ABSTRACT
It was perhaps inevitable that Germany, the land of Savigny and Stahl as of Fichte and Arndt and Gentz, should have been at the very centre of the reaction against the French Revolution. In this defeated and disorganized country, whose ancient foundations had crumbled in the great storm, the quest for order took on a special urgency, while the contagious fever of nationalism seemed, for many of the same reasons, particularly intense. Yet the picture is not that simple. For admiration of Burke, imitation of Maistre, concurrence with Eldon, loathing of Jacobins and French imperialists by no means exhausted the full range of the Germans' intellectual response. Still another line of argument, which was neither a literal extension of Enlightenment thought, an adaptation of revolutionary theses nor just another appeal to established authority, is encountered in Immanuel Kant, at the beginning of our period, and in Georg W. F. Hegel, near its end. In a summary discussion it is not possible to do justice to these founders of modern German philosophy. We should, nevertheless, seek to understand their efforts - differing but related, since Hegel owed much to Kant - to incorporate the experiences of their times into ambitious theoretical systems.
