‘Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment, and of its allies and disciples in other European countries, is as old as the movement itself.’ These words are Isaiah Berlin's, and they appear at the beginning of his now-canonical essay ‘The counter-enlightenment’ (1973).Footnote 1 In this piece, Berlin forwarded the historical thesis that, throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there sprang up across Europe a significant strain of opposition to enlightened social and political thought. At the heart of this résistance, Berlin placed the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97) and his famed Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). For Berlin, Burke's Reflections constituted a ‘resistance to attempts at a rational reorganization of society in the name of universal moral and intellectual ideals’.Footnote 2 Berlin claimed that, in the years after its publication, the Reflections inspired a pan-European turn away from the aspirations of the late eighteenth century and towards the irrationalism of the nineteenth. Among Burke's renegade disciples, Berlin included the Prussian philosophers J. G. Herder and J. G. Hamann, the Westphalian littérateur F. H. Jacobi, the Savoyard lawyer Joseph de Maistre, the Saxon mystic Novalis, and – some years later – the Prussian economist Adam Müller and the Hanoverian critics A. W. Schlegel and K. W. F. Schlegel.Footnote 3 For Berlin, the nineteenth-century figures in whose writings Burkean irrationalism reached its apogee were, to a man, German. In diametric opposition to the worldview of the lumières – liberal, cosmopolitan, and progressive – theirs was feudalistic, aesthetic, and above all conservative.
In the years since Berlin assembled his pantheon of counter-Enlighteners, historians have often described the Reflections as the catalyst of a Germanic counter-Enlightenment.Footnote 4 It is curious, however, that these same historians have devoted so little attention to the particular translation of the Reflections that nineteenth-century Germans read and debated – the edition that the Prussian journalist Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832) produced and published in the mid-1790s. Indeed, no dedicated analysis of Gentz's Reflections has ever been conducted, either in German or English. But even a concise examination of this translation is sufficient to challenge the notion that Burke incited a surge of counter-Enlightenment thought among nineteenth-century Germans.
I
The first German version of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the revolution in France was published in Vienna in early 1791, less than four months after the English original appeared in London.Footnote 5 Although its translator Joseph Stahel – printer, bookseller, and erstwhile confidant of the philosophe Friedrich Nicolai – managed to render the content of the original essay faithfully, his presentation was hardly artful.Footnote 6 His translation was clumsy, penned in a staid bourgeois German – ‘a mere shadow of the original’, in the words of one twentieth-century reviewer.Footnote 7 Such was also the judgement of Friedrich Gentz when he began reading the translation in mid-1791. ‘A few days ago I received Burke's Reflections’, he wrote to his mentor, the philosopher Christian Garve; ‘I do not like the translation.’Footnote 8 After a brief engagement with the Stahel edition, he set it aside, turning instead to the original.
Like most of his peers in Berlin, Gentz was a committed supporter of the Revolution in its initial phase. Even when tremors of unrest began emanating from Paris in the early 1790s, he remained loyal to what he called ‘the good cause’ (die gute Sache). ‘I would regard the failure of this Revolution as one of the worst disasters ever to befall the human race’, he told Garve:
It is the first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example of a government that is based on principles and a coherent, consistent system. It is a hope and a comfort against the many timeworn afflictions under which humanity groans. Should it fail, these afflictions will become ten times more irremediable.Footnote 9
As a partisan of the Revolution, Gentz approached the Reflections with deep scepticism. He found its mistrust of metaphysics crass and boorish, and disagreed with its harsh appraisal of the revolutionaries' practical abilities. And yet as a rhetorical achievement, the work impressed him. Gentz admired Burke as an orator, and envied the ways in which his Reflections marshalled classical rhetorical tactics – irony and satire, intricate syntactical formations, and stylized verbiage – to imbue his arguments with gravitas and moment.Footnote 10 ‘This man has earned the right to be heard, as indeed every man deserves when he speaks so masterfully’, he reported to Garve. ‘I am reading this book – though firmly opposed to its principles and conclusions – (I have not yet finished it) with greater enjoyment than those of a hundred shallow advocates of the Revolution.’Footnote 11 Whatever his misgivings about its content, Gentz believed that a work so inspired deserved a rendering adequate to its author. Sometime in mid-1791, he resolved to produce his own translation.Footnote 12
Although Gentz resisted the Reflections' arguments on his first reading, as he translated the work from late 1791, his disposition became more sympathetic. During these months, reports from abroad indicated escalating violence across France, a trend culminating in the September Massacres of 1792.Footnote 13 In the early 1790s, Gentz had cheered the French Revolution as the handmaiden of political progress, and recoiled at the Reflections' scorn for the patriotic philosopher-legislators who sought to enlighten their nation. Three years later, however, the spectre of social dissolution and political chaos seemed imminent. From this perspective, the Reflections appeared neither obdurate nor obtuse, but prescient. Gentz came to believe that Burke, through his piercing analysis of the revolutionaries' volatile ambitions, had predicted the rise of sans-culottes barbarism years before his peers. In this light, the Reflections assumed the status of a Jeremiad. By the time his translation appeared in print, Gentz was a sworn member of the anti-Jacobin résistance.Footnote 14
Gentz's newfound conservatism did not, however, assuage his doubts about the Reflections' particular arguments against the revolutionaries. As Gentz pointed out in the introduction to his translation, Burke was a talented statesman, but not a trained philosopher: his Reflections were an ‘appeal to the heart’ rather than an attempt to ground a worldview in secure ‘first principles’ (Grundideen).Footnote 15 As such, the work lacked philosophical rigor. It was too often imprecise: equivocal in the use of key conceptual terms, and unwilling to push arguments to their logical endpoints. Yet, rather than dampening his enthusiasm for the text, Gentz detected in this critique an exciting opportunity. Latent within the Reflections, he believed, there lay dormant a genuine philosophic case against the Revolution. Through his own mediation, the work could be transformed into a rigorous treatise:
