The notion of a paradigmatic shift from an eighteenth-century music culture infused with universalism to a nineteenth-century music culture that was increasingly nationalistic has long been discredited. The process of revision—or more likely clarification, as surely this narrative was never held as anything other than a useful fiction—has taken a variety of forms. For example, there have been those who have uncovered the self-serving discursive practices of nationalism within universalist music discourse as early as the 1760s (Vazsonyi 2004, Morrow 1997). Others have shown how universalizing tendencies characterized a number of nationalisms of the nineteenth-century musical sphere, particularly with respect to German instrumental music (Applegate and Potter 2002, Gramit 2001). In material terms, the notion that the nineteenth century can even be distinguished by its unprecedented level of global interconnectedness—enabling the transnational circulation of styles, genres, and performers—has also come under pressure. This kind of circulation was already occurring to some degree in the eighteenth century via the transmission of compositional techniques and by conventions such as the Grand Tour, and in any case it was precisely the increasing popular exposure to different cultures that shaped the more aggressive types of national imaginary as the century wore on.
Much of the work of revising the caricatured break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been grounded in sociologically focused approaches that tend to view intellectual practices as reflections of particular material pressures—economic, political, and social. This tendency speaks to the broader disciplinary desire to unmask the unarticulated assumptions of past thinkers, particularly music critics and, later, music historians. Under this paradigm, universalism is found to be as equally culpable as nationalism in its ideological foundations and oppressive effects; in its tendency to make its own assumptions seem natural, inevitable, or neutral; in its pernicious imperialism (both conceptually and in its rationalization of the colonial impulse); and in its latent Eurocentrism. What these revisions also confirm, though, is that the universal and the national were not opposing positions in discussions about music during the long nineteenth century. Indeed, there was a level of continuity between them in that both attributed to music a form of historical agency—or at least causality. Music was made to appear as if it had the capacity to simultaneously draw some people together and set others apart.
In the case of the type of universalism forwarded by Immanuel Kant and post-Kantians such as Friedrich Schiller, for example, humans were drawn into relation by a shared aesthetic sense, yet not all people were thought to be able to fully participate in this realm of experience. Equally, the idea of an authentic national spirit, construed in aesthetic terms, was inherently defined by what it was positioned against. In other words, every “us” has needed a “them.” Yet the question of whether the “us” was deemed superior to the “them” has been less consistent historically. Taking into account that both universalisms and nationalisms have involved an investment in music’s ability to both forge bonds and create divisions in its demarcation of a particular “world”—the world of the nation, the world of humanity, or the world of those of an aesthetic sensibility or “rational” capacity—what follows will consider the topic of the universal and the national within intellectual culture during the nineteenth century by tracing the shifting conceptions of the “world” that music was variously thought to constitute.
This approach inverts the usual questions associated with the topic of “music and nationalism” in the sense that it does not examine the effect of cultural and political nationalisms on music or music institutions, nor how music helped propagate nationalist agendas or bolster the national “imaginary,” nor how nationalist paradigms in nineteenth-century writing on music history and aesthetics reflected the influence of nationalist tropes such as organicism and historicism. There are already a broad range of very excellent studies advancing these and related questions. What concerns me here is the role of the “idea of music” in shaping the early discourse on various types of “world,” including, but not limited to, the world of the nation. The value of construing the category of the “world” as an abiding impulse of both the national and the universal is to recover the normative possibility that lay at the heart of these conceptions—a possibility whose failure in practice and limitations in scope belie its continuing potential as a way of approaching history and otherness (Cheah 2014). In so doing it may be worth taking a different view of universalism than one that views it merely as a discredited idea designed to legitimize imperialism and the interests of the elite, or as synonymous with the mistaken Enlightenment faith in reason. We might instead attempt to recover a sense of what music’s capacity for world-making might have looked like in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century without retroactively discovering the seeds of a later political nationalism in these views, and without holding it up as an empirical tool for analysis of social or musical identities (Chander 2009; Lazarus 1995; Zerilli 1998).
