Democratic Enlightenment

27
Goethe, Schiller, and the New
‘Dutch Revolt’ against Spain
1. DRAMA AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
If Kant’s ‘practical reason’ powerfully bolstered moderation and Christian values, he
was also a champion of political, social, and educational reform provided that it did
not affront authority and the princes. Indeed, the reasons he gives for refusing to
justify revolution and preferring compromise, pragmatism, and gradual reform are
among the most attractive features of his thought. 1 But the mainstream, Kantian no
less than Wolffian, however firm its moderation and benevolence, in late eighteenthcentury
circumstances was in no position to undertake a wide-ranging reform
programme precisely because it could not oppose princely rule. The discussions of
the group of enlighteners comprising the Berlin Mittwochgesellschaft, or ‘Wednesday
Society’, a society meeting regularly from 1783 to 1798 with the object of combining
the efforts of prominent ‘enlightened’ Prussian officials and key writers, editors, and
thinkers such as Biester, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn, only confirmed the impossibility
of carrying through comprehensive change from a moderate standpoint.
There was little difficulty in identifying problem areas. Various legal reforms had
been introduced since the 1740s, including Frederick’s 1765 edict decriminalizing
‘fornication’ and ending the penalties for irregular sexual liaisons between men and
women. But in Prussia, the economy remained under the deadening hand of an oldfashioned
mercantilism, fiscalism, and royally enforced commercial monopolies, 2 the
nobility remained a separate and excessively militarized caste, direct taxes remained
low to ‘please the nobility’ as radical critics put it, 3 throwing an unjust burden on the
rest of society, the serfs remained un-emancipated, the marriage laws antiquated and
divorce difficult to obtain, the Jews under a wide range of disabilities, the press under
growing restrictions, primary education in a highly unsatisfactory state, and the
problems of illegitimacy, infanticide, and male and female vagrancy acute. In Silesia,
1
Ellis, Kant’s Politics, 82–3, 173–4, 179; Kersting, ‘Politics’, 359–61.
2
Mirabeau, De la monarchie, i. 166–9, 173–9 and iii. 283–6, 288, 319, 326–9.
3
Ibid. i. 192.