ABSTRACT
A common view in Kierkegaard scholarship holds that the nineteenth-century Danish politician Orla Lehmann represents the opposite ideological extreme from Søren Kierkegaard. After all, Lehmann was a firm believer in the democratic political process and one of the architects of Denmark’s 1848 civil war in Schleswig-Holstein and transition to a constitutional monarchy. In his journals, Kierkegaard dismissed the former as incapable of truly resolving any problems, since “a decision through voting results in nothing,” since “the matter is simply terminated.”1 He denounced the latter as a travesty resulting from the fact that “it is we ourselves who are internally disintegrating.”2 For most of Kierkegaard’s adult life, Lehmann was one of the most prominent representatives of the Liberal party, which Kierkegaard derided as “the greatest cowards”3 and compared to the “tailor in heaven” about whom he claims “in order to punish a single abuse which they notice from our Lord’s usurped throne, they grab God’s footstool and hurl it down to earth-yes, to punish it they would willingly destroy the whole world.”4 Such ringing denouncements of Lehmann’s life’s work make it seem obvious that these two men shared no common ground and were in fact working against each other in their respective crusades to change the condition and character of their countrymen.
