ABSTRACT
W ithout explanation or evidence, on the concluding page of his Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century Alfred Cobban announced that "am ong Continental thinkers, despite occasional borrowings, the influence of [Burke’s] thought as a whole was negligible .” 1 Cobban failed, however, to convince. In his recent and widely acclaimed Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950, Franklin L. Baumer has repeated what is now the conventional wisdom that "Burke’s influence became pervasive in Germany as well as in England . ” 2 Koppel S. Pinson went further in affirming that "the influence of the Englishm an Burke, popularized in Germany and Austria by Gentz, had a more far-reaching effect in Germany than it had in England . ” 3 Moreover, in Pinson’s work on the intellectual history of Germany since the revoludonary era, more space is devoted to Burke than to any other non-German thinker, and more than is given to such domestic luminaries as Feuerbach, Holderlin, or Husserl.