While “Enlightenment universalism” is associated with a belief in universal human nature, “Romantic universalism” might be better understood by reference to the concept of “universalizability”—the belief in the potential for formulating universalizable principles that can inform ethical action (Chander 2009). The basis for this universalizability was not rational capacity, as it had been in the eighteenth century, but, rather, the capacity for aesthetic judgment—judgment being an inherently social exercise. Put simply, the idea is that even though two people may argue about a topic that involves matters of taste, their argument is itself predicated on the notion that judgment is possible. Perpetual antagonism takes place within a framework of possible consensus, creating the conditions for culture, just as political disagreements that occur within a shared democratic framework create the conditions for democracy. This conceptualization of the universal sees it as a performative process in that it creates rather than simply describes a preexistent entity. In extrapolating this type of conception in the context of “world literature”, Pheng Cheah recalled Erich Auerbach’s commitment to the humanist ethos that informed the notion of Weltliteratur, noting how:
Humanity … was not something naturally given, but a telos to be achieved through intercourse across the existential plurality and diversity of human traditions and cultures whose individuality must be maintained and whose unique historical development must be respected. (Cheah 2014, 305)
This normative reading of the idea of the “world” is in a sense closer to the Lockean notion of civil society than to the ethnic nationalisms of the later nineteenth century. The intellectual bases for the notion of “national character” and ethnic nationalisms more generally are often traced to the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whose ideas about the origins of language and culture seemed to imply that individuals were naturally coopted into communal belonging without the possibility of rational choice.1 Yet as we shall see, Herder viewed his activity of collecting and anthologizing folk song as part of a process of instantiating—rather than merely documenting—a “world music,” albeit one constituted by discrete cultures. We will also see that this process of world-making involved adding a temporal dimension to global space, drawing geographically distant cultures into a single historical narrative of the “human spirit.”2 Like Herder’s folk-song collecting, the activity of writing “universal history” through the act of comparison aimed not only at describing but also at creating humanity, and in this sense was both backward- and forward-looking.
The idea of music played a role in the causal view of these activities in the sense that it was thought to exemplify collective subjectivity. With communal feeling being the basis for the political legitimacy of popular sovereignty, the question of who could participate in self-rule became one of, ultimately, who could sing the songs of the people as a demonstration of an “authentic” connection to a culture’s past and future.
In considering constructions of the “world” with respect to music in the nineteenth century, it will be significant to first compare the notion of world music to that of world literature. In contemporary terms, “world literature” refers to a field of academic study that focuses on literature in translation. It is generally held to be different from “comparative literature,” which studies the literatures of cultures other than one’s own, usually in the vernacular. The study of world literature is based on the insight that translation allows a work to enter an international market of exchange and circulation in a way that affects its value and meaning, allowing it to perform a specific cultural function that has broad-reaching implications. Indeed, in his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin suggested that the very activity of translation is a necessary prerequisite for a text to be a part of “world literature.” Equally, it is well established that historicism was shaped by the encounters with otherness through nineteenth-century traveling culture, and that musical travelogues such as those of Charles Burney and many others who followed him shaped the conception of music’s historical development (Agnew 2008). It was the act of seeing one’s own culture through the eyes of another that led to a productive relativizing impulse. The presence of translation and of global circulation are the only sufficient conditions for world literature. In its strongest form, world literature is a normative concept that was part of a humanistic project closely related to cosmopolitanism that is both self-critical—with roots in philology and interrogating language and texts—and self-creating, involving an aspiration to pursuing knowledge about the human condition.
The idea of world literature is customarily traced to Goethe’s invocation of Weltliteratur on a number of occasions between 1827 and his death in 1832 (although the term it was used by others before him). While in using the term Goethe did refer to the material matter of circulation—namely the way in which contemporary political circumstances, such as the period of restoration after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, allowed for the circulation of periodicals within Europe on a new level—this was not the main feature of his idea of Weltliteratur, and the current discipline’s focus on global circulation and economic factors as a function of its literature’s “world”-ness reflects more closely perhaps Marx’s use of the term, rather than Goethe’s initial conception (D’haen 2012).
Goethe was also certainly referring to a moment of translation in his initial use of the term—namely the translation of one of his plays into French—but he used this as a moment to show how intellectual exchange via aesthetic media such as literature could sustain a “world” of ideas beyond commercial and state imperatives, with the German language’s ease of translation and the non-unified political status of the German states allowing it to serve as a mediating or supposedly “neutral” ground. As Isaiah Berlin had noted of Herder’s “linguistic patriotism,” claims for the special nature of the German language had in fact been a “traditional German attitude” since the seventeenth century, initiated by Martin Opitz and then taken up by post-Reformation thinkers who derided Latin and French (Berlin 1976, 151).
