II. Enlightened Government and its Critics in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

The debates between ‘rationalism’ and ‘traditionalism’ and between ‘organization’ and ‘community’ 1 which are such a striking feature of contemporary political thought may be traced back in their modern form to the eighteenth century. Men like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Bolingbroke, Hume, Bentham and Burke recognized the relevance of these debates to theory and practice and they attempted to link the issues by exploring the conceptual and practical connexions between rationalist politics and the theory of community. The problems were not, of course, discussed in either an intellectual or a political vacuum. The intellectual context was produced by the impact of the discoveries of natural science on social investigation. Students of social affairs hoped to discover behind the apparent diversity and complexity of actual societies a framework of uniform, consistent and, above all, predictable rules which would be analogous to the laws of the planetary system.