BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

home—loyalty, uprightness, honour, and simplicity.” 16 In Fichte’s opinion a true German looked
beyond appearances to the essence of being, believed in “the eternal progress of our race” and
would fight to the death not for constitution or laws but for love of the fatherland and “the
devouring flame of higher patriotism.” 17
Although Fichte certainly drew from Herder his antipathy for dead and distant cultures,
and probably his contempt for Jews as an alien and parasitic race, and though he seconded
Herder’s disgust at the imitation of French culture in Germany, Fichte’s nationalism marked a
clear departure from Enlightenment political ideals and what Isaiah Berlin called Herder’s own
“peculiar brand of universalism.” 18 While Herder criticized the ranking of cultures according to a
single universal standard as an abuse linked to political elitism and the suppression of organic
cultural development, he never abandoned Enlightenment optimism about progress toward
overarching humanitarian values. 19 Fichte, on the other hand, politicized organicism and, in his
16 Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Reginald Foy Jones, and George Henry
Turnbull based on Vogt’s edition of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation in the Bibliothek
pädagogischer klassiker, Langensalza, 1896 (Chicago; London: Open Court, 1922), 104, 63-71.
Available online at http://books.google.com/books/about/Addresses_to_the_German_nation
.html?id=SOtdAAAAIAAJ.
17 Ibid., 111-12, 125, 141.
18 Vico and Herder, 157, 178, 182. Berlin tended to dismiss Herder’s Eurocentric racism
as typical of his age rather than a contradiction to his general humanism, but Herder’s ideal of
humanity and progress, as Cedric Dover had earlier argued, tended to disparage non-European
beliefs. Herder’s conception of environmental adaptation specifically disadvantaged Africans
and Jews with the respective assumptions of a primitive homeland or none at all. See “The
Racial Philosophy of Johann Herder,” The British Journal of Sociology 3, no. 2 (June, 1952):
124-133.
19 Ibid., 162-64, 181. See also, Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and
Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790-1800 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 203-4.
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