From a strict philosophical perspective, Burke's work is nothing but a rhapsody: but a rhapsody from which the most comprehensive and ordered system can be devised (entwickelt). Indeed, its greatness of the style and its majesty of thought compel the interpreter to subdivide (teilen) the enthusiasm of the admirer … Eloquence such as this has not appeared since the resplendent days of the old republics. This inexhaustible abundance of keen and new ideas, fierce words, unexpected expressions and felicitous images; this luxuriant richness to which no field of knowledge (Gebiet der Erkenntniß) is inaccessible and no region of the human spirit (menschlichen Geistes) closed – all this overwhelms the imagination (Einbildungskraft) and gives the astonished mind no moment of rest or recuperation.Footnote 16
In his translation, Gentz set out ‘to develop on political and philosophical grounds a complete theory of the antirevolutionary system’.Footnote 17 His revised Reflections would, he promised, extract a coherent worldview from the embryonic philosophic intuitions scattered throughout the original text – an intellectual programme that could withstand the vicious attacks of the philosophes and their allies.
To this end, Gentz assumed extensive interpretative liberties in his translation. He inserted and deleted lines of text to achieve a more fluid prose, omitted obsolete passages that distracted from major argumentative moves, and standardized the use of philosophical terms throughout the work. He scattered footnotes liberally throughout his translation, both interpretive and substantive – to clarify political references and historical allusions for German readers, to explain difficult sections of argument, and, occasionally, to register his dissent.Footnote 18 To systematize the Reflections' incipient worldview, he penned five long essays – on the idea of revolution, on the nature of political freedom, and on the revolutionaries' Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (1789), most saliently – and appended them to his translation.Footnote 19 He prefaced this amalgam of translation and exegesis with a substantial introduction.Footnote 20 And finally, to ground his bona fides as Burke's interpreter, Gentz included an annotated index of works written in response to the Reflections, both defensive and critical, between 1790 and late 1792. In sum, his two-volume edition totalled over 650 pages, almost twice the length of the English original.Footnote 21
Gentz released his translation in January 1793, in the same month that Louis Capet met his end at the guillotine. The concurrence of these events, along with the subsequent rise of the Terror, made Gentz's Reflections a remarkable publishing success almost overnight. Within a few months, his translation had displaced Stahel's as the definitive German edition.Footnote 22 Various unlicensed copies metastasized throughout the Germanies in the mid-1790s, and a second printing was commissioned in 1794.Footnote 23 As German thinkers intensified their engagements with Burke in the late 1790s, Gentz's Reflections remained predominant.Footnote 24 Indeed, no competitor edition has eclipsed it to date. The catalogue of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek indicates that since the early twentieth century, the Gentz translation has undergone five separate reprintings. In this period, no other translation of the Reflections has been published more than once.Footnote 25
Despite its preeminence over the past two centuries, Gentz's Reflections has drawn minimal interest from modern historians. English-speaking scholars have ignored it almost entirely. German scholars, for their own part, have sublimated their analyses of Gentz's Reflections within broader debates over his shifting political allegiances in the 1790s and early 1800s. Philip Pirler, for instance, has suggested that with his translation Gentz, formerly a thoroughgoing rationalist, effected a philosophical volte-face and shocked the Prussian world of letters.Footnote 26 Gentz used his Reflections to announce himself a sceptic about political rationalism, ‘a defender of the old order’ (Verteidiger des Alten) against ‘the eulogists of the new’.Footnote 27 Theresa Dietrich, likewise, has pointed to Gentz's Reflections as proof of a radical break in his political thought. But whereas Pirler admired his newfound traditionalism, Dietrich scorned it. From her perspective, his critique of Enlightenment was little more than a display of aristocratic false consciousness, a neofeudal defence of corporate oppression.Footnote 28 Against Pirler and Dietrich, Günther Kronenbitter has situated the Reflections at the beginning of a more gradual evolution in Gentz's thought. While Gentz evinced a clear sympathy for Burke in parts of his Reflections, Kronenbitter admitted, the work was not composed as a declaration of partisanship. Rather, Gentz used his translation as an intellectual entrepreneur, to carve out a rhetorical space for himself in the contentious public sphere of High Enlightenment Berlin. According to Kronenbitter, Gentz would not adopt a fully counter-Enlightenment position until the mid-1810s, under the tutelage of Metternich.Footnote 29
Whatever their biographical recommendations, these debates ignored the extent to which Gentz – in his effort to extract an ‘anti-revolutionary system’ from Burke's Reflections – recast the work in his own philosophical image. This oversight has, in turn, blinded scholars to the degree to which the Burke of Gentz's Reflections – the same Burke that German-speaking readers have encountered ever since – differed from the historical figure. In fact, Gentz used his translation to defend a form of anti-revolutionary rationalism that was a self-conscious alternative to Burkean traditionalism. In contrast to the Burke of the original Reflections – a critic of ahistorical political theorizing who preferred the concrete wisdom bound up in particular social and political traditions – the Burke of Gentz's Reflections openly endorsed an a priori conception of right. Gentz's Burke did not oppose the revolutionaries because he disagreed with their metaphysics. Instead, he was sensitive to the gap that yawned between the revolutionaries' (noumenal) theoretical aims – aims that Gentz, on balance, supported – and the realities of their (phenomenal) socio-political context, and doubted that the revolutionaries' could span this chasm. For Gentz, the Reflections' central insight lay not in the normative realm of reason (Vernunft) but in the practical sphere of prudence (Klugheit). He translated the Reflections not to subvert the revolutionaries' goals, but to point out the hazards that lay along the path to their realization – not to undermine the project of Enlightenment, but to disassociate its noble ideals from the Jacobins' maladroit attempts to enact them.
