“Where there is no government there can be no letters [Wissenschaft]”,Footnote ¹ writes Johann Gottfried Herder in his award-winning answer to the prize competition initiated by the Berlin Academy in 1779. The question posed by the Académie royale des sciences et belles lettres, “What has been the influence of government on letters [lettres] among the nations where they have flourished and of letters on government?”,Footnote ² addresses the Enlightenment concern with the triangular relationship between the advancement of human culture, laws and morality. It also reads like a reformulation of the famous prize question announced by the academy of Dijon in 1749: “Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of morals?” As will be shown, Herder's contribution might as well be interpreted as a reply to the latter prize question and its controversial laureate, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Despite the similarities there is, however, a significant shift between the two questions from the relation between lettres and mœurs to the relation between lettres and gouvernement. This essay traces this shift by analysing how the “Discours qui a remporté le prix a l'Académie de Dijon” (or First Discourse) and the questions it posed about human progress and the moral foundations of society were debated in the institutional context of the Berlin Academy by Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey and Herder, two pivotal figures of the Enlightenment in Germany. It shall be argued that despite some fundamental disagreements with Rousseau they not only shared his criticism of the sciences and the arts to a certain extent, but even more, departing from this criticism, Formey and Herder envisioned an institutional regulation of knowledge and scholarship which should be read as their attempt to cure the disorders diagnosed by Rousseau.

The promotion and reform of an expanding, yet also often antiquated, realm of scholarship and learning was a major concern of the Enlightened bureaucracy in many eighteenth-century monarchies. One of the obvious models for this promotion and regulation was provided by academies and learned societies—a new institutional setting which James McClellan considers a key element in an “organizational revolution” that followed the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.Footnote ³ And the fact that the First Discourse, like Formey's and Herder's essays, which will be discussed below, was facilitated by academies should not be brushed aside as a mere coincidence but, particularly in Formey's case, taken as one significant point of reference of their argument. Before taking a closer look at their arguments, I shall, hence, first of all, place Formey and Herder against the background not only of the First Discourse but also of the meritocratic ideology of eighteenth-century academies and the idea of public promotion of the arts and sciences.

THE FIRST DISCOURSE AND ACADEMIC IDEOLOGY

Rousseau's First Discourse, which catapulted the unknown Genevan overnight to the status of a European celebrity, posed a deeply disturbing question about the alleged congruence between moral improvement on the one hand and the advancement of knowledge and the arts on the other.Footnote ⁴ His claim that the progress of the latter would lead to a decline of the former targeted mainstream Enlightenment assumptions about the interaction between moral refinement and the expansion of the arts and sciences propelling the progress of civilization. The First Discourse here raised two issues: first, what is the (causal) relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and morality and civic liberty on the other? Second, if the study of letters had indeed corrosive effects on society, how could they be checked without returning to a despotic suppression of the public sphere? As will be shown below, it was these issues which were at the core of Formey's and Herder's responses to Rousseau.

In the First Discourse and the replies to his critics, Rousseau knitted together two, rather contrasting, lines of argument. The first was the republican or civic humanist jeremiad about the corruption of liberty, military valour and virtue as a result of luxury and imperial aggrandizement.Footnote ⁵ The second was taken from an Augustinian (and Epicurean) analysis of modern commercial society and its origins in man's selfish or even vicious qualities like greed, vanity and pride. One need look no further for the premises of Rousseau's disquieting assertion about the immoral origins of the arts and sciences than the end of the first part of the Fable of the Bees. For it is here that Bernard Mandeville, summarizing his treatise, asserts that “what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures . . . That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences”.Footnote ⁶

What struck many readers of the First Discourse and the Second Discourse was that Rousseau seemed to offer no therapy for the defects he diagnosed so sharply in modern civilization. Yet this is not entirely true. On the last pages of the First Discourse Rousseau hinted at a possible cure by turning to a praise of academies. According to this puzzling twist of argument, these learned institutions were created as a remedy to the evil effects of the sciences. Their aim was to “act as checks on men of letters”, and prevent aberrations and amateurism.Footnote ⁷ With this polemic against scientific amateurs and his plea for an institutional regulation of science, Rousseau addressed central concerns in the specialist ideology of European academies. Their members viewed themselves as custodians of a certain expert knowledge, ranging from the study of nature to morality or taste, from which they tried to exclude unqualified aspirers and abusers.

