the state parliament, to his Stuttgart voters in 1832 about the relationship between the people and representatives. Politicians must feel the spirit of the population, just as people who come from the mountains feel the breath of refreshing mountain air. Nevertheless, according to Uhland, they must “reserve their own thinking”.
Uhland was one of the poets in the Vormärz who were also politically active, inspired by the confidence that humanity was on the way to a better future for everyone – and that reason would serve as a torch on this path. But these early liberals were also convinced that in anticipation of the higher development of all, people – that is, men – with greater reason and foresight should serve as guides.
Visionary early liberalism was the most important ideological background for the development of modern European-Western societies and democracies. You can understand today’s crisis of liberalism better if you know its roots, emphasizes the German literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke, who teaches in Konstanz. Only today’s threat to liberalism makes it clear how much its success was based on a combination of certain circumstances. And these circumstances were to a considerable extent cultural.
His book “Sovereignty of Reason”, published by Suhrkamp, explains the prerequisites, the contradictions and the current threat to (European) liberalism in an illuminating way based on history. Koschorke focuses primarily on the German pre-March period. Even then, liberalism was characterized by a double tension: on the one hand, between the value of freedom (individual property) and the legal equality of all people; on the other hand, between truth (or reasonableness) and the majority in political decision-making.
The French Marquis de Condorcet was one of the liberals avant la lettre. He wrote a treatise about the progress of humanity, inspired by the triumph of the French Revolution – at the very time when he was hiding from its captors (who killed him in 1794). Nevertheless, the Marquis was convinced: “The time will come when the sun here will only shine on free people, people who recognize nothing about themselves other than their reason.”
But how does this rule of reason, how this equality of all people translate into institutions? The French Revolution had shown how delicate this was.
The writer Benjamin Constant argued that leisure is needed to form an enlightened and correct judgment and to have the ability to direct passions into orderly channels. Together with his life partner Germaine de Staël, he was one of the most prominent pioneers of political liberalism in France. From this he concluded that political leadership or participation should be linked to property: an idea that he shared with many European and Anglo-Saxon liberals.
Privileges and equal rights for everyone, a contradiction in terms?
Less then than today. Because, as Koschorke puts it: “The reservation towards the people contained, so to speak, a time-limit note.” Those not yet empowered were presented with the prospect of a better future in which everyone would be sufficiently sophisticated to have the same rights as the current cultural elite. This is where the mandate to educate the people, which was closely associated with many early liberals, came from. But what, asks Koschorke with regard to the present, if this promise of the future is no longer credible?
The early liberals moved between concern for the liberation of the individual and concern about political radicalization, about the “wild” side of the people. Koschorke also shows that by insisting on political representatives with particularly far-sightedness, middle-class privileges were also supported. The ideal of the free, creative self-development of every individual, which Wilhelm von Humboldt proclaimed, was in reality also closely linked to a higher economic position. This can also be seen in the example of the German Bildungsroman.
Another phenomenon that is interesting for the present can be seen in the writings of the early liberals: that much of what they proclaimed politically was re-oralized in literature, or at the same time. “Practically everything that the liberal programmaticians swear by is called into question in the poetry of the time,” shows Koschorke.
As writers, early liberals often struggled with their own political beliefs. Today, according to Koschorke, “they would probably be certified as having mental health issues.” While the aforementioned French writer Benjamin Constant invoked a liberated humanity politically, his novel “Adolphe” shows an astonishingly pessimistic view of humanity. The price for the pursuit of freedom here is isolation. Another example: the novel “Young Europe” by the Vormärz author Heinrich Laube. The hero almost loses his life as a result of the Polish revolution, which he supports, and he only narrowly escapes a lynching. He loses faith in “enlightening and instructing” the excited revolutionary people – and says goodbye to his country estate. Other pre-March revolutionaries also ended in this disillusionment.
Koschorke sees the future of liberalism soberly, but not hopelessly. Globally, it would have similar tasks today as the Enlightenment and early liberalism had on a smaller scale, but if it cannot speak credibly in the name of a better future, “the voice will fail.”
“Sovereignty of reason. The Cultural Beginnings of Liberalism” by Albrecht Koschorke: 168 pages, €20.95, Suhrkamp.