II
Friedrich Gentz was born to German Huguenot parents in Breslau in the mid-1760s, and raised in a milieu both austere and philosophical. His father counted among his personal acquaintances the critic G. E. Lessing and the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In the mid-1780s, Gentz studied at Königsberg under Immanuel Kant, and maintained a strong commitment to Kantianism – his intellectual ‘adoptive mother’ (Pflegemutter), he later called it – in his postgraduate years as well.Footnote 30 ‘This exceptional man – both his instruction as well as his personal virtues – have raised up and formed within me a great appetite for philosophy’, he wrote to Garve in the mid-1780s. ‘I have ventured into his difficult and subtle speculations, and plumbed the depths of his transcendental idealism, and [it] has awakened within me the desire for virtue and true inner maturity.’Footnote 31 Archival evidence indicates that from 1783 to 1784, Gentz attended (at least) two of the small symposia that Kant held for his favourite students, one on ‘Natürliche Theologie’ and one on ‘Naturrecht’.Footnote 32 Five years after Gentz left Königsberg, Kant mailed him a draft of his Kritik der Urteilskraft, and requested that Gentz return critical comments.Footnote 33 For at least one historian, Gentz's correspondence from this period constitutes ‘clear’ proof that ‘the basic impetus (Grundmotiv) of his thought was Kantian’.Footnote 34 Even after Gentz published his Reflections, he continued to attend the public lectures of Johann Gottfried Kiesewetter, a philosophe who preached Kantian liberalism to the intellectual elite of eighteenth-century Berlin.Footnote 35
In a contribution to the Berlinische Monatsschrift published in April 1791 – the same month that he began translating the Reflections – Gentz provided an explicit defence of his Kantian philosophical commitments, and adumbrated their practical implications.Footnote 36 His article was a rejoinder to the Westphalian historian and administrator Justus Möser.Footnote 37 Some ten months earlier, Möser had poured scorn on the idea of human rights – in particular, the right to citizenship – in the pages of the Monatsschrift.Footnote 38 Möser claimed that since time immemorial, the governments of Europe predicated the right to citizenship on property: in agrarian societies, on the ownership of land, and in mercantile societies, on monetary wealth. There was wisdom in this practice, Möser claimed. It is reasonable that those citizens guide the state who have invested the most in its flourishing, and who have the means to secure a political education. Furthermore, the ancientness of this custom was evidence of its wisdom. Property-based restrictions on enfranchisement were time-tested, and attuned to the particular character of local communities. Möser explained that since the amount of property (Mansus) necessary for citizenship varies according to custom, this right is particular and contingent. But recently, he complained, the revolutionaries in France have announced that the right to citizenship is self-evident and universal. Such a bold philosophical move seemed to Möser incredible. Against the revolutionaries he insisted that abstract reason, shorn from custom and tradition, is indeterminate. For Möser, the rights catalogue of the revolutionaries' Déclaration succeeded only in divorcing particular rights from their historical rationales.
In his response to Möser, Gentz sought to wrest the concept of right from the realm of history, and to set it on a surer, more rational, foundation. He decried Möserian traditionalism as ‘medieval’ and ‘barbarous’.Footnote 39 Indeed, Möser did not understand the concept of right at all, according to Gentz. ‘Observation, tradition, historical conjecture’ – such practices, he explained, can investigate the empirical world of phenomena, but can never approach the theoretical realm of ideas. As a result, Möser's attempt to derive rights via historical investigation was predicated on a categorical mistake. ‘If reason only conjectured about the realm of nature, nothing would … lead it to take up the strange and obscure concepts of right and duty into its system; nature shows … what man can do, not what he should do.’Footnote 40 The concept of a historical right was therefore nonsensical, dissolving the distinction between what is normative and what is factual. The purpose of right is to establish an evaluative standard that stands apart from the inherited and contingent order.
