Introduction

This article explores the philosophical genesis of the concept of self-determination of peoples. Although a key concept in modern political vocabulary and international law, it is notoriously elusive. First, the meaning of the term “people” can vary considerably. As a singular term with the definite article it may refer to the common people or the entirety of citizens in a state, while in the plural it can denote either territorial communities or cultural peoples.Footnote ¹ Second, the concept of self-determination may connote independent statehood, political self-government, popular sovereignty, or even autonomous development.Footnote ² Some authors have proposed that we differentiate between cultural and democratic self-determination. While “cultural self-determination” refers to the “right of a nation to preserve its existence as a unique social group,” “democratic self-determination” consists of “the right of individuals to govern their lives and to participate in a free and domestic political process.”Footnote ³ Alan Patten has suggested an even more nuanced distinction between three conceptions of self-determination: statist, democratic, and national. The statist conception equates self-determination with state autonomy.Footnote ⁴ The democratic one points to the “the value for a people of being able to shape and determine its own affairs.”Footnote ⁵ The nationalist one posits that it is specifically the “sociocultural peoples” that should be able to do so.Footnote ⁶

My focus in this article is on the views of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Herder is widely credited with having created a strong version of the concept of national self-determination, one positing that all nations have a right to their own state.Footnote ⁷ Vicki Spencer has qualified this view, maintaining that Herder was defending cultural rather than national self-determination.Footnote ⁸ According to her, Herder carved out a compelling philosophical understanding of culture, grounding it in an expressivist theory of language and an idea of moral pluralism. From this he derived an insight into the value of the autonomous cultural development of all peoples, and so opposed all forms of imperialism and colonialism.Footnote ⁹ This does not mean, however, that he suggested that all peoples should create states of their own.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Spencer, Herder did not rule out multinational polities.

These qualifications about Herder's relationship to a strong version of national self-determination are largely apposite. He did not advocate a right of all nations to independent statehood. However, it is not clear why the adjective “cultural” should be the main, let alone the sole, defining element of Herder's understanding of collective self-determination. The relationship between cultural and political (as well as democratic) self-determination in his thought has remained elusive. Although Spencer recognizes Herder's republican principles and the importance of political self-government, the term “cultural self-determination” risks leaving the false impression that political self-determination is not part of Herder's conception of self-determination.Footnote ¹¹ Adopting the analytical prism suggested by this term would also shift our attention away from Herder's notion of the people as a political agent. Yet, as I hope to show, Herder's comments on the French Revolution and the concept of revolution in general are very relevant for understanding his ideas about the self-determination of peoples. There is also a continuing debate about Herder's views on multinational polities. Alan Patten, for example, argues that Herder's preference was for “nationally bounded” polities.Footnote ¹² Indeed, while Herder discussed the situation of various kinds of multinational empires and commented on their possible reform, it remains an open question what kind of future he envisioned for modern peoples (and those in Europe specifically).

The lack of any systematic discussion of Herder's views on the self-determination of peoples is also perhaps one of the reasons why he does not appear in recent attempts to chart the complex philosophical genesis of that concept. Eric D. Weitz mentions Herder's name only in passing, even while claiming that the concept of self-determination emerged in the German Enlightenment. For Weitz, Kant originated the concept, whereas the subsequent history of self-determination can be understood as “dramatic, often unnoticed transformation” of self-determination from “a primarily individualist into a collectivist doctrine.”Footnote ¹³ Jörg Fisch and Edward Kolla focus on the ways in which ideas of popular sovereignty were associated with territorial claims, leaving aside questions about the philosophical genesis of the ideal of the self-determination of cultural peoples (nations).Footnote ¹⁴ The present article demonstrates that Herder's ideas merit a significant place in the intellectual history of the concept of self-determination.

Elsewhere I have traced the evolution of Herder's political thought by situating his ideas in eighteenth-century debates on modern patriotism, commerce, and peace. I have also touched on Herder's understanding of individual and collective self-determination in discussing his critical engagement with Kant.Footnote ¹⁵ In various texts Herder used the term “self-determination” (Selbstbestimmung) to designate individual human moral freedom (consisting in a voluntary commitment to associative obligations or the pursuit of truth), fundamentally opposing Kant's concept of individual self-determination as well as his model of constitutional republicanism.Footnote ¹⁶ Herder proposed an alternative, Stoic-vitalist understanding of self-determination, and emphasized the importance of moral sentiments in achieving a stable form of republicanism. Drawing on those findings, this article analyzes systematically the several facets of Herder's ideas about the self-determination of peoples. It goes beyond that work by juxtaposing Herder's ideas with what can be called a Grotian tradition in early modern natural law, on the one hand, and with those of the most radical French republicans, on the other. My goal here is to specify how Herder envisioned the self-determination of peoples as taking place and what kinds of political institutions he regarded as entailed by or compatible with it. I argue that in the 1780s and 1790s, immediately before and during the French Revolution, Herder expressed ideas that in important ways may have contributed to the rise of the concept, while cultural and political aspects of self-determination cannot neatly be separated in his understanding of the concept.

