BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

ejection of perfectibility and a hypothetical golden age, sought to turn Enlightenment
universalism on its head by claiming for Germans alone the true path toward “becoming.” 20 For
Berlin, this shift marked the dramatic contrast between a benign Counter-Enlightenment that
envisioned cultural pluralism within the framework of a basic universal morality and a far more
subjectivist and relativist Romanticism that postulated self-created moral values and the
reforming of nature and society through individual and collective will. Roger Hausheer, referring
to Berlin’s work on the roots of Romanticism and the central role of Fichte in this transition,
wrote “his [Fichte’s] voluntarist philosophy of the absolute ego that creates literally everything
inaugurated an epoch,” and “Fichte’s image of man as a demiurge inspired Carlyle and Nietzsche
and had a fateful impact on the ideologies of Fascism and National Socialism.” 21 Hausheer
credited Berlin not only for differentiating Herder’s Counter-Enlightenment from later Romantic
reaction but also for recognizing Herder’s prescient conception of the individual’s need for self-
identification and expression within a historical community. 22 From this perspective, the
Romantic revolt exalted Herder’s emphasis on “belonging” into a politicized conception of
20 Fichte, Addresses, 85-86, 118-19.
21 “Enlightening the Enlightenment,” in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., “Isaiah
Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 93, no. 5
(2003): 42-43, 44. Hausheer refers to two works: Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy, The Roots of
Romanticism: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; [London]: Chatto & Windus, 1999)
and Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of
Oxford on 31 October 1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Voluntarism in philosophy,
because rooted in the organic tradition, does not imply individual autonomy and should not be
confused with voluntarist nationalism.
22 “Enlightening the Enlightenment,” 45-46. The disruption of community through
imperial conquest and rapid technological change has triggered, in Hausheer’s words, “those
pathological convulsions of national self-awareness that now scar the entire globe.”
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