Fortunately, Gentz claimed, we have reason to believe that the human mind can transcend its a posteriori mode, and uncover a universal grounding for right. With clear reference to his Kantian education, Gentz argued that human beings are twofold creatures. We exist within the world, as the phenomenal subjects of its causal and natural laws, and we exist outside it, as noumenal agents that are rational and responsible. But if natural right were chimerical, or if our intellectual faculties were not adequate to discern what is right, the noumenal dimension of our experience would be illusory. The human race would be merely phenomenal, no different from animals, without moral responsibility or causal agency. Therefore – since ‘human nature is not equivalent to the nature of things’ – Gentz surmised that ‘the pure concept of humanity necessarily involves the concept of right’.Footnote 41
By this point, Gentz believed that he had wrested the mantle of right from Möser, and restored it to its proper philosophical grounding. But he chose to go further, to provide not only a conceptual derivation of ‘original right’ (ursprüngliches Recht) but a list of the ‘derivative rights’ (abgeleitete Rechte) implied by his theoretical approach.Footnote 42 For Gentz, ‘natural right is, in a true philosophical sense, the right that man possesses according to his nature, his being’.Footnote 43 The concept of right was a precondition for intelligible action. It followed, he explained, that right exists to secure an existential space in which human beings can act free of coercion. In a populous world, of course, absolute freedom is impossible. For Gentz, it is the longstanding problem of collective action that gives rise to the concept of political right:
The law that reason prescribes to free-acting beings – insofar as they regard themselves free, while in a community of other free beings – is the moral law. … Right is the moral capacity (moralische Vermögen) (the licence) of an individual to constrict the freedom of another insofar as it is necessary for the preservation of his own freedom.Footnote 44
On this interpretation, political right is universal, contractual, and a priori. No historical investigation into a putative state of nature is needed to secure its legitimacy.
To flesh out the content of this concept – to build a catalogue of specific political rights that legislators and statesmen could use in the process of constitution-building – Gentz insisted upon a deductive approach. Three practical rights followed from his negative derivation of political right. First was the ‘right to personhood’.Footnote 45 If action ceases to be free when it constricts the freedom of a rational being, no man can lay rightful claim to the person of another. To treat a human being as an instrumental tool rather than a rights-bearing end is to enslave him. And as Gentz curtly insisted, ‘I have the right to obstruct any man who intends to make me a slave.’Footnote 46 From this supposition, Gentz inferred a right to the ‘externalities’ (Äußerungen) of freedom – that is, a ‘right to property’ (Eigenthum) – and a ‘right to the maintenance of finalized contracts’.Footnote 47 If men did not have a right to the fruits of their labour, it would be impossible to execute concerted action over time. Freedom would be an ‘empty name’.Footnote 48 But without a right to secure contracts, co-operation between rational agents would be impossible. Contracts grant human beings control over their freedom, and over the concretizations of their freedom, their property. This catalogue proved, for Gentz, that although Möser could not vindicate his preferred legal conventions via inductive analyses of their histories, an a priori deductive approach could legislate norms to order the practice of politics. Without a firm grasp of the concept of right, political theories are without philosophic mooring.Footnote 49
III
In February 1793, one month after Gentz published his translation of the Reflections, he sent a copy to Burke. He attached a rushed cover letter, penned in a faltering English, to thank Burke for his inspiration and to present his work for evaluation:
Sir!
Having finished a toil which afforded to me, nearly for two years, that precious enjoyment to converse with the most sublime genius of the age, it is but very natural, I should wish to carry this labour of mine before the most competent judge, I can look for among the wise. I am certainly aware, that language I wrote in, is but little known to the nation, which is happy and glorious in your possession, and also perhaps unknown to you: still I hope, there may be among your acquaintance one willing to become my interpreter: and if not, I'll think myself sufficiently rewarded, whenever this undertaking does not entirely die away, unregarded by you.
What power I had, I assumed, to deliver a faithful lively copy of your great original. What I thought proper, in order to put German readers into the just sense of your book, and to make them fair judges about those refined ideas which were too often misunderstood, I brought into annotations and annexed essays. Nay, I was bold enough to entertain a doubt against a very few of your opinions: much oftener I ought to reinforce what your experience, what your consummated wisdom foretold us two years ago, by what the sad history of these last two years is compelled to remember. This is a time, where every man, conscious of his forces is obliged to pay a public tribute to reason – a time as well for Germany, as for the rest of Europe.Footnote 50
As Gentz suspected, Burke did not read German. Nevertheless, as he perused Gentz's edition of the Reflections, it must have been clear that his translator had asserted his own editorial voice – ‘in order to put German readers into the just sense of your book’. In his response, Burke was gracious. ‘I ought to be somewhat ashamed of my total ignorance of the German language … as it prevents me from seeing how much my thoughts are improved in your hands’, he told Gentz.Footnote 51 But if Burke privately harboured doubts about the trustworthiness of Gentz's translation – owing to the sheer scale of Gentz's exegetical apparatus – his suspicions would have been justified.