Peoples and State-Machines

Throughout his life, Herder pondered the nature of the people as a community, inquiring about the sources of unity and common feelings (i.e., patriotism) which characterized various societies. In his early years, he engaged in a sustained debate on this issue with Rousseau as well as with Montesquieu, seeking to show against the latter that human beings are naturally sociable and that love of the fatherland, too, is a natural feeling.Footnote ¹⁷ From the 1780s onwards, Herder also made a clear distinction between the people and the state. I focus on this distinction.

In order to specify the degree of originality in Herder's thinking in this respect, it is useful to juxtapose his ideas with a clear line of thinking in early modern natural law discourse. As Richard Tuck has shown, Samuel von Pufendorf and John Locke, each in his own way, followed Hugo Grotius in developing and elaborating on the notion of a distinct people as an association of individuals which is entitled to freely choose a form of government for itself, without at the same time being constituted through that “form” (as Aristotle would have it).Footnote ¹⁸ These thinkers posited at least two steps in the formation of political communities: most essentially, the creation of a body of people or society by individuals as an initial step (via contract or consent to accept the principle of majority), and, subsequently, the selection of a form of government or the establishment of “sovereignty.”Footnote ¹⁹ Although the “people” for them had in general no capacity to exercise sovereign power and no actual legislative role in the resulting polity, it was nonetheless an identifiable political agent which had chosen, or had the right to choose, the form of government, and whose consent mattered on certain central issues. They fundamentally distinguished the concepts of the people and the state.

Grotius and Pufendorf granted that it was possible to have several peoples ruled by a single sovereign. If a sovereign wished to transfer one of these peoples to another sovereign, then it was necessary to obtain the consent of that distinctive people. Similarly, there is a rudimentary idea of the people as an agent distinct from the state in Locke's Two Treatises on Government, although Locke drew more radical conclusions from this (and did not discuss the possibility that there would be many peoples in one state). For Locke, distinct “peoples” were constituted through “the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society”Footnote ²⁰ as well as to “submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it.”Footnote ²¹ This community chose its form of government and constitution as well as delegated (but never alienated) different aspects of political power to designated agents (individual or collective) as specified by their constitution.Footnote ²² Violation of trust by rulers led to a dissolution of political government, as a result of which the people as a whole was free to choose a new form of government.Footnote ²³

Herder proposed a very different understanding of the formation of peoples and their relationship to states. For most of his life, he maintained a critical distance towards the early modern natural law tradition, rejecting its core concepts such as the “state of nature,” “sovereignty,” and “social contract.” Already in his earliest essays, he instead pondered what human literary history could reveal about human nature, society, and the history of mankind. He reached the conclusion that humans were fundamentally “aesthetic” and “poetic” beings who interacted with the world through their senses while the capacity for reason and language were interwoven with sensibility. Humans gradually created and continuously developed language in order to understand their world but also to communicate with each other, expressing themselves in various forms of art. Herder emphasized natural human sociability, maintaining that human beings spontaneously develop national groups or peoples (Völker), based on common origin, language, communal singing and the rise of distinct linguistic, religious, and cultural traditions. Political laws were collectively articulated (indeed, “sung”) at public gatherings.Footnote ²⁴ Political principles (Triebfeder des Staats) were an integral part of poetry and aesthetic and moral taste in early societies. Imagining a contract between separated individuals was thus misleading. Herder's view also made questions about the enforcement of contracts or laws in early societies redundant. Laws were originally grounded in mores, while mores were grounded in national traditions.

Herder's most explicit reflections on the relationship between the people and the modern state can be found in his Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–1791). He discussed this relationship in responding to Kant's argument about unsocial sociability and the need for a sovereign ruler in human society. Herder maintained that there was no “natural” form of political government, insisting that humans did not “need” a ruler by nature. States—distinctively modern forms of political government—were contingent historical developments. Human beings could do without them. However, this required a thorough transformation of humans’ moral dispositions.Footnote ²⁵ Herder offered a highly critical account of modern sovereignty as essentially a form of oppressive rule that had no grounding in its subjects’ mores and willing obedience to the laws. Yet this did not prevent him from expressing some hope about the future of Europe.