The development of universal humanistic ideas in German literary culture more generally during this period may be construed as a response to the historical idealization of small self-governing communities in the German principalities and states, and the interest among the German middle class in global structures (or at least, the idea of Europe) in the absence of a unified national consciousness. The nonpolitical focus of the Bildungsburgertum, and their interest in nurturing aesthetic sensibility, was in turn a response to the revolutionary pitfalls of French politics (which particularly influenced Schiller’s ideas on “aesthetic education”). What they developed was a vision of universal civil society based on a common aesthetic sense—a sense which today seems so narrowly bourgeois in its remit and scope, after Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s critique of German idealism in The German Ideology (written c.1846; published 1932) and in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–44).
Goethe aimed to refashion in literature the tradition of international intellectual exchange through letter writing between European thinkers before the French Revolution—the “republic of letters.” His concept therefore did not encompass all literature in translation—not all literature circulating in a “world” system—but, rather, a type of literature that was able to survive being decontextualized, and which by virtue of its aesthetic makeup, remained outside the commercial realm, even as it was subject to commodification or state power. The aesthetic world embodied in Weltliteratur lay apart from the “globe” as a spatial concept—it was rather a temporal and historical concept that saw the “world” as the ongoing actualization of universal humanity. It was a process of becoming, rather than of building, canons of European master works, as it would later become in the world of Matthew Arnold, who in 1848 translated the term (from the French) into “comparative literature.” The concept sought to pursue the understanding of difference as an expression of universal human values—and by the very process draw difference within a common realm of understanding—and to actualize universal humanity; it was therefore a project related more to cosmopolitanism than to globalization. This notion places a great deal of faith on the practices of the reader and his or her capacity for imagination and action, and there were similar functions attributed to listeners in the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to the symphony.
At first glance, there seems to have been no direct equivalent musical concept to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, despite other examples such as Jacob Burckhardt’s and Schiller’s use of the term Weltgeschichte or the term Weltanschaung (Gur 2012). The comparable term Weltmusik referred to something quite different from Weltliteratur, and although the term was used by writers of universal histories in the nineteenth century such as Franz Brendel and then later by Berendt (related to jazz), it was used in a different sense; in any case, the term is now more often associated with the interest among the European musical avant-garde—particularly from the late 1960s to the early ’80s—in integrating non-Western music into their own, mediated by technology in a way that makes a claim about an emerging “global culture,” such as in Stockhausen’s use of the term in Telemusk (1966) (Heile 2009).
The English term “world music” also has a rather different linage, of course. The term entered English usage in the 1960s, and although it was a reasonably accepted term for the study of non-Western musical practices, or of the “local music of others” for some time, its commercial and pedagogical applications gradually came to be seen as having the effect of ghettoizing and stereotyping the music, which served to ingrain its otherness and subservience to the Western music canon, rather than to promote cross-cultural understanding.
Nevertheless, the type of normative concept of “world” that Goethe invoked for literature is not entirely divorced from the idea of world music. The roots of the construction “world music” have been variously attributed to the turn of the twentieth century, when Western musical styles received along colonial lines began to be reformatted by local actors for “cosmopolitan” ends (Magaldi 2009), or earlier to the late eighteenth-century activities of Herder, whose invention of the idea of “folk song” in a historical sense—a moment that Philip Bolhman has called the “global moment of world music history”—also laid the foundations for musical nationalism (Bohlman 2013). Herder’s “world” was one inhabited by a historically and musically constituted Volk.
There are two elements to note about this aspect of the “world” in Weltliteratur and universal history. First, it relied on a philosophical understanding of history that was explicitly Hegelian and future oriented. And second, it relied on a conceptualization of cultural difference that positioned it along a historical continuum of development, reminding us that this period’s historical consciousness proceeded in part from a greater mobility and exposure to other cultures. In other words, the activity of comparison informed the historical enterprise, and reflected the desire to collect and assemble all the features of humanity into a single universal narrative.
Goethe’s original notion of Weltliteratur proceeded from a moment of travel (namely his trip to Italy), and therefore of comparison and translation. Similarly, in 1772, Charles Burney traveled to the German states to document musical activities as part of his research into what he conceived as a universal history of music (he had traveled to France and Italy in 1770, which were more conventional stops within the practices of the Grand Tour). Burney’s trip came at a moment when French and Italian opera enjoyed the highest level of prestige, and in relation to which the German music to which he was witness appeared provincial and limited. The rise in value enjoyed by German instrumental music in the nineteenth century was supported by a shift in the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, moving broadly from a utilitarian view of music as something that could shape character (closer to Burney’s view) to the view that music embodied a universal essence, beyond the limits of language and representation.
The idealization of instrumental music latently served the interests of the German-speaking lands and is generally conceived as part of a bid for cultural dominance. Yet the shift in aesthetics that facilitated this dominance was substantially shaped by cross-cultural musical encounters occasioned by travels such as those of Burney. The Enlightenment’s rationalist belief in music’s power to sway the passions was both a promise and a caution in accordance with the interest of Enlightenment culture in Classical antiquity. The mythical story of Orpheus and his music’s power over animals and plants came to thematize music’s constitutive potential in late Enlightenment thought in a way that aligned it with the “worlding” character of Goethe’s Weltliteratur, offering a vision of the aesthetic as facilitating bonds between groups that are otherwise different, through communal aesthetic experience rather than through communal origins.3
Despite the paradigmatic shift that was marked by increasing German cultural dominance in the early nineteenth century (and ultimately the unification of the German-speaking lands), which brought with it a tradition of German philosophy that was to have a decisive sway on music history, the Enlightenment idea of the utilitarian purpose of music, and the intellectual culture that had nurtured it, continued to persist alongside. So, while the tendency of German culture to present itself as universal or neutral or as a mediator between cultures became by the end of the nineteenth century merely a means of securing an ethnically inflected cultural dominance, at the turn of the nineteenth century this image of Germanness and the powerful aesthetics associated with it were aimed more directly against French and Italian cultural and political authority. Universalizing claims in early Romantic German aesthetics in this way proceeded from a desire to project a unified image against the threat of neighboring powers. As Mark Evans Bonds has noted, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was only one step in a process that had begun earlier of politicizing practices of listening to instrumental music via philosophical work. Robert Schumann claimed that Beethoven’s symphonies proved that “a German has spiritually re-won the battles that Napoleon took from him”; and Gottfried Wilhelm Fink in 1835 fought back against a Frenchman who claimed that Gossec had originated the modern symphony by claiming that mantle for Franz Josef Hayden (Bonds 2006, 90). These maneuvers should all be viewed within the context of a post-Revolutionary milieu—the Napoleonic wars (1803–15) and later the Franco-Prussian war (1870–71) were key events in the ferment of nationalistic ideas, but also in the consolidation of “Romantic universalism,” or the universal conceived as a process of worlding, described earlier. The post-revolutionary milieu of the early 1800s was also, after all, the period in which Goethe wrote of the importance of his humanistic concept of Weltliteratur.
Another way in which discourses on the universal and the national cohabited via the idea of “world” in music was in the disciplinary link between comparative and historical work. Studies of “musical nationalism,” or the practice of writing music history in national groupings that is still common today, obscures the earlier indebtedness of music historiography to the genre of the musical travelogue, and the way in which the encounter with the music of others facilitated knowledge of music taut court. Indeed, the prestige attributed to travel in the Enlightenment reflected not only the traveler’s material privilege but also the liberal humanist idea that moral action proceeded from a concern with how others view us, replacing the eye of God in a secularized world (Agnew 2008, 28–29).