One could question the honesty of these passages which were obviously directed at the jury of the Dijon Academy. Indeed, some modern scholars like Roger Hahn have dismissed them as ironic.Footnote ⁸ However, Rousseau repeatedly insisted in his answers to critics that he did not completely deny the public utility of the arts and sciences, especially after morals had already been corrupted. It would be a mistake, he wrote in his reply to King Stanislas, to infer from his observations that “we should now burn all Libraries and destroy the Universities and the Academies”. Any attempt to return to innocent ignorance would only vainly plunge Europe back into barbarism for “never has a people, once corrupted, been known to return to virtue”.Footnote ⁹ Rousseau's support for the academies hence rather foreshadowed his later espousal of sumptuary laws and strict institutional regulations, rather than being a complete proscription to counter the ills of modern civilization, such as luxury.Footnote ¹⁰

Despite these concessions to the learned establishment, contemporaries could yet hardly ignore the fact that the general argument of the First Discourse did not chime very well with the self-representation of scholars and of European academies.Footnote ¹¹ Academies viewed themselves as crucial in augmenting and spreading new learning, fighting superstition and thus improving society in general. In the case of the Berlin Academy, public relations and ideology were masterminded and propagated by Formey (1718–97), a Prussian-born Huguenot, who since 1748 had been the Academy's perpetual secretary for nearly fifty years.Footnote ¹² Through his enormous network of correspondence Formey was somehow the incarnation of the European Republic of Letters. He later became notorious for his Anti-Emile (1764) and Emile chrétien (1763), early legal editions of the widely banned Emile, whose extensive commentary challenged Rousseau's message in terms of Christian morality. The provocative impact of Rousseau's attack on scientific knowledge can be clearly understood if we compare the First Discourse with Formey's programmatic preface to the first volume of the Histoire de l'Académie royale of 1747, the Academy's new yearbook. In former days, Formey noted, the scientific occupation had to be defended against charges of uselessness. Nowadays, things had changed. Everyone would accept a great mathematician, an accomplished physicist, and an outstanding man of letters not only as someone who conveyed honour to his country, but also as a useful citizen whose inventions would generate public good.Footnote ¹³

FORMEY'S DISJUNCTION OF MURS AND SCIENCES

The perpetual secretary must have understood Rousseau's challenge to this kind of utility argument very well. Through his reviews of the First Discourse and the Recueil de toutes les pièces qui ont été publiées à l'occasion du discours de M. J. J. Rousseau in 1751 and 1753 he was involved in the debate from its very beginnings.Footnote ¹⁴ In his first reaction he rejected Rousseau's argument on the ground that it was only a matter of proper usage of the sciences. Pointing at Prussia, Formey also stressed, against Rousseau, the compatibility of martial spirit and the cultivation of the arts and sciences.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet in his “Examen philosophique” of 1755 he did not simply side with Rousseau's opponents. Instead, Formey proposed a different solution to the deadlocked controversy around the First Discourse. Formey wished “un peu plus de Philosophie” in the debate. According to him, the discussion was dominated by a rather simple sophism on both sides, which had substituted sound reasoning: “Post hoc: Ergo propter hoc”.Footnote ¹⁶ In contrast, he came out with a rather sceptical thesis: sciences had no effect, or only a very limited effect, on morals (mœurs).

At first glance, this use of sceptical arguments comes as a surprise. Formey, the eclectic popularizer of Christian Wolff's philosophy, is usually considered one of the chief representatives of “a school of anti-sceptics in Berlin” who were eager to defend Christian morality against genuine or alleged Pyrrhonists like Bayle, Hume, Diderot, Rousseau and others.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite that, Formey, Albrecht von Haller, Johann Bernhard Merian and other Academy members showed great interest in sceptical philosophy and were engaged in the translation and publication of works such as Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1758. In fact, as John Christian Laursen and Richard Popkin have pointed out, they even “domesticated many a sceptical point into their own canons of argument” and thus “contributed to the process of assimilating scepticism into the modern world view.”Footnote ¹⁸ As will be shown, it was this integration of sceptical arguments that was crucial for Formey's engagement with the First Discourse.

In terms of conjectural history, Formey assumed the existence of three stages in the development of mankind from a state of animal-like ignorance via enlightenment to decline.Footnote ¹⁹ In none of these stages could the sciences have a real impact on morals. The sciences added nothing to the diverse impulses of human nature towards virtue and vice. They could at best make virtues and vices manifest but not alter them profoundly.