One of Herder's most pregnant insights, developed first in the 1770s, was the idea that European hereditary monarchies (the dominant state-form in Europe at the time) had emerged as a result of the Germanic conquest of Roman territories, while the ruling classes (nobles and the clergy) adopted new principles owing to the fusion of “Roman” and “German” ways of thought, both of which were bellicose in their own ways.Footnote ²⁶ He elaborated on the character and underlying principles of European monarchies in Ideas, arguing that the latter were fundamentally “state-machines,” designed for making war and dominating the common people, including conquered peoples. Although lawful government had emerged in early modern times, modern states remained geared towards external conquest. Worse still, new political pathologies (for example, global colonialism and imperialism internationally as well as extensive civic apathy domestically) had emerged.

Herder's reference to “life” is consistent with his broader vitalist natural philosophy as developed in the Ideas.Footnote ²⁸ He posited the existence of a continuous existential thread running between the natural and human worlds, and viewed the entirety of created nature as permeated by one basic living force, God. This force, in turn, diversified itself through a dynamic natural process so as to reach a state of stability in organized forms of various degrees of complexity—in essence, an immense variety of ascending forms of inanimate and animate organization from the simplest forms of beings right up to human beings.Footnote ²⁹ As Marion Heinz explains, social groups, like nations, were for Herder not independent beings or organic forms, but only quasi individuals and quasi beings. They emerged as a result of the manifestation of the organic forces in the actually existing individuals who composed them.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, they came into being precisely because human beings were “the first beings set free by nature.” Humans were by nature determined to be “self-constituting,” which meant that they essentially “constituted themselves” as well as the entire historical world.Footnote ³¹

From the metaphysical point of view, cultural peoples were emergent communities, which resulted from human interaction with the external world and each other, facilitated by human sensibility and the human capacity for reason. Herder never uses the term “Volksgeist” (the spirit of the people) to denote something like the soul of a collective being. The terms he mostly used were “Nationalgeist” (national spirit) and “National-Charakter.”Footnote ³² Although these terms, too, had several meanings for him (for example, “Nationalgeist” could also designate public spirit), Herder principally uses them to denote a people's historically conditioned ways of thought and action. While “ways of thought” (Denkarten) were expressed through a people's language and literature, he also maintained (following Montesquieu) that national spirit or character as a whole resulted from an interaction between various kinds of historical factors—a nation's “mode of life, habits, needs, peculiarities of land and climate” as well as its distinctive “constitutions” (Verfassungen) and also its “history.”Footnote ³³

In criticizing modern states as “lifeless,” Herder is not suggesting that there were no living “peoples” in them. Rather, the problem was that these peoples were alienated from the state and the current political institutions, which operated mechanically. However, despite his differences from natural law thinkers, he aligned himself with the more radical of them like John Locke in arguing that the people could always alter their institutions. He made strong normative claims about the ever valid “rights of humanity” (Rechte der Menschheit).Footnote ³⁴ He pointed to the ancient Greeks and Romans who had demonstrated that it was possible for a people to enjoy freedom under political government as well as to shake off “the yoke of ancient forms of government and traditions.”Footnote ³⁵ While referring to single peoples, Herder also had in view “the people” or even “the common people” within society as the agent entitled to represent or defend the rights of humanity. Thus Herder, like Locke, suggested that “the people” was always justified in exerting its political agency, hinting at the need to radically reform the political institutions in his own time. He made it abundantly clear that “the people” in modern states had especially good reasons to do this as well the increasing capacity to do it. Yet it was also likely that in modern “state-machines,” the mass of the people would simultaneously be organized into distinct peoples rediscovering and reaffirming their national character.

Following Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like William Robertson and Adam Smith, Herder maintained that the rise of long-distance commerce and heightened economic competition between states as well as increased international communication were progressively moderating the despotism of the European monarchies. These processes were fundamentally transforming the power relations within society, materially liberating the common people, yet also making them, at least initially, more subservient. At the same time, there was a different but related process under way, that of the progress of Humanität in human history. Humans were increasingly aware of the relations of justice and equity in human society and even in the progress of history itself. Herder hoped and believed that the cultural leaders of different nations would soon begin to seriously explore, and self-reflectively revise and develop, the cultural heritage and political traditions of their nations in the light of Humanität. All this would lead to profound transformations in, or, perhaps more likely, the collapse and rebuilding of, the existing “state-machines.”Footnote ³⁶

Herder makes this point most forcefully when discussing the history and future prospects of the currently “subjugated” and foreign--dominated Slavic peoples. Modern trade would improve the “legislation and politics” in the historical territories of these peoples, promoting their “quiet industry” and international contacts.Footnote ³⁷ As a result of these processes, “these now deeply sunk, but once industrious and happy peoples will awake from their deep and long slumber,” so that they ultimately “will be freed from their chains of slavery and will use their beautiful areas from the Adriatic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from the Don to the Moldau as their property,”Footnote ³⁸ celebrating on these territories “their old festivals of peaceful industry and trade.”Footnote ³⁹