In his Reflections, Burke had poured scepticism on the philosophes’ efforts to theorize political norms in the abstract. Proper political reasoning, he believed, must be rooted in a particular context. Shorn from the socio-historical matrices that give them meaning and substance, political and moral claims are indeterminate:
I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.Footnote 52
Since human experience is circumstantial, it was not possible to ascertain a comprehensive understanding of human nature in abstraction. Attempts to pierce the veil of nature via an unmediated and unhistorical ratiocination were, in Burke's view, arrogant and foolish:
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted from their straight line. In the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.Footnote 53
Burke believed that metaphysical analyses of human nature tend to distort the truths gleaned from experience. He was quick to insist, however, that his mistrust of political rationalism was not tantamount to an attack on political or moral norms as such. ‘Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice … the real rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy.’Footnote 54 For Burke, it was dangerous to laud liberté in the abstract since the concept only became intelligible in the concrete.
As an alternative to the philosophes' rationalism, Burke recommended to his compatriots the particular principles of their time-tested constitution. His Reflections argued that just as the common law was the product of a long process of legal reflection, the ancient constitution was a reservoir of political wisdom. It was a moral inheritance, shaped and refined in response to the unique needs of diverse citizens in different circumstances. Because the human mind is limited and the historical record is vast, its traditional principles were not amenable to geometric analysis: no individual could distil them into a pure system, or export them to a foreign context.
Nevertheless, for Burke, the prescriptive wisdom of the ancient constitution was accessible. The Reflections signalled at various intervals that the prudent statesman could, through an inductive process of historical investigation, acculturate himself to the spirit of the constitution and approach an imperfect appreciation of its raison d’être. Burke encouraged legislators to study the constitution and its attendant institutional buttresses, to ‘employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them’.Footnote 55 Such learned statesmen will, in a moment of crisis, be able to repair the constitution via principles native to it. This historicist mode of political reasoning – what Burke called reflection ‘upon the principle of reverence to antiquity’ – was grounded in a fundamental trust that the ancient constitution approximated political right more dependably than the theories of solipsistic philosophes.Footnote 56 For Burke, that is to say, theory was in fact derivative of praxis.
Gentz, of course, disagreed. In his translation and exegesis, he took proactive steps to conceal the Reflections' opposition to political rationalism, while preserving its case against the revolutionaries. To this end, his interpretive footnotes carved out a new space for a priori right in the logic of the text. Burke, in an extended defence of prescriptive right, had written the following of the English Dissenters and their eighteenth-century allies:
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good, in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.Footnote 57
For Gentz, this passage was emblematic of the Reflections' broader philosophical confusion. How, he wondered, could a right be true in one sense (‘metaphysically true’) yet false in another (‘morally and politically false’)? For his readership in High Enlightenment Prussia – accustomed to ‘the precision of conceptual terminology, and therefore the precision of philosophical language, in which we Germans indisputably surpass all other nations’ – this equivocation would not do.Footnote 58 In his translation, Gentz affixed a four-page footnote to this passage, to rescue Burke from his embarrassing faux pas. Here, Gentz laid the philosophical groundwork for his systematic reconstruction of Burke.
Pure philosophers use the term ‘right’ in a rigorous and particular sense, to refer to ‘that which corresponds to so-called pure duty’ (vollkommenen Pflicht), Gentz explained. ‘For us it makes no sense to speak of a right that is true in one regard and is false in another.’Footnote 59 How, then, could Gentz parse the Reflections' muddled discussion of right? He reasoned that in Burke, ‘metaphysical right’ corresponds to real right. But what Burke called ‘moral’ and ‘political right’ were not, in fact, normative claims at all. Rather, these referred to subordinate considerations about how to put a priori right into practice:
There are in the broad field of the practical concept of permissiveness (Erlaubtheit) three discernible gradations, which pervade all Burkean reasoning but are never distinguished with the appropriate sharpness: principles of right (Prinzipien des Rechts), sources of moral warrant (moralische Befugnisse), and provisions of prudence (Vorschriften der Klugheit).Footnote 60
Whereas, for Burke, moral and political norms were pregnant in the concrete traditions of his nation, Gentz's interpretation placed the ‘principles of right’ within the noumenal realm of pure reason. In so doing, he undermined Burke's attempt to ostracize metaphysics from political reasoning, and opened a gap between theory and praxis in the logic of the text.
Gentz believed, in other words, that Burke stretched the term ‘right’ to cover three non-equivalent concepts. As he explained with a navigational metaphor, an intellectual apprehension of political right does not necessitate a moral or prudential means of implementation:
He who wishes to venture across a broad ocean and begins by orienting himself towards the North Star will meet the approval of the wise … But if he ends his preparation here, if he begins his trip around the world in an empty boat with nothing but a foolish faith in his preliminary knowledge – without a rudder or compass or oars or charts – he will be scorned as an idiot and chastised as a reckless adventurer.Footnote 61
Just as the seafarer must locate the North Star in order to navigate his vessel, a metaphysical goal is vital to impart normative direction to a political movement. However, this orienting principle does not entail the practical means of its realization. Like the seafarer, who requires tools to power his ship and to chart his progress, an intellectual apprehension of a priori right must be complemented with moral virtue and prudence if it is to become practicable.
