Review

Author(s): Bedrich Loewenstein

Review by: Bedrich Loewenstein
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1976), pp. 122-124
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877758
Accessed: 31-01-2016 05:54 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Modern
History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.28.191.34 on Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:54:46 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
122 Book Reviews
Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogeneseder burgerlichenWelt. By
Reinhart Koselleck. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 36. 1st ed.
Freiberg: K. Alber, 1959; 2d ed.
Frankfurt:SuhrkampVerlag. 1973. Pp. 248.
The Enlightenmenthas long had a bad press in Germany:it was unhistorical,
blinded by rationalismto the true vital drives, consequently superficialand
utopian, irreligious,and anational. Positive aspects of the Enlightenmentare
conceded only reluctantly.It is somewhat surprisingto find these attitudes, in
Germanyoften shared by the Left (Engels spoke of "Aufklkricht"), in this
serious, in some respects outstandingwork by Koselleck. Koselleck formu-
lates questions brilliantly,he has commandover a very rich arrayof sources
which he employs to the point of pedantry,he has a philosophicalmind-and
yet his analysis is an example of a highly one-sided interpretation.
Koselleck's thesis, briefly stated, is the following: absolute monarchy
created a suprareligious, rational sphere of action which helped Europe
overcome the state of permanent religious civil war. However, the inner
sphere of private life, left vacant by the state, became a new source of
disturbancethat constantly extended its frontiersuntil it sucked the state, the
embodiment of reason, into a new vortex of ideological civil war.
Koselleck uses Hobbes and Vattel as examples of absolutist rationality,
Locke and the Freemasons for bourgeois self-righteousness, Lessing, Did-
erot, and Schiller for the infringementof moralistic-aestheticcriteria upon
politics, Bayle, Voltaire, and Kant for the development of criticism into a
politicalforce, and so on. Added to this is a discussion of the Enlightenment's
philosophy of history, which is said to have created an image of the future
that filled its followers with a false confidence and to have in fact exacerbated
the crisis by interpretingit in metapoliticalterms. The author shows in the
case of Turgot the failure in practice of an attempt to subordinatepolitics to
morality,an event which he interpretsas the complete reversalof absolutism,
namely, the creation of an inviolate spiritual antipole and a de facto total
politicizationof the spiritualworld. Rousseau provides a further link in the
"dialectic of the enlightenment," which becomes transformed into the
dictatorshipof the general will. In contrast to the old absolutism, ideological
terror took hold in the inner private sphere as well: "Die moralische Zensur
[Locke'sJ hat sich bei Rousseau verstaatlicht, der 6iffentlicheZensor wird
zum Chefideologen" (p. 138). The Abbe Raynal completes the chain of
bourgeois utopianismand hypocrisy by juxtaposing immoral European des-
potism against the natural innocent state of the American wilderness, and
thus letting the (relative, political) contrast become a worldwide Manichaean
dualism.
Koselleck's brilliantand dazzling presentation is without doubt extremely
suggestive: I do not hesitate to call it a great dare. If critical doubts are
appropriate,it is certainly not because Koselleck analyzes the present as
reflectedin the past ratherthan the past-in my jLdgmentthis is to his credit.
But his overemphasis on parallels with the twentieth century (the develop-
ment of moralizing, pseudological philosophy of history leading to rigid
political fronts and ideological terror) is not fair to the Enlightenment.For
instance, to state that the acceptance of binding moral standards robs the
sovereign's decisions of their political character-indeed, eliminates al-
together his freedom to make decisions-presupposes a particular,