This point about how it was the encounter with others that shaped music historiography in the late eighteenth century has also been made of the longer nineteenth-century context by Philip Bohlman (1987). Empirical studies of the music of “non-Western” cultures (as in the work of Guillaume Villoteau and Edward William Lane in Egypt) informed later philological work, shaping a notion of music history as a science (as in the work of Raphael Georg Kiesewetter and then later his nephew August Wilhelm Ambros, and later still Forkel and François-Joseph Fétis). Western examinations of Islamic culture, which was seen as having its origins in Greek civilization, were for some scholars viewed as historical examinations of the origins of European civilization. It was of interest in “evolutionary” terms, which is why it seemed to be perversely justified to acquire (sometimes by illegitimate means) artifacts for display in Britain. Imperial activities were thereby construed as acts of recovering one’s own past. This idea was bolstered by Hegel’s conception of history as flowing from East to West, from Asia to Europe, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837). Universal history conceived in this way did not devalue non-Western musics for being “primitive” but, rather, saw them as retaining a natural simplicity that reflected a prehistory to modern complexity, according to the “natural” laws of human development. Still, Forkel and Fétis were less inclined to co-opt non-Western music within a single tradition narrative, the latter now more associated with “comparative musicology” rather than universal history (Bohlman 1987).
While the traveler’s enlightened humanism and universalism alike were integrated into national agendas and played their parts in consolidating national imaginaries both of selves and others as the century wore on, their initiating impulse should not be forgotten. Indeed, this impulse was particularly important for Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, given divisions not only between its various states and principalities but also religiously between North and South, and musically between the practices of different courts, as revealed in Burney’s account.
Herder’s ideas have been inextricably tied to the notion of cultural nationalism. His contribution to the notion lies in his view that each culture has its own particular character, and that customs, language, art, and religious traditions are fostered in local context as expressions of collective life, rather than as a part of the kind of universal historical narrative of progressive development described here. Yet his work has also been used to support other more narrow agendas. For example, Herder is sometimes associated with the view that cultures are closed systems of authentically associated peoples, linked by language and soil and legitimately wary of foreign influence; and with the view that moral codes are relative to their cultural origin and cannot be judged against any universal criteria, or in relation to the moral principles of other cultures. In effect, Herder’s ideas have been used to naturalize sometimes quite arbitrary (culturally speaking) national boundaries, to argue for moral relativism and against the idea of human nature, and to support organicist rhetoric that came to be associated with aggressive forms of cultural and political nationalism that relied on ideas about authenticity in rejection of foreign influence.
Carl Dahlhaus went so far as to construe nationalism as virtually synonymous with Herder’s conflation of “folk” and “nation,” whereby the “spirit of the people” (der Volksgeist) serves to actualize a form of political identity (Dahlhaus 1980, 81). Dahlhaus distinguishes between an earlier manifestation of this idea (whereby national identity was coextensive with a broader cosmopolitan ethos) and the post-1848 move to more exclusive, aggressive nationalisms that actively defended their own cultures as superior. Yet he goes even further than conceiving Herder’s “Volksgeist hypothesis” as involving a description of national traits in folk song, arguing that composers in fact responded to Herder’s idea that there was such a thing as a collective creative spirit that was manifest in music by actively incorporating local color into their music as a conscious attempt to be a mouthpiece for that collective spirit. In other words, according to Dahlhaus’s reading, Herder invented musical nationalism—not only the concept but the phenomenon itself. Dahlhaus attributed a strong level of causality to the intellectual construct, arguing that the idea that the collective spirit of the people found expression in musical material itself effected a change in compositional practice, just as historicism had a performative effect beyond merely describing empirical features of past works—it served a normative or “worlding” function of the type that Brendel, after Schiller, embraced with respect to universal history, as we have seen. Part of Dahlhaus’s agenda in his 1980 reading of Herder was to debunk the idea that folk music was in any way an expression of an authentic collective spirit in the manner claimed in studies of musical nationalism, and to see it, rather, as a construction that served a bourgeois sensibility.
Similarly, Jim Sampson has ascribed to Herder (together with Fichte) the transformation of Enlightenment principles to support the purposes of a type of cultural nationalism that relied on ethnic commonality in particular (as opposed to cultural nationalisms that proceed from an idea of a rational individual that was usually associated with the West) (Samson 2001). In this reading, Herder’s work can be seen as part of an ongoing process of discerning a basis for popular sovereignty that took place before the political authority of the nation-state was consolidated. Taruskin also points to Herder’s essay Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1772) as positioned against Enlightenment universalism’s idea of human nature, forwarding the notion that language was developed within communities and acquired meaning within them (as with folk song). Taruskin sees the implication of this point for Romantics being a concept of authenticity predicated on the idea that one must work to express the collective spirit of the people (Taruskin 2001).