In a second step, Formey developed a more conceptual model. He highlighted the imprecise usage of the term “sciences” by his contemporaries to denote any type of knowledge formed through experience and reason. For him, this conceptual confusion was the direct result of the anarchic social structure of the Republic of Letters or realm of the sciences (empire des sciences).Footnote ²⁰ In strict correspondence to the well-established concept from natural law, Formey drew the picture of an almost Hobbesian state of nature among men of learning.Footnote ²¹ That the relations between scholars were portrayed in analogy to states or to men acting under no political authority was a recurring theme in eighteenth-century accounts of the république des lettres. Notably, Samuel König, a Swiss professor at Leiden and external member of the Berlin Academy, invoked this notion in 1752 in order to challenge the authoritarian intervention by the Berlin Academy in his quarrel with its president, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, about the principle of the least action.Footnote ²² By contrast, Formey pointed at the costs of the alleged natural liberty and equality between the members of the Republic of Letters. For this would prevent intellectual dominance and consequently an exact definition of true science and its boundaries. Hence the realm of the sciences, Formey contended, can easily fall prey to a number of adventurers and vain usurpers, who suppress truth and modesty. Not surprisingly, knowledge would often depend on external causes like taste, fashion and climate and thus consist rather of opinions than of truth.

As a solution, Formey restricted sciences to theories based on principles, from which one can draw further conceptual or systematic conclusions.Footnote ²³ From here, it was relatively easy to argue that the highly specialized work of physicists and other scientists could hardly have any effect on the manners of ordinary people.Footnote ²⁴ He also highlighted the fact that historically the number of savants had always been negligible compared to the mass of the population.Footnote ²⁵ Even with respect to the personal character of the savant there was no necessary connection between sciences and morality. Formey denounced it as an erreur perpétuelle to attribute virtues and vices to the sciences originating in human nature.Footnote ²⁶

In a later reply to the critics of the “Examen philosophique”, Formey pointed at the example of a chemist who had detected a very dangerous poison. “The good usage or abuse which he will make of such a discovery do not depend on whether he is a chemist or a scientist but on whether he is a gentleman [honnête-homme], who has a righteous and good heart”.Footnote ²⁷ Formey here repudiated any form of moral elitism, present in many self-stylizations of scientists and men of letters throughout Europe. Prominently, Bernard de Fontenelle, who as perpetual secretary of the Académie des sciences in Paris was the model for Formey's position at the Berlin Academy, had stressed in various éloges that it was science itself which formed the virtuous character of the good scientist.Footnote ²⁸

Yet Formey was not ready to deny every possible connection between sciences and morals. Scientific research had a moral value, because the study of nature showed us the perfection of God's creation and could thus guide us to virtue.Footnote ²⁹ With respect to the study of moral philosophy itself, he was much more sceptical. Denouncing its whole history, Formey claimed that hitherto no system of moral philosophy had been developed that was “immediately and continuously applicable to the life of the citizens”.Footnote ³⁰ Though he accepted that the ancient philosophers had provided us with many admirable precepts, he criticized them for lacking a coherent theory of morality. They had remained rather sterile because their theories were not incorporated into religion.Footnote ³¹ And while he praised the achievements of Christianity he likewise emphasized that the enlightenment it provided mankind with was separate from that of the sciences.

Formey's argument was not essentially Pyrrhonist. He claimed neither that morals were inaccessible to human cognition nor that they could not be guided by reason. However, in practice his rejection of all philosophical attempts at a consistent and applicable system came very close to the position of a sceptic. In fact, Formey's doubts about existing systems of moral philosophy were an extension of his former claim that the history of the sciences was characterized by an extraordinary diversity of different, rather inconsistent, theories. In practice, men would often only disguise and palliate truth.Footnote ³²

Taking these arguments together, the “Examen philosophique” is remarkable for two reasons: first, it criticizes Rousseau's and his opponents’ cloudy notion of “science”. Second, it stresses the relative autonomy of sciences from morals.

However, Formey's position gets complicated if we take the “Examen philosophique” together with his review of the Recueil of 1753. Here he pointed to a crucial distinction which had been ignored in the debate around the First Discourse. What exactly is to be understood by mœurs epurées? he asked. Does it mean that they would “be bereft of their grossness or less vicious”?Footnote ³³ Formey was convinced that the first could not be contested. He thereby drew on the differences between moral and material progress, moral goodness and a mere refinement of manners—a term widely used in Enlightenment thought to denote the progress associated with the advancement of arts and sciences. Refinement and a politeness would civilize passions and submit men to the (soft) force of social conventions. They could thus function as social surrogates for virtue and moral purification. Formey argued rather cynically that with effect to the bien de la Société there would be no difference between the apparences du bien (“appearances of the good”)and le bien même (“the good itself”).Footnote ³⁴ Sciences in this way become part of an almost Mandevillean social engineering to reduce social conflict which eventually devalues the difference between moral goodness and mere compliance with conventions—a distinction central to Rousseau's argument. However, even Rousseau stressed in the preface to his play Narcissus that the sciences would prevent greater evil in an already corrupted society by keeping up the “public semblance” of virtue.Footnote ³⁵

