The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background by Hans Kohn

Author:Hans Kohn [Kohn, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, History, Sociology, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781351481236
Google: zh8xDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36078372
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1944-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

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On no German thinker had Rousseau’s influence been so decisive and lasting as on Kant. “Rousseau set me right. I learned to honor man,” he wrote.115 Both shared the fundamental respect for the dignity of the human individual, but Kant’s ethics never knew any other horizon than the universal one of mankind. To treat man as an end and not merely as a means, to subject him to no other legislation than that to which he has concurred as an autonomous member of the general will, was Rousseauan; but beyond that Kant visualized mankind, a universal society of free individuals, as the goal of all human development. Man should always act on the principle of absolute reciprocity, principles applicable to every man, not to any particular nation, class, or caste.116 Rousseau had thought more in the concept of the political life of a national community, Kant thought exclusively in the concepts of a rational order for mankind. The principles of the French Revolution were enthusiastically welcomed by him.117 Friedrich Gentz rightly said that Kant’s philosophy contained “the complete theory of the often praised and little understood rights of man which emerged from the quiet and modest reasoning of the German philosopher, without any noise, without any pomp, yet in the most perfect form.”118 But Kant did not remain confined to the inalienable rights of man; his universalism led him to demand a world order under rational law, an association of constitutional republics guaranteeing the liberty of the citizen and the peace of the peoples.

Kant has sometimes been regarded as a Prussian in a deeper sense than that of a mere subject. Prussian emphasis upon duty and discipline and Kant’s primacy of duty seemed to reveal a certain affinity between their ethical attitudes. In reality the similarity is purely superficial and is confined to one point; in their origin and essence the two attitudes were not only different but opposed. Prussianism centered in the state, for which Kant’s philosophy showed hardly any understanding or love. Prussia was founded upon authority and subjection; Kant’s philosophy, upon equality and autonomy. It was this fundamental and central position of freedom in his philosophy which attracted Schiller; Kant’s influence brought him to maturity and fulfillment as the contact of classical antiquity in Italy did Goethe. “No greater word has ever been pronounced by a mortal man,” Schiller wrote to his friend Korner on February 18, 1793, “than Kant’s word, which is the essence of his whole philosophy: determine yourself by yourself {bestimme dich aus dir selbst)!” On the autonomy of man a new world was to be built: the world of man’s maturity, in which a universal order of rational law could enable every man to develop his capacities and his humanity to the fullest. The great winds of the century swelled the sails of the ship on which Kant’s mankind traveled to its destiny. To him the Middle Ages appeared as an “incomprehensible aberration of the human mind.” In December, 1784, Kant published in

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