For Gentz, this revised interpretation resolved the apparent confusion in the passage in question. The potential divergence between the theoretical right and the instruments of its realization explained how an action could be immoral and impolitic, yet still retain the mantle of right:
In order to express Burke's idea with as much accuracy as possible we would have to say: ‘The rights that these theorists chimerically take for everything are nothing but extremes. Since there must be many other sources of warrant (Befugnisse) in the moral world, and many other rules in the political world, these rights are insufficient (unzureichend) for him who wishes to erect a constitution (Staatsverfassung), and will produce bad results when taken as his sole principle.’Footnote 62
Thus for Gentz, ‘the very true thought that lies concealed in this sentence’ was that the political norms deduced by metaphysicians (‘metaphysically true’) are not sufficient for the practice of politics (‘morally and politically false’).Footnote 63 This insight, Gentz claimed, was at the heart of the Reflections' critique of the revolutionaries. Burke faulted them not for their theoretical overconfidence, but for their practical impotence – for their immoral and imprudent attempts to enact their ideals.
In a long article appended to his translation, Gentz attempted to sketch the parameters within which a political movement commands moral warrant. Since, for Gentz, ‘the essence of the social contract is that whoever enters into it must submit his own will to the general will’, an existing state cannot be dissolved unless each and every citizen agrees to abandon it.Footnote 64 A ‘total revolution’ like the French Revolution, Gentz argued – a political movement that seeks ‘to tear the bands of civil society’ and ‘to create a wholly new order of things’ (Ordnung der Dinge) – is immoral unless it can secure unanimous consent.Footnote 65 Otherwise, a particular faction will lead the revolution on behalf of the rest of the nation. This will involve forcing passive citizens to be free: means will contradict ends. Thus, Gentz wrote, ‘a total revolution that is coveted and instigated by a part of the nation is always a breach of the social contract and, from a philosophical perspective, … an immoral operation’.Footnote 66 For this reason, moral statesmen will prefer reform to revolution:
In its most wonderful metamorphoses nature allows the old form to remain, while time … does its work: when the metamorphosis is completed, the supplanted vestment then slips away, and nothing other than a light quiver announces that a gentle transformation has been accomplished through an organic process (organischen Gliederbau). To imitate the course of nature is great wisdom, and only this wisdom promises lasting prosperity, security, unity and harmony: only this wisdom sustains that moral character [that gives] the great operations of states … rational and substantial worth.Footnote 67
Whereas piecemeal reform efforts ensure a moral implementation of right, revolutions are seldom moral.
If, as Gentz claimed, Burke indeed endorsed an a priori conception of right, then what should readers make of his frequent appeals to historical precedent? In his translation, Gentz was forced to demote the status of prescription, in ways both subtle and explicit. Consider, for instance, the following passage from the English-language version, in which Burke sought to defend the political wisdom inherent in long-standing customs:
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures … Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together.Footnote 68
The concept of ‘convention’ was central to the Reflections, for it offered Burke an alternative to the eighteenth-century rhetoric of ‘contract’ and ‘consent’. Burke saw political liberties as the product of a slow process of socialization – embedded in a dense web of custom, habit, and convention – and abjured the notion of an original contrat social as speculative and ahistorical. But in his translation of the Reflections, Gentz chose to translate ‘convention’ as ‘contract’ (Vertrag), even though more precise options were available to him (e.g. Brauch, Sitte, Gepflogenheit, Konvention). In translation, therefore, Burke appeared not as a Whig champion of prescriptive right but as a Kantian defender of contractual right:
If civil society is the result of contracts (Verträge), these contracts must be its foundational laws (Grundgesetze). These contracts must determine the form and the limits of every constitution (Staatsverfassung) erected under their sanction. Every sort of legislative, judicial or executive power are its work … Man cannot enjoy the rights of an unsocial (ungeselligen) and a social condition (geselligen Zustand) at the same time.Footnote 69
To make the rationalist implications of his legalistic language explicit, Gentz attached a footnote explaining that one cannot infer natural right from convention. ‘It belongs within the rights of every man, that there exist a restraint on the rights of everyone else’, he wrote.Footnote 70 But if these legal restraints varied according to historical circumstance, some citizens would be less free than others. It is thus ‘unclear’ and makes ‘absolutely no sense’ – so Gentz reasoned – to seek (in Burke's words) ‘the direct original rights of man in civil society’.Footnote 71
Elsewhere in his translation, Gentz evinced a marked discomfort with Burke's traditionalist mode of political reasoning. When Gentz felt Burke nearing an appeal to precedent, he supplemented Burke's argument with one of his own. Thus, for instance, when Burke constructed a genealogy of the House of Lords to contend for the wisdom of bicameral constitutions, Gentz had an a priori argument against universal democracy at the ready. (Since the propertied class always has more to lose in a revolution than the poor, ‘the first principle of stability in a constitution’ is the elevation of the aristocracy to a position of electoral privilege.)Footnote 72 Or when Burke slighted Frederick the Great for his enthusiasm about the philosophes' encyclopédie, Gentz defended the Prussian monarch. Frederick never seriously considered adopting the politics of d'Alembert and Diderot, Gentz argued: the king corresponded with these philosophers only for amusement.Footnote 73