At first glance, it is difficult to see how Formey's claim about the refining influence of arts and sciences on manners could be harmonized with the central thesis of the “Examen philosophique” that the sciences had no influence on mœurs. A sympathetic explanation could run along the lines that the latter was really only concerned with mœurs in the restricted sense of virtues and vices but not with manners and conventions. Formey's distinction between moral purification and a refinement of manners resembled d'Alembert's reply to Rousseau in the Discours préliminaire. “Letters certainly contribute to render society more pleasing”, though it was difficult, as d'Alembert conceded, “to prove that men are because of them better and virtue more common”.Footnote ³⁶

In his 1755 reply to critical reviewers of the “Examen philosophique”, Formey noticeably distinguished between the effects of the sciences on mankind (genre humain) and on the individual.Footnote ³⁷ Mankind would surely profit from material progress, enlightenment and refinement brought about by the arts and sciences. In contrast, the individual could become rather prone to vices than to virtues even if the overall advantages would outweigh these negative results of progress.Footnote ³⁸ As suggested above, the perpetual secretary's view of the sciences in the “Examen philosophique” was thus more Rousseauian than he was ready to admit. Various reviewers of the “Examen philosophique” were hence eager to point out that Formey would, in many ways, confirm Rousseau's accusations against the arts and sciences.Footnote ³⁹

That the realm of sciences was an “état plus mal réglé” was a claim to which Rousseau would have readily subscribed.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet while Formey was, in contrast to Rousseau, rather sceptical about extensive (moral) effects of scholarship on society, he nevertheless restated a double criticism of learning and philosophy in his later publications. In the Histoire abrégée de la Philosophie of 1760 he made the case for a moderate Protestant Enlightenment, warning against the expansion of Pyrrhonism and other erroneous ideas which would undermine society and man's happiness (bonheur).Footnote ⁴¹ In a comment on an essay about the question of happiness by Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche he deplored that the sciences and arts had a bad reputation because many scholars wasted their time with idle musing in their study or, driven by pride, with quarrelling against each other without benefiting society.Footnote ⁴² Formey and Rousseau thus fundamentally agreed that the corrupted sciences had to be regulated in order to prevent further damage and to allow society to profit from their many beneficial qualities.

Consequently, in his Considérations sur ce qu'on peut regarder aujourd'hui comme le but principal des Académies, a two-part programmatic speech held at the Berlin Academy's public assemblies marking the king's birthday in January 1767 and 1768, Formey declared the regulation of scholarship to one of the central aims of today's academies.Footnote ⁴³ The chief enemy of the sciences and letters nowadays was less the problem of ignorance but that of le demi-savoir, he contended.Footnote ⁴⁴ Formey took the problem of partial knowledge and amateurism very seriously. One fancied, he wrote, to speak of the eighteenth century as “le siecle de la Philosophie”, while he would prefer to call it “le siecle du demi-savoir”.Footnote ⁴⁵ The legions of demi-savants would, not least through an uncontrollable number of journals and dictionaries, increasingly invade and occupy large parts of the sciences. Amateurism thus threatened the achievements of serious scientists and led to a depravation of manners in the Republic of Letters. Instead, academies should function as professional tribunals which could restrict the abuse of knowledge by the demi-savants. Formey compared the role of academies to that of the Church with respect to religion and that of tribunals with respect to the law, for it was “the duty of the academies to govern a purified, sound knowledge prolific with precious fruits, which chases out . . . partial knowledge like one had done before with false-knowledge”.Footnote ⁴⁶

On the one hand, Formey here employed a common polemic against amateurs who allegedly tried to impose their tyranny over all branches of knowledge. Academies sought to centralize authority and expertise in the sphere of sciences and arts through prize contests or the examination and certification of inventions which, particularly in France, met with the increasing resistance of outsiders.Footnote ⁴⁷ On the other hand, he rejected the idea of an independent public sphere. In contrast to Samuel König, who had appealed to the public as un Juge souverain & indépendant against the alleged partiality of a certain society of scholars in his struggle with Maupertuis and the Berlin Academy,Footnote ⁴⁸ Formey asserted the authority of academies and wanted them to control an unruly sphere of academic publications and scientific inventions. He went as far as to call for a fifty-year scientific dictatorship of one academy for the benefit of mankind.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is not without a certain irony. For Formey himself, as a tireless editor of (review) journals, translations and dictionaries, had contributed to the popularization of knowledge and the denounced expansion of the print market.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet to portray this as self-contradictory would be a misrepresentation of the cultural policy Formey pursued as a journalist. Particularly his review journals (Nouvelle) Bibliothèque germanique and the Bibliothèque impartiale were conceived as allegedly impartial tribunals asserting the authority of meritocratic experts over the sphere of knowledge.

