ABSTRACT
Prussia is not known for its deep-seated republican or liberal traditions. According to Perry Anderson’s classical comparative landscape of European absolutist states it belongs to the Middle Eastern European type of centralized military states ruled from above with no influential bourgeois middle class. 1 This might be one reason for the very rudimentary reception of the theories of republican authors such as James Harrington – even if, in the late seventeenth century, there were several instances of interaction between early modern English republicans such as John Toland and radical Enlightenment authors in Brandenburg-Prussia. 2 One of the very rare examples of a German or Prussian Harrington reception, however, can be found in the writings of the political journalist and historian Friedrich Buchholz, who was writing during the reform period of the early nineteenth century. Harrington became of interest during this era of societal change with respect to questions regarding the form of government, the economic basis of power, or operational modes of participation, in a way that is similar to the discussions surrounding the French Revolution that have already been reconstructed comprehensively by Rachel Hammersley. 3