This content downloaded from 202.28.191.34 on Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:54:46 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Book Reviews 123
existential-decisionist conception of politics (pp. 121-22). In this case, a
passing and seldom practiced conception of absolutist sovereignty is elevated
to the standard of what is political (or salutary). In practice there was hardly
any absolute sovereignty, since in Europe (fortunately) the prince's power
was always limited.
Or to give another example: When Kant states that his age was one of
criticism, which must force everything into subjection, and when he demands
"free and public examination" as the precondition for undisguised respect,
then it is hard to understand why this claim should be interpreted as an
expression of self-righteous mendacity, delusion and ideological alienation
(pp. 97-103). The author's analysis would be appropriate if "criticism"
became uncritical, that is, if it froze into a self-righteous ideological system
or, as it will later, if it veered from a passionate desire for freedom into
fanatical collectivism, from the universal brotherhood of peoples into holy
national war. But must it be emphasized that this is the opposite of ''free and
public examination" by reason? To equate continuous democratic-critical
reflection with permanent revolution is demagogy; a causal relationship
between criticism and terror has yet to be proved.
Of course, a feeling of powerlessness against a system of privileged
incompetence can give rise to a tendency to polarization and a pathetic
overrating of oneself and to the converse: to turning the sphere which escapes
one's influence into the Kingdom of Satan. But it would be false to describe
this as a fatal consequence or even a characteristic of the Enlightenmlent,
which after all did not hatch in an ideological ivory tower far from the real
world-by no means did the state, the church, the upper classes, etc.
everywhere resist the impulse of critical reason.
Koselleck's aim is the historical destruction of the Enlightenment as
ideologyx. It is therefore unsettling to find him content to expound immanent
quasi-logical relationships in the sphere of ideas, thus, inOtibenie, creating the
appearance of an inevitable process. He never really poses the question of the
historical adequacy of the Enlightenment as a program of reform, for example
that the claim to have a voice also in matters other than science and literary
criticism cannot be rejected, or the at least relative justification for passing
moral judgment on a society that, on the basis of shameless exploitation of
peasants, lived as if life was a refined theater and play: all is hypocrisy, false
consciousness. Related to this is the author's exaggeration of the contrast
between the philosophy of history and the facts of history: he treats the
former as mere support for claims to power, thus overlooking that historical
facts always exist in an interpretive relationship to one another. The
absolute contrast between morality and politics strikes an equally false note.
For all this I am by no means trying to spirit away the Enlightenment's
rationalist one-sidedness: pragmatists like Burke may be right in their
rejection of the claim to absolute authority made by metaphysical dilettantes,
without impairing the legitimacy of the Enlightenment. The open society,
which must justify its decisions and institutions according to the canons of
reason and humanity, is admittedly a utopia to our day, though to be sure not
an implicitly terrorist utopia but a practical and necessary one. Other partial
reservations concern the overestimation of the role of the Freemasons and of
the dialectic between the open society as an imagined goal and the actual
mystery mongering of closed sects, as well as the interpretation of Rousseau,
no longer tenable today, as a clearly totalitarian ideologue.

This content downloaded from 202.28.191.34 on Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:54:46 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
124 Book Reviews
All in all, Koselleck's book is a polemic treatise, which through its
one-sided judgment brings salutary movement into the all too self-serving
academic discussion. The high level of scholarship and the impressive
apparatus,convincing in detail, should in any case not delude readers as to
the anti-ideological character of the work.
BEDRICH LOEWENSTEIN
Prague, Czechoslovakia

The Mythology of the Secret Societies. By J. M. Roberts.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972. Pp. x+370. $17.50.
In the words of the author, the editor of the English Historical Reviewv, this
book is "about what has been believed and said about secret societies, not
about secret societies themselves" (p. vii). Roberts makes no claim to have
written an exhaustive study or a definitive work. He is too modest. Although
he has by no means scanned every scrap of available evidence about each and
every secret society from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the
1820s-the period with which he deals-he has made good use of most of the
important literature on the topic and of a number of key primary sources.
Moreover, his work is the most interesting and reliable general study, not
only of the mythology but also of the particular secret societies themselves,
that I have seen.
The account begins with the founding of the first "speculative" Masonic
lodge in London in 1717 and continues with a description of the rapid spread
of Freemasonry through the Continent. Although the Freemasons were
socially exclusive and in nearly all instances abstained from political activity,
the opposite was true of the other secret societies in Western Europe and
America, almost all of which, the author correctly maintains, were "shaped
directly or indirectly" by English Freemasonry (p. 28). The Rosicrucians, for
instance, engendered a respect for hierarchy and tradition and promoted
social and religious policies, while the Illuminati, "the first society to seek to
use for political subversion the machinery of secret organisation offered by
Freemasonry" (p. 124), plotted the establishment of an egalitarian society. A
number of other societies were also conspiratorial in nature, especially some
in Italy where "the first purely political secret societies appeared" (p. 222) as
offshoots of the Freemasons after Napoleon put the Masonic lodges under his
official protection. Most of them conspired first against the French emperor
and then against the conservative governments restored in 1814-15. Poten-
tially the most dangerous of them was Filippo Buonarroti's Sublimes Maitres
Parfaits, which was intended to be a secret international directorate for
coordinating the machinations of all European secret societies in their effort to
subvert the existing religious, political, and social order and thus realize the
egalitarian ideal of the Illuminati.
Running like a red thread through the pages of Roberts's volume is the
sharp contrast between the weakness, ineffectiveness, and, in some cases, the
moderate apolitical views of the secret societies and the threatening subver-
sive role attributed to them by conservatives as well as liberals. It is almost as
if the period of the French Revolution and conservative restoration was an
age of "McCarthyism"! True, as the author points out, the political aims of
the Illuminati were definitely subversive, but the philosophy and goals of the
Freemasons were apolitical. Overt "political activity by Masons" was

This content downloaded from 202.28.191.34 on Sun, 31 Jan 2016 05:54:46 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions