Tradition and discontinuity

Romantic attitudes towards Europe reflected a more general tendency to seek authentic models of political authority in the distant past, treating the early modern period as a regrettable disruption of a tradition that needed to be recovered. This view of the eighteenth century stood in sharp contrast to that of Burke. German Romantics pointed to unsettling parallels between the assumptions underlying late seventeenth- and eighteenth- century monarchical absolutism, and those of the proponents of the ‘rights of men and citizens’ in the 1790s. In each case, sociability and individuality were seen as fundamentally antithetical. Sovereign power was an expedient necessary to protect the interests of bearers of natural rights, but it did not generate collective values or political cultures capable of capturing the transformations that individuals underwent as a consequence of their integration in a range of complex social relationships. Romantics argued that when political life was explained in these terms, the state assumed a cool, instrumental and conditional character that made it unable to withstand either criticisms about its value to individuals, or the alluring prospects of reinvigorated and engaged

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social life advanced by the champions of liberty, equality and fraternity. Given their atomistic starting-point and hostility to existing forms of collective Ijfe, these aspirations proved tragically false; yearnings for fraternity were obliterated by the fratricidal practice of revolution. By 1800 German Romantics had become stern critics of the revolutionary movements sparked by events in France. Over the following decades they became increasingly hostile to even the most modest constitutional aspirations of reformers in France and elsewhere. It is important to note, however, that the Romantic critique of absolutism was just as sharp as its reaction to constitutional government and rested on much the same grounds.

This critique was exemplified in Novalis’s characterization of Frederick the Great’s Prussia as a‘factory’ state presided over by a ‘state mechanic’ committed to the hopeless task of squaring the circle of his own and his subjects’ self-interest Other Romantics focused on the shortcomings of exclusively juristic conceptions of the state. Frederick Schlegel, for example, drew a contrast between ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ law and claimed that the latter was a necessary feature of a true political community. Since rational law began with the idea that individuals were bearers of pre-political rights, it could not evade the conclusion that state membership compromised rather than reconciled the interests of individuals. By contrast, natural law was the product of systems of authority that had their origins in the family; it thus integrated interests that were based on affection and sociability rather than those juristic constructs that were premised on the fiction that natural human beings lived in isolation from one another. This formulation reflected the Romantics’ stress on reconceptualizing the relationship between subjects and rulers so that fear of coercion and the pursuit of self-interest was replaced by exchanges based on admiration, affection and respect. Relationships of this kind were not possible under absolute monarchy, but nor could they be expected to emerge under constitutional regimes that reduced the monarch to the status of a paid servant of the public, or an empty symbol. Romantics tended to see monarchs as independent political actors bound to their subjects by strong ties of identity and emotion, and presiding over a network on institutions akin to traditional estates. Estates provided advice for rulers without impugning their sovereign authority and a focal point for subjects to participate in the state through institutions that reflected other aspects of their life as members of the community.

Tradition and discontinuity