The Genesis of German Conservatism, by Klaus Epstein. Princeton, $17.50
WHATEVER THE LESSONS of history may be, the protean past always speaks to us with an ambiguous voice. It is not simply that the clamor of the present blurs and distorts what otherwise would have been a clear message from one generation to another, from one century to another. The experience of history is itself a manifold and its meaning must be _disentangled from the exertion, the hopes and the frustrations of the past as well as from the passions of the present. Even when the monographic historian has explored his narrow subject carefully and won from it as much clarity as his intense and narrow investigation is capable of yielding, the view he holds must of necessity remain partial and incomplete. It is only in those works of broad synthesis, building as they do upon the partial meanings of the monographic historian, that the past gains an articulation and meaning which it did not possess even for those who experienced it. And it is only in these broadly synthetic works in which the concerns of the present and the passions of the past interpenetrate and are fused that the dialogue of the centuries can take place. It is in the great work of synthesis that the ambiguities are resolved and the accounts settled, the form and meaning of the past established with as much finality as our creatureliness admits. Until recently the major synthetic works dealing with the history of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries traced the evolution of liberal democratic and popular socialist and Marxian thought. Those works written in the course of the nineteenth century not only lacked perspective, but were invariably and triumphantly nationalistic in tone, and in the case of Germany dominated by the success of Prussia. Those great latter-day historians, Friedrich Meinecke, Franz Schnabel and Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, did much to shift the emphasis from parochialnationalist to common European concerns and from a language of cultural particularity to a language with general relevance to Western society. Even so, their works were preliminary _ essays which sketched out the lines of attack but were unable to avail themselves of the complete range of evidence and the monographic materials which have since become available. All of these historians attempted an exploration of the great current of conservatism which was the formative influence in modern German history, yet each in his way fell short of achieving his objective. It is of the utmost interest and importance, then, that an American scholar, Professor Klaus Epstein, chairman of the history department at Brown University and frequent contributor to Modern Age, has written a compendious work of synthesis which not only dazzles by its superb bibliographic and interpretative mastery, but which presents German history between 1770 and 1806 with a wholly new clarity. When the promised second volume of this major work appears it will at last be possible to understand the dynamics of nineteenth-century German history. This book clearly establishes Professor Epstein as the most important living historian of the German-speaking peoples. Moreover, Professor Epstein demonstrates that aft the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not only a great occidental or Atlantic revolution which one can recognize as Professors Louis Gottschalk and R. R. Palmer have done in its American and its French phase, but a great conservative upwelling which manifested itself in every aspect of German life—religious, social, political and economic. It goes without saying that this conservative movement was not simply a German but a universal European phenomenon. To A FAR greater extent than is generally recognized, the tone of the nineteenth century was not one dominated by the energies and potencies of liberal, democratic and socialistic ideas. In France, in England, and in Germany in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a conservative Weltanschauung emerged and formulated its conceptions of the good society. It was a common European movement which developed dialectically and in close relationship to the ideas of Enlightenment and the democratic revolution. Unfortunately, the positive aspects of this great conservative movement have, until re- © cently, been almost completely ne- ~ glected in Anglo-American historiography; its pedigree has been ignored and its thinkers despised and discounted as blind reactionaries. Where conservatism was not ignored, as in Professor J. Barzun’s Romanticism and the Modern Ego, Romanticism and conservatism are seen simply as a reflex from. Classicism and the French Revolution. Professor Epstein has gone a long way toward correcting this underevaluation of conservatism. He has traced with patience the emergence of German conservatism and correctly sees it in close relationship to the social and economic structure of German life in the late eighteenth century. There are few recent works of history in which the critical apparatus of footnotes and bibliography bulk: so large or are so important to the meaning of the work. Moreover, it would be difficult to find a recent historical work where the footnotes are as exciting, as opinionated and as interesting as they are in Professor Epstein’s ‘book. SEEN IN A larger context, the problems attendant upon the rise of German conservatism are the perennial problems of conservatism everywhere. Even in a superficial sense this is the case. The conspiracy theory of revolution and the preoccupation with Free Masonic lodges and subversive associations of Illuminati, which have obsessed a certain portion of the conservative movement down to the present time, had their rise in Germany. Professor Epstein traces the development of the conspiracy theory with elaborate care and not a little humor. Obviously, the blueprints of a Burke or of an August Rehburg are not valid plans for our society, nor is there any ultimate validity in their formulations of the conservative position. When conservatism is anything more than a blind and uncomprehending opposition to all novelty and development it is a tactic for change and transformation. The “reform conservative” is a perennial type. In each generation it is he who strikes a compromise between the demands for liberty and the social imperative for order, a compromise between ancient institutions and faiths and the necessity for change and renewal, a compromise between the claims of justice and the need for stability, a compromise between the validity of the local and the legitimacy of the universal. It is – this conservative who will not be hurried but who will not temporize and who believes that ultimately the — conscience of society is a surer test of morality than the presumption of individuals. Professor Epstein is himself such a conservative and his book asserts the validity of such a position.
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