THE 1779 PRIZE CONTEST AND HERDER'S NATURAL HISTORY OF LEARNING AND GOVERNMENT

Prize questions were an essential part of this centralized cultural management in a meritocratic key sketched out by Formey.Footnote ⁵¹ The 1779 subject, formulated by the Classe de belles-lettres, directed by the Swiss philosopher Johann Bernhard Merian, proves the untiring interest of eighteenth-century men of letters in the histoire de l'esprit humain, i.e. the interaction between knowledge and society in the history of mankind.Footnote ⁵² While the contest received only a very limited number of direct contributions, it provoked, however, no less than the eminent Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners to produce a massive two-volume history of letters in antiquity in 1781, which was fundamentally concerned with the place of learning in society.Footnote ⁵³

Herder's contribution to the 1779 contest should surely be taken together with two other prize-winning works from the same years: his “Causes of the decline of taste of different nations in which it had flourished” of 1775, his second triumphant essay for the Berlin Academy, and “On the effect of poetry on the morals of the peoples in ancient and modern times” (written in 1778, published 1781), an essay for the Bavarian academy in Munich.Footnote ⁵⁴ These texts can be read as a tripartite reply to Rousseau. Like his academic teacher Kant, Herder had been struggling with the impulses of Rousseau's two discourses since the middle of the 1760s.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his essay “How philosophy can become more universal and useful for the best of the people”, written in 1765, he addressed the question, which he considered to be the “most appropriate for our economico-political age”, “How can philosophy be reconciled with politics and humanity so that it really serves the latter? . . . The question over which Plato, Rousseau, Hume, and Shaftesbury pondered very deeply and plunged into doubt.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Likewise, Herder's 1778, 1775 and 1780 contributions include numerous references to the Genevan. In contrast to the First Discourse, Herder set out to give a much more historically complex account of the problem. In the essay “On the Influence of Government on Learning” he developed a natural and evolutionary history of the relation between Regierung and Wissenschaften.Footnote ⁵⁷ Terminology, again, is crucial. Herder translated lettres as formulated in the question as Wissenschaften, with which he denoted various forms of knowledge, skills, (liberal) arts and sciences. Government was nothing artificially instituted but, like authority and power relations, always part of human society. Likewise, no human society can be without Wissenschaft. Starting with the emergence of poetry in patriarchic forms of government, every society gave birth to certain branches of Wissenschaften, and promoted some and repressed others.Footnote ⁵⁸ By marrying their history with the evolution of man's natural sociability, Herder downplayed not only contractarian theories of the origins of the state but also Rousseau's notion that the sciences are something artificial which can be completely banned from a political community. As he made clear in his later Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–5), with the origin of language man had necessarily taken the road to the cultivation of arts and sciences, which are consequently part of a natural history of man.Footnote ⁵⁹

Like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the first German reviewer of Rousseau's First Discourse,Footnote ⁶⁰ Herder argued that the social effects of the sciences would depend on their actual usage. Particularly in early societies, poetry and religion were crucial in upholding social cohesion. But they were at the same time much more open to abuse as a means of national hatred and superstition than in modern times, where their influence was diminished. Patriarchal government was succeeded by despotism. According to Herder, its political features produced similar effects in the sphere of arts and sciences by promoting opulence, religious superstition, arbitrary rule and a disproportionate grandeur. This pomp and despotism of taste, as he contended against Voltaire, could not only be found in the ancient Asiatic monarchies but also traced to the France of Louis XIV.

