3. Romantic Conservatism.
While romantic con-
servatism in
Germany was in practice drawn into res-
torationist politics, its ideas and intentions, however,
were
developed in dialectical opposition to enlighten-
ment theories of the state and society as founded on
rational
laws, and in opposition to the politics of
enlightened despotism. These
theories and politics, and
not primarily the revolution, were made
responsible
for the abandonment of the beautiful hierarchical order
(family, corporate state, monarchy, church) that had
been formed in the
Middle Ages. The road to revolu-
tion had
followed an inevitable path from the Refor-
mation to rationalism and individualism, to adminis-
trative centralism and to the decline of
corporative
prerogatives. Rather than regard the revolution merely
as
a misfortune romantic conservatives understood
revolution to mean that a
soulless, nonreligious state
and the presumptuous attempt to reconstruct it
on
substantially rational principles were doomed to
failure. In
opposition to this, they relied upon the old
order and envisioned the
better future of an idealized
and harmonious Christian state (Novalis, A.
Müller,
F. von Baader). Since the evil reality of the present
was
viewed as a nonessential phenomenon the only escape
was seen in
the aesthetic reconciliation of opposites.
Romantic conservative political
thought in Germany
was closely intertwined with historicism, with Schel-
ling's philosophy of identity, and with
the nationalist
movement. The preference for vested rights over
consciously sought “progress” and the conviction that
every people must proceed along the lines of its own
unique organic
development, jointly produced in the
educated classes a growing tendency to
political con-
servatism. This attitude
also penetrated the ranks of
moderate liberalism in its increasing concern
about
radical and social democracy.
It was the reception of German romantic thought
and its insistence upon
history and Volk that formed
the conservative
component in the growing nationalism
among the mainly democratic, educated
classes of
Eastern Europe. “The Society of Friends of
Wisdom”
(liubomudry, 1823) with its
romantic-conservative
nationalism and the circle surrounding N. V. Stankević
were also shaped by ideas originating in Germany; both
Muscovite groups were—despite a rather short exist-
ence—forerunners of the accentuated Russian
nation-
alism during the second half of
the nineteenth century.
