German patriots; but for some decades attitudes were not that clearly polarized. Thus, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte all greeted the advent of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and they all owed much to Rousseau. Herder, who became a major defender of national identities, was influenced by Condillac, while Wilhelm von Humboldt, who became a leader of the Prussian movement for renewal, spent years in Paris, in association with Destutt de Tracy’s ideologues. Some influential individuals, such as the Baltic “Sage of the North” Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), were Enlighteners in the first part of their lives and enemies of the movement in the second. French and German identities certainly came to be locked in opposition, but this was the outcome of a long process of political change, and not—as nationalists on both sides have depicted it—the result of an instantaneous cultural repulsion.
Viewed in broad outlines, where the Enlightenment celebrated reason the Counter-Enlightenment affirmed a belief in faith and in the primordial wisdom of the senses. Hamann proclaimed that God was “a poet, not a mathematician,” that reason was “a stuffed dummy,” and that Nature was not a repository of primordial virtue but “a wild dance” (Berlin 1982, 169). Where the Enlightenment projected the ideal of a common humanity with universal goals, its opponents exalted differentiation, particularism, and parochial identities. The émigré Savoyard aristocrat Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)—a founder of sociology, as well as arguably a precursor of fascism (Bramson 1961; Berlin 1990)—rejected human universalism outright: “The constitution of 1795, just like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. . . . But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life” (in Berlin 1990, 59). Others, notably the East Prussian Johann Herder (1744–1803), undertook to write a universal history of humanity but transformed the project into a synthetic presentation of the multiple histories of particular peoples.
Herder read the language and folklore of each people as expressions of its unconscious inner genius, its characteristic Volksgeist. This drew on Condillac’s idea that “each language expresses the character of the people who speak” (in Aarsleff 1982, 346). This formulation could be employed to modify Enlightenment universalism in order to envisage a pluralistic assembly of particular peoples, each seen as imbued with a distinctive “spirit.” One outcome was a fateful conflation of linguistic studies with an ethnically based psychology (Whitman 1984). This orientation was even more evident in the linguistics of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who reinforced the notion that the inner organizational form at the root of each language was neither static nor passive but constituted “a spiritual driving force” (Verburg 1974, 215). Subsequently, as Prussian minister of education, Humboldt channeled the German educational system into Bildung, the schooling of the academically educated elites toward a neo-humanist revival of the classics, including studies in philology and psychology. As the nineteenth century grew ever more nationalist, this fusion of disciplines equipped German nationalists with a new “spiritual” weapon to combat materialism. It also produced a new science of ethnic psychology (Völkerpsychologie), which strove to demonstrate that “the Volksgeist was the unifying psychological essence shared by all members of a Volk and the driving force of its historical trajectory” (Bunzl 1996, 28). This echoed, a half-century later, Destutt de Tracy’s project to establish a science of human ideas, yet it transformed that science from a universal project of humankind into a psychology of national identities.
“Culture” stems from this orbit of German usage. The term was originally processual, being drawn from “cultivation,” or agriculture, and then applied to cultura animi, the cultivation of young minds to aspire to adult ideals. In this later sense it came into Germany in the seventeenth century. There in the eighteenth century its meaning was extended from the development of individuals to include cultivation of the moral and intellectual capacities of nations and humankind (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 18–23), The shift in emphasis from “culture” as cultivation to culture as the basic assumptions and guiding aspirations of an entire collectivity—a whole people, a folk, a nation—probably occurred only in the course of the nineteenth century, under the promptings of an intensifying nationalism. Then each people, with its characteristic culture, came to be understood as possessing a mode of perceiving and conceptualizing the world all of its own. For a time ethnologists modified this view by insisting that the components of any one culture were rarely homegrown but rather were assembled over time from many sources and articulated in diverse ways. Yet increasingly, the question of what made the sum of these culture traits cohere was answered by claiming that the aggregates of culture traits from hither and yon were worked into a common totality by the unifying “spirit” manifest in each particular people and in that people alone. Fortified by that inner unity, each separate and distinctive people could resist the universalizing claims of enlightened Reason.
The concept of “society” was transformed in similar fashion. In the first flush of the Enlightenment, people imagined that a new “civil society” would pack off kings and emperors into exile, disband the royally protected social and political corporations, and disassemble the hierarchical arrangements of precedence and privilege. Yet as revolution after revolution leveled gradations and perquisites of rank in one country after another, many began to ask where this process of decomposition would stop and how any kind of integral social order could be restored. How were citizens, now stripped of the robes of status and expelled into the faceless crowd, ever to regain a stake in the new arrangements, a sense of belonging, a foothold in secure and collectively shared values? The search for answers prompted the development of sociology, conceived as a new science able to provide “an antidote against the poison of social disintegration” (Rudolf Heberle, in Bramson 1961, 12). Perhaps social order could once again be stabilized by building up face-to-face social interaction and association in primary groups and by reinforcing these linkages through appeal to common values.
Marx and Engels
This vision of society was challenged from the 1830s on by two kindred spirits from Germany: Karl Marx, a journalist from the Rhineland, and Friedrich Engels, the scion of a family of textile entrepreneurs from Westphalia. They combined in a new way the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment with critiques of the dissolution of institutional ties, as advanced by conservatives (Bramson 1961, 21). The two friends followed the Enlightenment in the conviction that reason could unmask falsehood and proclaim truth. They believed that employing reason would help uncover the sources of human misery, which—like many conservatives of their time—they located in the emergence of individuals disconnected from any web of mutual rights and obligations through the breakdown of older communal ways of life. They further held that humans could reach a greater realm of freedom through reliance on their own efforts, including the use of reason, without invoking the consolations of religion. They did not think, however, that such a transformation could be accomplished by the force of ideas alone, or that the envisioned change would come about by spreading truthful ideas through education. They insisted that human life was shaped not by the workings of the “Spirit” embodied in reason but through production: human practice in transforming nature to answer human needs, by means of tools, organization, and the employment of “practical reason.” Practice does not merely contemplate and observe the world; it works to alter the world, using reason to further the process and evaluate its results.
Marx and Engels were convinced, moreover, that the prevalence of misery and untruth among humans was due neither to original sin nor inherent human incapacity but to a class society with a social system that severed people from communities and interdicted their access to resources. Under these circumstances, the dispossessed were forced to hire themselves out to members of another class who benefited from this transfer of labor, and who developed rationalizations purporting to explain why this state of affairs was to the advantage of possessors and dispossessed alike. Marx and Engels were to call these rationalizations “ideology.”
By the time they adopted the term, “ideology” had lost the initial meaning of a “natural history” or “science” of ideas that Destutt de Tracy had bestowed on it and had come to mean thought formulated to serve some particular social interest. In 1844–1845, in Paris, Marx took notes on Destutt de Tracy,