Is the political ideal Herder is proposing merely cultural self-determination, or is it also political self-government, perhaps even the creation of new states? What is clear is that he is demanding that these peoples be able to determine their affairs and way of life on their historical territories. The precise mechanism how this is achieved remains unspecified, as it is up to these peoples to decide upon it. As for the creation of new states, the term “state” is of course key. If used to designate modern “state-machines,” then Herder was not proposing a new ideal according to which all cultural peoples should create their own states. Recall that he suggested that the state would ultimately become redundant in human history. However, if we have in view a humanized state serving the purpose of Humanität as well as enabling political self-government,Footnote ⁴⁰ then things become more complicated. As we have seen, Herder made clear that peoples were always free to alter their form of government and that the example of the Greeks and Romans showed that political self-government was possible. Thus, given that we are not talking about state-machines, but instead humanized states, possibly federal states, there is a certain plausibility to this interpretive possibility. He does not say much about the precise institutional form of the new polities created, or indeed about its relationships to other polities, but highlights the emerging agency of Slavic peoples and their new aspirations. Whether he thought about extending this idea to other subjugated peoples in Europe or elsewhere is less clear. It is nevertheless likely, given his straightforward rejection of all kinds of colonialism and imperialism as well as his overall view of the progress of Humanität.

Self-Determination of the French People during the Revolution

In 1792, Herder published a short essay entitled “Tithon and Aurora,” in which he raised a direct question about the meaning and legitimacy of a “revolution” (he did not mention the French Revolution).Footnote ⁴¹ When read together with his thoughts on the process of the alteration of the French constitution in his unpublished early draft of Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, his reflections in this essay show that he was concerned about the situation and rights not only of subjugated peoples but of all peoples whose political institutions were in need of profound reform.

Herder begins by analyzing the term “revolution,” proposing that it essentially has two meanings. The first, the true and older definition, refers to circular kinds of natural movement, like the revolution of the moon around the earth. The second, and much later, meaning connotes violent upheavals which turn the established order upside down, for example, elevating those formerly at the bottom to the top or vice versa. This latter definition dated from the barbaric period when conquests and violent upheavals occurred frequently.Footnote ⁴² This kind of revolution, obviously, was best avoided, and indeed, there was hope that it could be avoided in modern times: “the more our reason and equity increases, the more the concept of revolution should also be used in its original true sense,” meaning a return to the “natural order of things” (das natürliche Verhältnis), an orderly course of things according to natural laws.Footnote ⁴³

While this may sound like a straightforward invitation to a revolution in the true sense, Herder also made clear that evolution and revolution (properly understood) only seemed to be opposed to one another, and there was actually no need for even any true revolution, if there was a regular evolution. However, in human affairs evolution could be hindered. According to Herder, everything in “nature” was in constant evolution and revolution, but where human art is involved, it is possible that old or dying bodies can be preserved by artificial means. Sometimes, in individual cases, the body outlives the soul, making the person in one sense already dead before their death actually occurs. The person's energy has died, and he has become a shadow of himself.Footnote ⁴⁴ The same can happen to “so-called politico-moral persons, institutions, constitutions, estates and corporations.”Footnote ⁴⁵ These bodies can linger on for centuries, even though their “souls” have long since departed. Herder thus claimed: “While the land and the people never really become old, or become so only very late, states as human institutions . . . can fortunately also experience old age and youth, and thus also an ever-lasting unnoticeable progression towards growth, fruition, or dissolution.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Good regents will not let this decay happen. They understand that the human course of events requires a form of “gardening,” pruning dry leaves, and fostering natural development and growth, thereby facilitating evolution. More often than not, however, political leaders did not understand that this was their true task.

It must have been clear to contemporary readers that Herder was suggesting that France had long ago become a dead state owing to the inaction of its rulers and dominant classes. To paraphrase Herder's claims in Ideas, the “state-machine” was functioning, but was devoid of life. He hereby implied that it was more than likely that “an upheaval of the state” (Staatsumwälzung) would happen in France at some point. If this was the case, it was vital for the leaders of the people to seize the opportunity to initiate a true revolution in order to restore the natural order within the state. In the realm of human affairs, this kind of restoration could not obviously be a full revolution (a return to an original state), but only a return to the natural principles of order suitable to the current age. There was no justification for trying to stop this process. When a political upheaval has taken place, the state is to “retain or restore the natural order, the healthy activity of all its parts as well as the vibrant circulation of all its fluids, and not fight against the nature of things. Sooner or later, even the strongest machine will yield [to nature] in this fight.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Referring again to the idea of the “state” as a “machine,” Herder made clear that the original Frankish “state-machine” (i.e., the medieval constitution) could not and should not be revived. The current “state-machine” needed to be replaced by a new kind of political community grounded on very different foundations.