By contrast, learning and arts could only fully develop in right proportion to human nature under free governments. The flourishing of the arts and sciences was hence a direct expression of the political form and culture of the Greek republics. Herder took up Rousseau's contrast between Athens and Sparta, but in a clearly less partisan way by stressing the advantages of both models.Footnote ⁶¹ Sparta provided the model of how a state can control and restrict the arts and sciences to clearly defined political needs. Athens's lawgiver Solon chose a different route. His constitution, with aristocratic and strong democratic elements, “sought to pair riches with freedom, luxury with love of the fatherland”. “Inevitably”, Herder continued,

Herder portrayed Athenian culture as dynamic but fragile, threatened by corruption and the instabilities of ancient democratic politics. Despite his mild Rousseauian criticism of the idleness of Athenian rhetoricians and the theatre, he was clearly convinced of the superiority of the Greeks’ republican culture and personality over modernity.Footnote ⁶³ With this stress on creativity set free by the somewhat chaotic and competetive Athenian society, Herder ran a parallel course to Adam Ferguson, whose An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) was widely read among German intellectuals in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁴ Based on a new stress on individual genius, Herder also sympathized with Ferguson's preference of a creative self-appropriation of aesthetic materials and the integration of learning and taste in an active life in contrast to a refined but sterile imitation of classical models.Footnote ⁶⁵

With the dawn and loss of freedom in the Greek republics and later in ancient Rome, the arts and sciences also declined and lost their originality. In his “Causes of the Decline of Taste” essay, Herder drew a strikingly analogous picture with respect to taste. Though he was rather cautious about a direct correspondence between taste and civic virtue he argued that with the total loss of virtue and liberty taste would become incurably corrupted as well.Footnote ⁶⁶

These accounts of the relation between liberty and culture recover ancient depictions of the decline of rhetoric under non-free governments by Pseudo-Longinus and Tacitus. Another influence, in Herder's case, was certainly Johann Joachim Winckelmann's history of art, which emphasized the importance of Athens's free constitution for the flourishing of the fine arts.Footnote ⁶⁷ Winckelmann, however, did not dwell very much on this relation in more specific terms. A more relevant source of Herder's reflections can rather be found in David Hume's “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742) and Ferguson's Essay (1767), a fact overlooked by modern commentators like Rainer Wisbert. Already in November 1768 Herder wrote enthusiastically to Hamann that Hume's essay had nurtured him very much. Alluding to the founding myth of Carthage, he added that it would “provide a cowhide for a Carthage bigger than Winckelmann's history of art”.Footnote ⁶⁸

Herder was impressed by Hume's argument “that it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that people enjoys the blessing of a free government”.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hume stressed the security provided by the rule of law in a free constitution which would allow the passion of curiosity to develop and produce knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁰ As shown above, Herder, by contrast, differed from Hume in arguing that learning was, though to a smaller degree, already present from the beginning of human society. This nuanced view was not least due to Herder's more empirically and anthropologically informed approach, which tried to present human history as an evolutionary history of continuous development. However, along with Hume, Ferguson and Rousseau, he claimed that human creativity and capacity can only fully develop under a free or republican constitution. With this stress on liberty, its legal and constitutional pillars, Herder explicitly sidelined “natural” factors such as climate and national character as of less importance for the development of arts and sciences in ancient Greece.Footnote ⁷¹ Herder also followed Hume when he argued that it was the continuous exchange and emulation between the Greek republics which propelled the advancement of the arts and sciences further.Footnote ⁷²

LEARNING AND THE MODERN MONARCHY

Herder's balanced admiration of ancient republican culture, his Rousseauian condemnation of modern corruption and despotism, particularly in his earlier works, could not easily be harmonized with the attempt to successfully win a prize from the academy of Frederick the Great on a highly political question. Here, Hume became immensely important for the “On the Influence of Government on Learning” essay. He provided a scheme for how to reconcile Herder's republican sympathies with an account of learning in modern monarchies.Footnote ⁷³

According to Hume, the contrast between republics and monarchies lost its significance in the course of history. Modern “civilized monarchies” gradually incorporated the achievements of free governments, like the rule of law.Footnote ⁷⁴ They could hence provide a similar if not a more favourable environment for commerce and the polite arts than republics. Herder, who probably also drew on William Robertson's History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V of 1769 (1770 in German),Footnote ⁷⁵ equally observed a transformation from the despotism of the medieval feudal regimens to a system of modern lawful monarchies. “Despotism almost eroded itself and was forced to become a monarchy based on the laws of the state. This happened”, Herder argued with a view to the unintended consequences of modern state competition, “because despotic states will not be safe among states with a superior constitution and become annihilated”.Footnote ⁷⁶ Scholarship not only contributed to the civilization of European states, but in return also profited from their military and peaceful emulation, which forced European princes to found universities and academies, and to promote the arts and sciences in general. These lawful monarchies were usually more stable than (ancient) republics. And while the latter would favour inventions and the most outstanding creations of human spirit, lawful monarchies would provide a better environment to preserve these inventions for mankind.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Herder of the Weimar period thus strikingly departed from his sarcastic parody of the evolution of modern monarchies in his earlier Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Man of 1774.Footnote ⁷⁸

