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Chapter 4, ‘Intellectual Background’, attempts to reconstruct the intellectual background which informed the historians' mindset and argues that the vantage point of such study must be their own national traditions. Relying on the methodology of intellectual transfer it looks at the influence of the Enlightenment in its national variations, as well as the impact of Romanticism on their work. Within the analysis of foreign intellectual influences, special attention is given to the Göttingen school and in broader terms to the Spätaufklärung. Herder's influence is also investigated and the conclusion is reached that his impact was not as crucial as one would expect. Further, the chapter assesses the inspiration which the Scottish Enlightenment provided for the historians and explores in what ways and to what extent they were indebted to the French liberal school and the writings of the Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin.

While rationalist reflection can derive a single set of authoritative standards from a universal faculty of reason, sentimentalism must assume an implausible degree of uniformity among the contingent psychological features of human beings to do the same. Another sentimentalist alternative, however, is to accept rather than reject the pluralism of human standards, while still insisting that plural sets of standards can join in a single overlapping consensus behind basic principles of justice and reciprocity. This chapter argues that exactly such a pluralist sentimentalism can be found in the work of J. G. Herder, a student of the pre-critical, sentimentalist Kant and a vociferous opponent of the critical, rationalist Kant.

This chapter examines the two versions of Johann Gottfried von Herder's essay answering the question “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” The first version from 1765 can be read as a direct response to the attempts to conceive of a modern patriotic public during the Seven Years' War, whereas the second version from 1795/96 provides an extensive reflection on the function of real time and space in the construction of different kinds of publics with regard to the different domains of politics, religion, and the arts. The chapter considers how Herder addresses the question about the difference between a modern and an ancient public and their respective types of patriotism. It argues that Herder's advocacy of the public of literature as the ideal public for a humanist agenda shows us how this agenda is directly and consciously intertwined with a distinct model of secularization, a displacement of religion by art when it comes to the construction of a critical audience.

This chapter examines three influential models of the genius as radical innovator, each with a different approach to the tension between the natural gift of genius, which is opposed to the teachable arts that generally define human culture, on the one hand, and historical progress and the individual artist's relationship to contemporaneous cultural norms, on the other hand, differently. The first model is associated with Edward Young's essay on original genius from 1759, which is still committed to a model of cumulative progress. The second model, which is related to Johann Gottfried von Herder's essay on William Shakespeare from 1773, works with a radically historicist approach to change. Also, is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's essay on Johann Joachim Winckelmann from 1805. In contrast to both the cumulative and the historicist paradigm, the third example of the genius as radical innovator makes being out of sync with one's times the condition of genuine innovation.

This chapter focuses on the role given to mountain areas and topography in the making of territory of modern states. It especially examines the birth and spreading of the idea that mountains could serve as natural limits to political territories, from natural philosophy and political economy of the 18^th century to the treaties of the 20^th century in Central Europe and South America. It also recalls the role of the strategic and tactical vision of mountains in modern armies. It also give room to theoreticians, such as Ratzel and Haushofer, political regimes, such as the Nazis, and ideologists of expansionism such as the one which fueled the making of the US territory in the 19^th century who criticized this policy of natural boundaries and contested the advantage of having mountains at the border of national territories. This chapter also examines the case of countries where some mountains have been thought as being a pivot of national territory and national imagination, such as in Switzerland, Korea, Slovenia.

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.

For all the room that Smith makes for human difference, many social scientists will see Smith as too universalist for their taste. Why suppose that we can enter into the circumstances of any and every other human being? The very capacity for universal empathy that Smith presupposes is likely to be rejected by those who favor hermeneutic approaches to social science, for whom understanding other cultures takes more than imagining ourselves, thickly acculturated as we are, into the shoes of someone with a different upbringing. It is argued that this objection makes an important point but exaggerates the gap between Smith’s and other ways of understanding cultural difference. Johann Gottfried von Herder is often thought to have helped found the hermeneutic approach, and a disputation is staged between Smithian and Herderian empathy. Smithian empathy is shown to be a condition for Herderian empathy, in many respects.