Such a true revolution was possible because human art and learning (Kunst und Wissenschaften) never died, but only regenerated themselves, attaining new forms. Considering that Herder viewed peoples as constituted primarily through culture, this helps to explain his confidence about the longevity of peoples in contrast to states. Art and learning, too, could potentially become stagnant, yet never (or very rarely) could they die completely. National character thus also evolved, even if it was not currently expressed in the state. Furthermore, as we have seen, a people could always adopt a new constitution. Cultural revival and political revival, of course, were mutually reinforcing, while the revolution in France showed that time had become ripe for the latter in particular. Interestingly, Herder in “Tithon and Aurora” also praised the Glorious Revolution for having helped England to achieve its “living constitution” in the “most peaceful manner.” While rulers in other states had suppressed all new developments and initiatives, England (Britain) was making great progress in its “constitutional, financial, and commercial affairs.” With that revolution, it had decisively renounced the “spirit of feudal, military, and forest laws of William the Conqueror.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In the unpublished draft of the first series of Letters, written from November to December 1792,Footnote ⁴⁹ Herder applied these insights to the French Revolution. He maintained that it represented the “spirit of the times” at the end of the eighteenth century, but could also be seen as a return to natural order, a regeneration of the French state as a new kind of polity. The recession of the barbaric spirit of conquest and war as well as the abolition of ancient royal and noble privileges represented the inevitable “natural” course of history. From the point of view of “natural relations,” all individuals within a state belonged to one and the same “rank” (Stand)—“the people (not the rabble) [Volk (nicht Pöbel)].”Footnote ⁵⁰ By contrasting the “people” with the “rabble,” Herder wished to make clear that being part of the people was not to be confused with belonging to the lowest kind of people; rather it consisted in being a member of a body of citizens.

Herder thus expressed his full support for France in its attempts to “give itself a constitution” (Verfassung).Footnote ⁵¹ Although using the term “France,” he really meant the French people who in turn were acting through their representatives. The French (like the English) were a “nation that constituted a political whole.”Footnote ⁵² While he did not use the term “self-determination” in this context, he introduced a relatively close cognate to describe the ongoing process—“self-constitution” (applied to both individuals and collectives).Footnote ⁵³ France was reconstituting itself. However, it thereby also contributed to the more general progress of Humanität. The discussions in the French National Convention on “the tasks, details, and doubts regarding the constitution [Einrichtung] of the entire nation [die Nation], its full organization and fundamental rebirth”Footnote ⁵⁴ were bound to have consequences for all European nations and the entire human species: “The constitution [die Konstitution] that the National Convention is working on is an unsolved, until now unprecedented problem; [regardless of whether] those who seek to resolve it do not succeed or, conversely, meet with success is the struggle, the victory, even the failure of this most complex, difficult problem of humanity not worth the attention of anyone who does not want to be considered to be an animal?”Footnote ⁵⁵

As we have seen, thanks to his conception of the progress of Humanität in human history, Herder believed that modern peoples awakening from their slumber would attempt to create political institutions in which the people would govern themselves. In seeking to specify the form of their institutions, they would be creatively drawing on, yet not seeking to “revive” in a more precise sense, their own national traditions. The barbaric heritage and the spirit of conquest were to be replaced by Humanität and the spirit of (benign) trade. Herder seemed to believe that “peoples” would naturally resume their agency in modern revolutions—in certain cases, there would be many peoples emerging from dying “state-machines,” in others there would be only one. In France, just one people seemed to be regenerating itself.Footnote ⁵⁶ Of course, these were hints only; Herder did not consider these processes in any detail. He did not address the question of possible distinct peoples within the political whole of France (or England/Britain, for that matter). He did not specify any formal mechanisms to find out about the existence or viability of a collective political self. Nor does it seem to have occurred to him that these kinds of processes on the territories of collapsing empires could easily lead to rival interpretations of national or political selfhood among the population, or profound political disagreements within, as well as rivalry and conflicts between, different self-constituting nations.

Herder focused instead on the relationships between the French people and other states. Here his position was very clear. He maintained that no external meddling in the self-constitution of France was legitimate, following the example of natural lawyers like Emer de Vattel who had specified the implications of a nation's right to alter its constitution for international relations.Footnote ⁵⁷ He strongly criticized the interventionism of neighboring European monarchies, including the Austro-Prussian intervention,Footnote ⁵⁸ rejecting also emerging French republican interventionism and imperialism.

The Phantom of Liberty

Although Herder was highly sympathetic to the French Revolution in the early 1790s, over time he became increasingly critical of it. He early on identified the rise of a false ideal of self-determination in France during the revolution, one that he called the “phantom of liberty” (Schwindelgeist der Freiheit).Footnote ⁵⁹ Essentially, it consisted in a specific (and in his eyes misguided) understanding of what political liberty involves in terms of institutional design. Herder suggested that this ideal would lead to disastrous consequences in both domestic and international affairs.