Taking the ideal of a lawful monarchy as point of departure, Herder gave a number of precepts for how government can favour learning. First of all, the state should not obstruct freedom of opinion and should try not to interfere with the endeavour of scientists and men of letters. Second, it could provide opportunities for learning through commerce and exchange between nations and cultures. Third, the state should actively encourage learning through honours, sponsorship and an intensive care for education.Footnote ⁷⁹

Moreover, as shown above with respect to Greek liberty, Herder did not believe in a symmetric relation between government and letters. In a direct reply to Rousseau he argued that government was always a dominant force against whose corruption arts and sciences could provide only a very limited remedy. And while the First Discourse had charged luxury and sciences for ancient Rome's decline, Herder blamed luxury alone. However, as a result of his very broad concept of Wissenschaften, Herder could not deny them any influence on government and morals, as Formey had argued. Through education, Wissenschaften would constantly affect society. Hence Herder could not assert a full deregulation of the sphere of learning and economy as was advocated by the Physiocrats. And it is at this point that he tried to balance a Humean belief in the civilizing force of the sciences and arts with a Rousseauian criticism of their morally corrupting potential. Herder warned that opulence in sciences and its connection with luxury could be a waste of resources and detrimental to social cohesion. An exaggerated esteem for the arts and sciences would make peasants seek a profession in the new arts and sciences.Footnote ⁸⁰ This would lead to the neglect of agriculture and cause poverty and excessive urbanization. In return, learning itself would eventually become the object of contempt.

According to his Ideen, rivalry between “envious scholars” was evidence of the potential corruption of man's naturally peaceful and sociable features under civilized urban conditions. It was “against the truth of history”, he claimed against a dominant strand in natural-law thinking, to infer from their example that man was by nature unsociable and pugnacious.Footnote ⁸¹

Herder, who in other respects was rather critical of the mechanic structure of the modern bureaucratic state, thus called for political regulation of the arts and sciences. This also reflects his concern, as superintendent and member of the Lutheran consistory in the duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, with the education of the people and the preservation of the Christian faith against signs of irreligion. In a public sermon for the court and Weimar burghers in 1782 Herder dared openly to express his discontent with a growing agnosticism among the elites (höhere Stände), notably Duke Carl August himself.Footnote ⁸² Despite his clear distance from traditional orthodox Lutheranism, Herder later was equally ill at ease with the Kantian philosophy taught at the nearby university of Jena. He became critical of the so-called neologist theology and what he perceived as potentially dangerous abstract speculations in the instruction of future pastors.Footnote ⁸³ As an inspector and superintendent of the schools and the Gymnasium in the duchy Herder was largely focused on how to provide a wider population with practically and morally useful knowledge, for example by such reforms of school curricula as the reduction of Greek and Latin tuition.Footnote ⁸⁴

With this, Herder was very much in line with a number of Protestant Aufklärer, who debated the form and extent of knowledge provided to the people.Footnote ⁸⁵Wissenschaft, Herder wrote, should be practical wisdom, in which “the opulences of the mind and life should find no place”.Footnote ⁸⁶ “If learning should affect society [whole] ranks [Stände, in the sense of Berufsstände] have to be taught and not scholars, men of business and not polygraphs.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Modern monarchies should take early republics as their ideal, in which only necessary knowledge and sciences were encouraged. He acknowledged, however, that a return to a Spartan policy under the conditions of constant flux of goods and ideas between modern (European) states was neither possible nor wishful. To counter the abuse of learning with sheer prohibition (kahle Verbote) was not a very promising option. In contrast, the state should profess a closer observance of its universities, encourage talented scholars, and ban the practice of anonymous writing.Footnote ⁸⁸

Herder's acknowledgement of the state as an important civilizing force and his advice for a reform of antiquated universities and public control of scholarship and writing is surprising. At first glance, these views cannot easily be reconciled with the well-established picture of Herder as strong critic of the machine-like structure of the modern (absolutist) state, against which he had developed the idea of Volk and nation as organic counterconcepts. Even Rainer Wisbert, in his thoughtful commentary, claims that Herder had made a number of compromises with respect to his addressees at the Berlin Academy.Footnote ⁸⁹ Herder's 1780 call for state control of the arts and sciences was yet no tactical manoeuvre to please the admirers of Frederick the Great. As can be seen from a later article in his journal Adrastea of 1802, Herder rehearsed these views during the final years of his life. These reflections were part of a surprisingly late, though relatively conventional, rejection of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and his notorious assertion that private vices would produce public benefits.Footnote ⁹⁰ Herder strongly disagreed with Mandeville that the state could be indifferent to moral education or be satisfied by the mere appearance of honesty. In order to keep up the morality of the future educated elites and connect higher education with the needs of society, Herder called for a thorough public control of universities and schools.Footnote ⁹¹ He also proposed the introduction of public review committees and journals of leading scholars and other educated specialists to observe the growing market for (academic) publications in the name of the state.Footnote ⁹²