Rather than a source of normative guidance, Gentz saw historical knowledge as a constituent of political prudence. Burke, he claimed, used historical investigation in two ways. First, the Reflections charted the vast distance between the revolutionaries' aims and their actual social conditions. For Gentz, Burke was prescient because he recognized the wide chasm that separated the Jacobins' theoretical aims from the realities of eighteenth-century French politics, and because he foresaw that their efforts would not be sufficient to span it:
What was most absurd in the proceedings of those who wanted to construct the new constitution of France on what they call the rights of man was not their search for these rights and their respect for them … but that they thought these rights sufficed – that they dreamed to build a state with these bare rights (bloßen Rechte) when, in fact, it calls for different materials as well.Footnote 74
The Jacobins, contrariwise – drunk on the ‘liquor’ of theoretical reasoning, as Burke put it – were ignorant of their true socio-political context.Footnote 75
Second, Gentz claimed that, from his extensive knowledge of seventeenth-century British history, Burke understood the difficulties that attend the implementation of right. The true lesson of the Glorious Revolution, according to Gentz, was that durable liberties could not be secured with mere legislation, but must be internalized and incorporated into the character of the nation. ‘He who wishes to build a new heavens and a new earth must know how to populate it with new men.’Footnote 76 Burke saw that in the late 1780s, there were few republicans available to populate the revolutionaries' new republic. True statesmanship consists in the ability to sculpt and improve the character of a nation over time, to endow its people with the ‘manly ripeness’ for self-government.Footnote 77 But since the Jacobins refused to admit that their compatriots were unfit for self-government – that, as Gentz put it, ‘their work would lack meaning and purpose, unless they were able to achieve a congruence between their new political system and the abilities, habits, and character of their nation’ – theirs was a lost cause.Footnote 78
IV
For Gentz, it was important that Burke not only reason like a rationalist: he needed to appear as one, too. To this end, Gentz used his introduction to present Burke not as a critic, but as a champion, of Kantian Enlightenment. The ancien régime that the Reflections defended, according to Gentz, was not feudal but modern. He described the status quo pro bellum that Burke sought to vindicate as a tranquil period in which
the great were made gentle and mild through the increase of knowledge (Erkenntniß), while the small became self-sufficient and corrigible. That which pleased citizens also strengthened governments (Regierungen). The scourge could rest as reason gripped the sceptre, and enlightened citizens (aufgeklärte Bürger) were truer subjects than unknowing slaves.Footnote 79
But now, Gentz lamented, the revolutionaries had besmirched the ‘non-partisan’ Enlightenment.Footnote 80 As their movement turned to violence in the early 1790s, the fragile norms of enlightened intellectual culture – dispassionate philosophical analysis, open debate, and critical introspection – had given way to factionalism and political posturing. The German elite had become convinced theoretical reason was dangerous and impracticable. The Friedrichian motto of Aufklärung – ‘Räsonniert, soviel ihr wollt und worüber ihr wollt, aber gehorcht!’ – had become untenable.Footnote 81 Revolution had eclipsed Enlightenment.Footnote 82
In this context, Gentz continued, ‘cold and unadorned’ reason is insufficient to quell the popular lust for revolution.Footnote 83 In the battle between order and disorder, reason and passion, the opponents of the Revolution were at a structural disadvantage. Gentz explained that, whereas the revolutionaries have the biases of the people on their side, ‘the defenders of the old order must appeal to reason’ and reason alone.Footnote 84 Whereas the revolutionaries promise liberation, their critics counsel moderation and restraint. And whereas the apologists of the Revolution ‘prize a future good and scorn a present evil’, their anti-revolutionary foes ‘warn of a coming evil and defend a present good’.Footnote 85 At stake in this titanic struggle was nothing less than the survival of Enlightenment. If they had their way, Gentz promised, the revolutionaries would ‘establish … a political religion’ and, like inquisitors, banish art and science into ‘the night of an eternal oblivion’.Footnote 86 In the early 1790s, a ‘thick darkness’ loomed on the horizon.Footnote 87
The Reflections, Gentz argued, was well suited to this moment. It was a defence of Enlightenment against the philosophe zealots who sought to co-opt it. Its rhetorical power provided a forceful retort to the revolutionaries. And its arguments had awakened a league of conservative statesmen and intellectuals across Europe. Burke, Gentz assured his readers, spoke from a political posture both ‘practical’ and ‘enlightened’.Footnote 88 As the German herald of his message, Gentz hoped to stem the rising tide of the Revolution and to restore ‘a balance of power (Gleichgewicht) between ideas and passions’ throughout the Germanies.Footnote 89