There was one thinker in particular whom Herder regarded as primarily responsible for the rise of the “phantom of liberty” in modern France: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's critique of representation had facilitated the spread of this problematic ideal. Rousseau had famously called for an extraconstitutional legislator to form the people as a political body. However, when the people was constituted, it could not be divested of its legislative right, and the general will would be the only principle followed by the people. Rousseau also denied the possibility of representing the general will, arguing that it does not “admit to be represented.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It thus followed that laws could only be changed by an act of the will of the sovereign, while sovereignty belonged to all the members of the body politic as equal citizens. Every law was therefore to be ratified by all the members of the body politic as citizens. Rousseau also maintained that deliberation was not to be expected from the citizens as members of the sovereign body, but instead was directly opposed to the idea of the general will.Footnote ⁶¹

Rousseau's support for direct democracy was in fact strongly qualified—indeed, as Richard Tuck and Michael Sonenscher have (in their otherwise very different interpretations) demonstrated, he expressly distinguished the modern republic from the ancient one, emphasizing several profound differences in their socioeconomic and cultural foundations as well as proposing a distinction between sovereignty and government as an essential modern innovation.Footnote ⁶² For large states, he recommended mandat impératif and gradated promotion.Footnote ⁶³ The reception of Rousseau's suspicion of representation by the French revolutionary thinkers, however, is more important for our purposes. As Keith Baker pointed out some time ago, during the French Revolution, a considerable number of authors came to follow Rousseau on the issue of representation in particular. These thinkers insisted that the “election of representatives would result in the subjection of the entire community to the particular (hence arbitrary) will of the representative body.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Agreeing that in a large territorial state, a representative body would still be necessary, they accordingly came to defend mandation, and advocated for the creation of a system of local municipal assemblies alongside the national one.Footnote ⁶⁵ They also endorsed the ‘“municipal revolution’” in France, which instigated the rise of popular councils (and militias) in each town, and the setting up of 41,000 new communes in France.

These communes—among them, most notably, that of Paris—assumed a highly active role in the progress of the revolution. Thanks to this widespread suspicion of representation (which was also expressed in the 1791 constitution), the communes regarded themselves as entitled to intervene in the political process and to express various kinds of demands, including against the constitution itself. Indeed, it is necessary to distinguish between two very different lines of development ensuing from the Rousseauean suspicion of representation. As Tuck suggests, the Girondins developed Rousseau's distinction between sovereignty and government by insisting on the right of the municipalities to vote on fundamental (i.e., constitutional) laws, leaving all other legislation to the representative assembly. The Jacobins, by contrast, blurred the line between sovereignty and government by proclaiming that all laws, however minor, should (in theory) be enacted by the people.Footnote ⁶⁶ The door had to be left open to allow for popular contestation of any decision; whereas over the course of the revolution, the municipalities became ever more empowered as the actual agents of the people. As the revolution evolved and external threats to the republic escalated, the Jacobins resorted to the rhetoric and practice of necessity increasingly against the National Convention as a representative body, so as to claim the rights of the people against it.Footnote ⁶⁷

It is in all likelihood these developments that Herder had in view when he repeatedly criticized the Rousseauean ideas that prevailed in France from early 1793 into 1794. I propose that what he is in fact referencing is the Jacobin idea of popular rule in France, which he (like Benjamin Constant later) interpreted as a misguided attempt to revive ancient liberty in modern times. Already in 1765, in an essay on ancient and modern patriotism, Herder had rejected the ancient understanding of freedom (and direct democracy) by arguing that, for the ancients, “freedom was an untamed audacity, the daring to hold the wheel of state in one's hands, the wilfulness not to suffer any other name above oneself.” The freedom that moderns wanted for themselves, by contrast, was a more “modest freedom,” “the freedom to enjoy in the shadow of the throne one's dwelling and vineyard in peace and quiet, and to possess the fruit of one's labours, the freedom to be the shaper of one's happiness and comfort, the friend of one's intimates and the father and guardian of one's children.”Footnote ⁶⁸

During the French Revolution, Herder qualified this account by complaining that the idea that the people should rule directly originated in the minds of the philosophers. He refers directly to Rousseau,Footnote ⁶⁹ making the claim that the people should not rule or instruct. It instead required instruction. Rousseau's idea of the “rule of the people” was being implemented in France without regard for the fact that the “people have remained uneducated for centuries under the yoke of European despotisms.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Herder also compared current German bureaucratic rule with the “even more oppressive yoke of popular rule by numerous municipalities” in France, expressing his relief that Germans can observe the “French shipwreck in an open and alien sea from a safe coast,” at least as long as “our evil genius does not push us against our will into the [same] sea.”Footnote ⁷¹ He also never expressed support for the idea that a universal popular vote on the constitution was required.