With this search for alternative forms of public control Herder thus did not subscribe, as did the later Prussian state minister Johann Christoph von Wöllner, to attempts by the confessional orthodoxy and the camp of enlightened conservatives to curb the dynamics of intellectual discourse by public censorship and strict bans. Herder, rather, along with Rousseau, Ferguson, Kant and a number of German Popularaufklärer, opposed what he perceived as a detached concept of scholarship (Gelehrsamkeit) and religion which would ignore the moral and practical needs of society. His 1780 prize essay could thus also be read as part of a broad call for a reform of an antiquated university and school education in Germany.Footnote ⁹³

Seven years later Herder spelled out his belief in the crucial role of academies and other institutions of learning in the improvement of society more concretely in a proposal for a national academy. The “Idea for the First Patriotic Institute for Germany's Public Spirit” was drawn for the Margrave Karl Friedrich of Baden, a leading member of the German Fürstenbund. The Institut was planned to orchestrate the political attempt by several, mostly small-state, German princes for an institutional and legal reform of the Holy Roman Empire. The underlying assumption that Germany lacked public spirit and national patriotism that could overcome the Austro-Prussian divide and foster reform of the empire had been a recurring subject in German public discourse since the Seven Years War. Herder appealed to the princes to sponsor an institution that should give German culture a national focus, promote the cultivation of the German language and facilitate exchange between Germany's provinces.Footnote ⁹⁴ Thus it was planned as an amendatory element to some of the defects of the empire, but not as part of a utopian countermodel to the political realities of his time.Footnote ⁹⁵

REVERSING MODERNITY? A NEW PUBLIC ROLE FOR THE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Herder's position on the pernicious effects of scholarship and science on society and morality was not entirely clear. In contrast to Rousseau and Formey, Herder focused on the uselessness of misconceived concepts of learning and rather ignored the problem of mœurs. Corruption of learning was not effected by vicious passions like pride which would give way to inequality. Rather, it was the social consequence of outdated curricula and the problem of the vast number of university graduates without a proper Beruf (profession) who flooded the market with their writings.

He also meticulously distinguished between the influence of the various branches of the arts and sciences on morality in the course of history as well as between moral and material progress. In his Ideen he took up the question of the First Discourse and reformulated it with respect to the happiness of mankind. Like Lessing, Formey and others, he again stressed that everything would depend on the proper usage of the arts and sciences. Herder was distinctly ambivalent about scientific progress and particularly its consequences for the non-European world. He accepted that with every new art and science “a new bond of sociability, i.e. a collective need [gemeinschaftliches Bedürfnis] became established without which civilized men [künstliche Menschen] cannot live”.Footnote ⁹⁶ This intensified exchange and sociability in some parts of the world, however, contrasted sharply with the inequality and poverty it had caused in other parts of the globe. Gunpowder was a notorious example for the ambivalence of scientific inventions.Footnote ⁹⁷ It had had, Herder conceded, a number of devastating consequences, particularly in the hands of despotic regimes, that its inventor had never calculated. At the same time, gunpowder had levelled natural inequalities between men and was likely to turn itself against modern (military) despotism and bring about new forms of government.

Progress was spelled out very differently with respect to the liberal arts. In the essay “On the Effect of Poetry” Herder differentiated between various stages of the relationship between poetry and society. Poetry had been symbiotically conjoined with the political community in ancient Greek and early Germanic and Celtic societies. This vital influence on manners and morals, however, was already distinctively diminished in ancient Rome, where law and rhetoric played a much greater role in integrating society. Herder thereby turned notions of cause and effect in the First Discourse upside down. He attributed the loss of poetic originality and depth to an evolving, universalizing civilization, accompanied by luxury and moral corruption. In modern times, there was hardly any relation between an increasingly refined poetry and manners. Poetry now served pleasure only.Footnote ⁹⁸ Herder, however, expressed his hope to find a means to reverse this process of differentiation and political marginalization. In order to regain the balanced taste and culture of the ancient Greeks, he argued in the “Causes of the Decline of Taste”, against a purely aesthetic classicism, we should not try to impose sterile aesthetic rules of imitation but reopen its sources: liberty, humanity and virtue.Footnote ⁹⁹