What, then, was Gentz to make of the frequent sardonic references to Enlightenment throughout the Reflections, of its consistent scorn for ‘the patriotic crimes of an enlightened age’?Footnote 90 In the course of the original text, Burke used the terms ‘enlightened’ and ‘enlightenment’ on ten occassions, always as a term of derision. In his translation, Gentz edited each of these passages to fit his interpretive programme. As a result of his mediation, the Reflections' attacks on ‘this enlightened age’ became complaints about ‘dieses erleuchtete Jahrhundert’.Footnote 91 Only when a more positive context presented itself did Gentz deploy the keyword ‘enlightened’.Footnote 92 When, for instance, Burke lauded Jacques Necker as a ‘wise and liberal’ man, Gentz's translation described Necker as ‘durchaus weiße und aufgeklärt’.Footnote 93 Or when Burke praised the Magna Carta as ‘an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers’, Gentz noted that the compact had furnished a durable freedom for the English people, and was for this reason ‘aufgeklärt’.Footnote 94
Gentz understood, of course, that the Reflections' anti-modern currents ran deeper than a few slighting references to Enlightenment. Indeed, while Gentz translated the work in the early 1790s, the Reflections' critics often accused Burke of a foolish nostalgism.Footnote 95 In particular, these critics pointed to Burke's paeans to chivalric virtue and noblesse oblige. Consider, for instance, the Reflections' famous diatribe against the revolutionaries' treatment of Marie Antoinette, in which Burke lamented that
the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone … All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal … are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.Footnote 96
For the Reflections' critics, this passage was proof of the latent medieval sympathies that permeated the text. In order to render his rationalist interpretation of Burke plausible, Gentz was forced to respond to such accusations. In a four-page footnote affixed to this passage, he noted that its ‘praise of medieval chivalry has become the cause of vicious attacks and biting mockeries’.Footnote 97
Such criticisms are not warranted, Gentz argued. In the same way that Rousseau – a modern thinker par excellence – emphasized the virtues inherent in prepolitical societies, Burke highlighted the virtues of the medieval world for rhetorical reasons, in order to throw the vices and excesses of eighteenth-century life into clearer relief:
Those who imagine that Burke, in this portrait, … betrayed a secret urge to reintroduce these [medieval] concepts and morals (Begriffe und Sitten) into the current relations of men … fall into the same vulgar error … that traps the countless adversaries of the Rouseauian system, when they accuse the Genevan philosopher of seeking ‘to transform men into four-legged animals’. Just as it was far from Rousseau's intention that men should give up all the advantages of civilization and turn back to acorns and roots, Burke was far from suggesting that we abandon [modern] social conditions in exchange for lances, and set off in search of giants and magical princesses in faraway wastelands.Footnote 98
Gentz explained that Burke's invocations of lost virtues were, like Rousseau's, not stubborn attempts to thwart modern social and political progress. Instead, these men sought to counterbalance a ‘one-sided appreciation of our present situation and its attendant advantages, virtues and comforts’.Footnote 99 Just as Rousseau worked to check the excesses of eighteenth-century materialism through a sympathetic consideration of natural man, Burke – so Gentz contended – ‘wanted to temper the evil that he saw as exclusive to the conditions of a … broadened culture’ through a re-examination of the virtues of aristocratic culture. Burke, Gentz wrote, sought ‘to weave that which was admirable in the ancient way of thinking, in its spiritual disposition (Geistesschwung), and in its customs and manners … into the character of our time, in so far as it is possible to do so without damaging our higher culture’.Footnote 100 Gentz assured his readers that, despite the criticisms levied at him, Burke did not advocate a return to a pre-modern past. His Reflections, rather, sought to protect the achievements of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment from degenerating into the uncivilized barbarism of a new Dark Ages.
V
In recent years, the Reflections' relation to the Enlightenment has emerged as a heated point of academic debate. Against Isaiah Berlin and his protégés, Richard Bourke has argued that Burke was in fact a proponent of Enlightenment, and that his critique of philosophe radicalism was consonant with the liberal political ideals he defended earlier in his career. According to Bourke, modern historians have mistaken the Reflections' narrow attack on the Revolution as a wholesale assault on reason per se:
As a result, Burke … is curiously reinterpreted as hostile to the very principles of enlightenment he was in fact defending…. There can be no doubt that Burke's writings in the 1790s resonated with many of the tenets espoused by Romantic writers in Britain and Germany. But this should not seduce us into equating his ideas with the principles generally associated with Romanticism.Footnote 101
In the German case, this insight can be expressed in even stronger terms. For nineteenth-century Germans, it was not possible to read the Reflections as a critique of Enlightenment. This was an interpretation that Gentz foreclosed. Far from a proto-Romantic cri de cœur, his translation confirmed the aufgeklärt prejudices of his eighteenth-century readership. Organicism, historicism, irrationalism, romanticism – Gentz self-consciously occluded such counter-Enlightenment spectres from his Reflections. If these concepts were later to attach themselves to Burke in Germany, it was despite his translator's best efforts to the contrary.
