F. M. Barnard. Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History. McGill-Queen's Studies of the History of Ideas Series. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. xii + 188 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-2519-1.

Reviewed by John Holloran (Department of History, Oregon Episcopal School)
Published on H-German (October, 2003)

A Herder for All Seasons

A Herder for All Seasons

After a century of ethnic cleansing, racist chauvinism, and nationalism run amuck, historians have given Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) the dubious honor of being the pioneer of the idea of a linguistically connected Volk and a culturally-based political nationalism. Amid debates on the relative merits of Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic subjectivity, Herder once was a political football of sorts. Isaiah Berlin admired him for standing in opposition to the Enlightenment, and for helping to create a so-called "counter-enlightenment" case for pluralism. Others like, R. G. J. Collingwood, wrote less admiringly of Herder and bemoaned Herder's abandonment of the "Enlightenment's conception of a single fixed human nature."[1] With this background debate about Herder's virtues in mind, and drawing on forty years' worth of work on the subject, Barnard sets out to defend Herder. Barnard argues that later, abusive forms of ethnic, racialist, and political nationalism involved distortions of, and departures from, Herder's groundbreaking ideas. If anything, Barnard insists, Herder anticipated those errors, and he proposes further that a careful study of Herder's work yields valuable insights and distinctions for current political debates. Such distinctions ought to provide historians with a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing manifestations of nationalism.

Barnard divides Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History into seven main articles: "The Hebraic Roots of Herder's Nationalism;" "Cultural Nationalism and Political Romanticism;" "Nationality and Humanity: Heine and Herder;" "Humanism and Titanism: Masaryk and Herder;" "Humanity and History: Causation and Continuity;" "The Dynamics of Culture and 'Globalization;'" "Historical and Political Consciousness: Herder and Rousseau." The chapters stand independently, and can be read in any order. In his introduction, however, Barnard offers five core ideas of Herder's that inform the entire book: the conviction that optimal human creativity requires a national matrix of embeddedness; the need for caution, lest one mistake embeddedness for sameness; the recognition that historical progress involves the cost of excluded alternatives; the counsel that relating the particular and the universal--such as nationality and humanity--must resist absorption of one by the other if their interaction is to preserve what is distinct and incommensurable in each; and the realization that coming to grips with history's tangled sequences of events may call for different methods of enquiry than the application (or sole application) of theoretical formulas, methods that demand a cognitive sensitivity toward the uniquely individual in order to yield the possibility of imaginative seeing and empathetic understanding (pp. 15-16).

In his first chapter, "On the Hebraic Origins of Herder's Nationalism," Barnard draws lines of continuity between Herder and Marx and later Herzl. Herder was particularly interested in discussing the Jewish people as a Volk, as a collective nation and, as such, Barnard sees in Herder's ideas not the "precursor of Nazi ideology" but rather anticipations of "political Zionism" (pp. 35-36). Here Barnard's history-of-ideas approach gives pause--it seems too uncritical to let Herder off the hook completely when writing so sweepingly about Hebrews and Jews. The point that Herder was not a racialist in the later Aryan sense and that he privately advocated political emancipation (if not social assimilation) is well taken, but it only goes so far. There is still more about eighteenth-century thought and attitudes to be interrogated here, even if Herder was on the liberal end of the spectrum and, as Barnard contends, Herder had (as a non-Jew) deep insight into the reason why "people no longer sharing a common homeland should regard themselves to be a people" (p. 18). It may well be impossible to fully embrace Herder's ideas; nevertheless, Barnard admirably draws out as palatable a vision as possible of Herder's sense of the culturally inspired political nation, one that is "maximally inclusionary in social and cultural terms and minimally exclusionary in political-legal terms" (p. 37).

Barnard's subsequent discussions of Herder's ideas alongside those of Rousseau, Heine, and the first Czechoslovakian president, Thomas Masaryk, rehabilitate Herder's genius by associating him with a more sympathetic crowd of humanists than previous critics have allowed. These chapters alone deserve careful consideration since the parallels he draws between Herder and Masaryk, for example, work productively to draw both into better focus. Indeed, the political vision that emerges from Barnard's humanistic sense of belonging is reminiscent of the level-headed, humane voice one can encounter when reading Herder directly, and that is an accomplishment in itself.

While we learn to see Herder in contrast to Rousseau and Kant, and in connection with Montesquieu, Heine, and Masaryk, Barnard offers little in the way of connecting Herder to other, earlier German discussions of language, culture, theology, literary theory, Hebraic studies, or political theory. For example, no mention is made of the long rivalry between the philologically and the mathematically oriented professors in German philosophy faculties; nor of the debates among historians in theology, philosophy, and law faculties; nor is any discussion provided of Herder's teachers or other lower profile but influential contemporaries. The result is a Herder who is more a body of ideas than a man writing in the eighteenth century. If intellectual history can be conveniently divided into three sorts--head and shoulders (ideas); heart and guts (political and financial interests); and below the belt (personal idiosyncrasies)--then Barnard's portrait is a particularly handsome bust.

The Herder who emerges is a remarkably modern-thinking, sensible, and republican-minded theorist, an author whose reputation suffered as much from the limitations imposed on him by censors (who would not allow Herder to reveal fully his republican colors in print) and propagated by Herder's own penchant for rhetorical excess. In apologizing for Herder, however, Barnard spends remarkably little time discussing the state of the question. But for a footnote on page 27, which cites books published in 1938, 1946, 1952, and 1955 (Benno von Wiese, Collingwood, Popper, and H. S. Reiss respectively), Barnard omits mention of any current scholarship that takes Herder to task. Who are the thinkers who have been misreading Herder? Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor are sympathetic, as are Anthony LaVopa, Frederick Beiser and John Zammito. Somewhere there is a cadre of critics, but, if Barnard knows them, he has politely decided not to name names (or reference their articles). Then again, the greatest challenge facing Herder enthusiasm is not the critics, per se, but the overstuffed canon of European Intellectual History. Herder is eminently worth reading, yet his work seldom makes it onto syllabi outside German departments. Barnard provides a great service in this further contribution to the promotion of Herder's work, yet two major stumbling blocks remain: historically embedding Herder in his eighteenth-century German world, and identifying (or promoting) a representative teaching text or texts that might enable students to recognize the nuanced concepts Barnard so rightly identifies.

Note:

[1]. R. G . Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp 88-93. More recently, though not mentioned by Barnard, Brian J. Whitton made a similar case against Herder's pluralism, in "Herder's Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community Versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism," History & Theory, 27:2 (1988), pp.146-168.

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Citation: John Holloran. Review of Barnard, F. M., Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8295

Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.