Herder's idea of political self-determination or indeed, of the “self-constitution” of the French people should not thus be confused with any support for direct democracy, plebiscitary legislation, or popular veto over the decisions of the legislative. Rather it seems that Herder's position shares common ground with authors who propose that the idea of modern liberty can be combined with new models of representative government.Footnote ⁷² As indicated above, he was highly enthusiastic about constitutional deliberations in the National Convention, particularly celebrating the fact that “more than a thousand well-selected individuals”Footnote ⁷³ were now publicly discussing constitutional issues, which reveals how important it was for him to have a proper public deliberation. We can thus argue with some confidence that so far as concerns the actual institutional makeup of a modern state like France, Herder's preference remained with representative government. Popular sovereignty in the form of popular rule or indeed mob rule in the municipalities was only deceptively a form of political liberty (self-determination).

As indicated above, Herder was also highly critical of the foreign policy implications of this “phantom of liberty.” Insofar as this ideal could be devised and justified rationally (in the abstract), there was also a temptation to impose it forcibly upon other, supposedly less enlightened peoples. This was unacceptable to Herder. Even had the French conception of political liberty been flawless, he would have opposed the idea that it could somehow be introduced without modifications and discussion in differing cultural contexts: “the so-called best form of government,” he maintained, simply cannot “suit all peoples, at once, in the same way.”Footnote ⁷⁴ He also clearly ruled out the imposition of “freedom” on other peoples by force.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Self-Determination of a People as a Continuous Process

In 1795, Herder published a new essay on ancient and modern patriotism, again approaching this problem from a wide historical perspective, just as with his earlier essay on the same topic. However, instead of juxtaposing ancient republican and modern monarchical liberty and patriotism, he offered a more complex argument about the formation of various national, transnational, and international “publics” as well as a different interpretation of the ideal of a “moral fatherland” in ancient as well as modern times. My goal here is to explicate how Herder's discussion of patriotism and the “modern public” can be seen as a reflection about those ways in which a people can be self-governing.

In the 1795 essay, in discussing the notion of the “public” as a collective singular, Herder distinguishes between “real” and “ideal” forms of public. The “real public” entailed a crowd of people that was physically present at a cultural event, whereas an “ideal public” was a virtual or imagined community, which did not depend on any contiguity in space or time. With regard to both kinds of public, Herder maintained that one should assume the existence of a “reasoning moral being” that sympathetically observes and judges our thoughts, and “whose tastes we are also allowed to strive to instruct, teach, form and further develop.”Footnote ⁷⁶ He highlighted the fact that such a public was increasingly aware of its own existence, thereby qualifying it as a form of collective self. This self could actively shape itself through public discussion.

Crucially, Herder suggested that nations, too, had to be construed as distinct kinds of “ideal publics.” Herder acknowledged that different nations had prioritized different elements in their collective self-understanding. While the Hebrews had articulated the ideal of a “God's people” as a “genetic individual” constituted through language, the Greeks coined the ideal of a moral fatherland as a special kind of community of fate established through laws and civil institutions. Herder's message is clear: modern nations should follow the example of both the Hebrews and the Greeks (and, indeed, the Romans) in cultivating and cherishing their languages and in realizing the idea of the “fatherland” as a moral and political project, to be pursued by generations through collaborative efforts.Footnote ⁷⁷

Herder also underscored the importance of moral and political leaders in awakening, forming, and maintaining the national public itself. In his unpublished draft of Letters (1792), he suggests that true leaders, in modern times, are best described as “aristo-democrats” (Aristodemokraten), “noble, great, wise men” trained through “education and experience,” who are “arranged as heads and leaders of the people by God and the state.”Footnote ⁷⁸ It is impossible to tell whether Herder here refers only to moral and spiritual leaders or if he was also pointing out the value of elections. It is not entirely implausible that his reference to the state could be to the institution of elections in a modern republic. The statement was made in the context of his commenting on the French discussions in the National Convention. If we recall his hopeful remarks about the importance of public deliberation on a new constitution, it would appear that Herder was proposing precisely this kind of deliberation as an essential part of, even a precondition for, legislation in a representative body.

Herder explicitly cautioned against following the ancients in relying on public ceremonies and theatrical effects to influence the minds of the audience. Here he again expressed a critical distance from direct democracy. The ancient Greek ideal of liberty had often enabled orators, oracles, and priests to manipulate the feelings of their publics.Footnote ⁷⁹ Already in his earliest essay on ancient and modern patriotism, mentioned above, Herder had jotted down the idea that there was a crucial difference between “our republics” and “ancient republics”; the latter having experienced the “disadvantages” characteristic of a situation “when the crowd thinks for us.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In his late years, Herder also feared that the danger of such manipulation was even more exaggerated in modern times, as there was a tendency to publicly venerate certain abstract ideas such as fraternity, liberty, or peace, which lacked a firm foundation in the actual morals of the people. This could produce nothing but glaring double standards—a gulf between the professed principles and the actual ways of thought and behavior of the people. Thus he argued that in modern times, moral reflection and education needed to take place via print media, including books. Appealing to the people's sentiments was necessary (and in this respect the moderns needed to learn from the ancients), but what was equally important was creating an attitude of unrushed deliberation, self-reflection, and even self-criticism, which would ultimately have a genuine impact on legislation.

Although sympathetic to revolutions, Herder was no revolutionary. In his theoretical reflections he always prefers gradual change and evolution to violent upheaval. The “aristo-democrats” that he envisions were thus not primarily revolutionary leaders, but those who saw their task as both educating and representing the people. Most likely, Herder also reserved this sort of role for himself in relation to his own fatherland, Germany. In his unpublished early draft for Letters, he made clear that the main question for Germany was how it could overcome its fragmentation and achieve something like a “national constitution,” considering that the present constitution of the Holy Roman Empire was dysfunctional.Footnote ⁸¹ In his published writings, Herder encouraged as much public debate about the situation and future of Germany as possible. He sought to enlighten his native German public about the positive aspects of their common cultural and political heritage, pointing in particular at the German traditions of republican self-government (“German people's government” [deutsche Völkerverfassung] as he also called it) in medieval cities.Footnote ⁸² These traditions revealed that modern ideals of civil and political liberty had deep roots in European social and political history, which offered hope that some of these traditions of self-government could be revived in new forms in modern states. Like France and, before it, England, Germany was to shed its barbaric heritage, while finding elements in its past on which it could creatively draw in devising its future constitution.

Did Herder call for “nationally bounded” states, as Patten has argued, or did he fully accept multinational states, as Spencer has claimed? Considering the central importance of the self-determining “public” in the political process for Herder, we need first to determine how he envisioned the operation of such a public. Clearly, a common language (as Patten also highlights) was a precondition for common social life and public debate.Footnote ⁸³ In Germany, one of Herder's primary goals was to encourage the cultivation of a common German language, so that the different German peoples in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire could together form one national public.Footnote ⁸⁴ The exact political institutions that such a public was to create for itself, however, were to be devised through these discussions.

In Herder's normative vision, modern cultural and political leaders should foster the rise and sustenance of a morally desirable form of national and political community, which would be capable of peacefully coexisting with other similar communities. Insofar as the collective self was an imagined self, essentially a “public” that was pursuing an idealized, moral form of itself, it was not a narrowly fixed concept. Just as individual self-determination consisted in a voluntary commitment to moral relationships and lasting associations with other human beings, so Herder expected culturally defined “peoples” to determine themselves not only by politically “constituting themselves,” but also by further cultivating their publics, which included the creation, maintenance, and development of ties with other peoples. The self-determination of a people was thus an ethical ideal and aspiration and only secondarily a right. Herder also directly sought to foster the rise of a transnational public, which would morally assess the actions of different individuals and peoples, applying but also actively reflecting on the most fundamental norms of justice in the wider international sphere, consistent with his conception of Humanität.Footnote ⁸⁵

Herder was critical of the nationalizing reforms initiated by rulers like Joseph II.Footnote ⁸⁶ Clearly, he had also cautioned against the loss of one's national character for the sake of some illusion of higher morality or political unity. In This Too a Philosophy, he castigated other Enlightenment writers for their disparaging remarks about “national character.”Footnote ⁸⁷ However, the possible alternatives to current “state-machines” for him were not exhausted by cultural respect for minorities in existing empires or indeed nationally bounded humanized states. He also encouraged more open-ended self-constitution. In Ideas, he welcomed the fact that European peoples possessed exceptionally “mild” kinds of “national character” owing to their relatively late, complex origins in the times of Völkerwanderungen and also because of their common religion. Herder maintained that these kinds of milder national characters were an excellent precondition for the rise of a future “common spirit” in Europe. He even mused that European peoples could come to form something like a “European republic,” a new and distinctively modern version of the Hanseatic League.Footnote ⁸⁸ In Letters, Herder's ultimate vision is the emergence of a “league of humanity.”Footnote ⁸⁹ According to his understanding of self-determination, we might argue that self-determining peoples could also potentially form transnational political unions in which their self-determination would not be absolute but relational to that of other peoples, grounded in republican and humanitarian as well as national values, which, as we have seen above, were compatible for Herder.Footnote ⁹⁰