It is true that Herder’s work sometimes makes for uncomfortable reading from a twenty-first-century perspective, both with the knowledge of the types of violence and state-sponsored tactics of oppression that have been used in the name of nationalism and in view of divisive and aggressive behavior on the part of some nations today that speak to a resurgent period of nationalisms. In the preface to Herder’s Alte Volkslieder (Ancient Folk Songs, 1774), he begins to construe the polity as itself being constituted by a commitment to a collective aesthetic heritage. He castigates those who are not interested in collecting songs as being “incapable of sensing value in the body of the nation” and of merely “aping the foreignness or … mimicking the cheap tinsel of the superficial”: “They are, thus, the offshoot of the foreign and a leaf that blows in the wind, in other words, a virtuoso of the latest trends for all times! A thinker!” (Herder and Bohlman 2017, 29–30; emphasis in original). The leaf blowing in the wind contrasts with the roots-in-the-soil imagery that became central to the convergence of national rhetoric and the Romantic language of organicism as the nineteenth century progressed.
Herder congratulates the English for their interest in their own songs from the past, which he saw as reflecting a unity of national feeling (embodied in the work of Shakespeare), in contrast to the poverty of similar commitments in the German context. This sentiment is striking, given the drastic redistribution of cultural dominance in the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to music. It is important to recall this strikingness because it reminds us that Herder’s impassioned advocacy for collecting was responding to what he perceived as an uprootedness and overly academic and trivializing, transitory cosmopolitanism—a cosmopolitanism that he believed did not foster an awareness of history. His wording was extremely urgent, casting “shame” on the Germans for not collecting sooner and of being “on the very edge of the precipice: in another hundred years it will be too late!” (31). Drawing from a notion of the German as a mediator (as per Goethe), or what later became German as a consolidator (as per Wagner) of other traditions, Herder wrote of Germany’s “tragic or happy fate” as the “Mother and servant to foreign nations,” at once their “law giver” and their “bleeding slave and exhausted wet nurse” (31). Herder writes of the need to consider the history of the German lands as emerging instead from a “single root,” in order to purge the “cancer” of “so-called culture” (32–33). For Herder, the German educated class’s disinterest in folk song—the form that he viewed as the very embodiment of the living history of a people—was not only a political and aesthetic issue but also a moral one:
[F]or a half century we have been embarrassed about everything that belongs to the fatherland; we dance French minuets unacceptably as German, and since the earliest times we sing the most obscene and crudest love songs, about whose crude and throwaway speech, narrative, and ballad tones nothing was known in earlier times.
(33)
The form of grounding that the organic metaphor offered Herder in his lament about foreign influence and lack of cultural centeredness fed into his advocacy of the senses over abstraction and of the material. He described the “soul of the folk” as “seeing and hearing, not thinking and pondering” (34). This was essentially a critique of Enlightenment rationalism, a critique of culture and ideas about civilization. The story of civilization was for Herder then a story of becoming silent, of losing the sense in which one’s identity—encompassing a collective spirituality, law, science, and myth—was bound to song: “All nations that have yet to be organized around political systems are a singing people” (36). The world was constituted through singing—an actualization of a continuing history. Brothers Shlegel and Grimm were also bound up in this revival of folk tales to foster the perception of a shared German heritage as a living and continuing tradition that forms the polity—the national consciousness—which is at once a communal and historical consciousness.
Despite the urgency with which Herder encouraged the German-speaking peoples to partake of their own shared history, his folk-song collecting was also aimed at discouraging an overinflated sense of one’s own traditions, noting an underlying commonality in folk productions, in that as art they all originated as an imitation of nature, taking on different forms according to their context. Nature provided the common model for the emergence of different peoples, and in order to appreciate this Herder advocated dispassionate collecting and anthologizing, “finding a path untouched by the national, which would lead to powerful medicines for healing and prevention” (39). Herder’s implication here, put crudely, is that we should aim to imitate nature (that is, the collective spirit) rather than imitate others who imitate nature, at one step removed. There is an element of anti-intellectualism here of the type that rings a dangerous note in our own time, though Herder’s radicalism was prompted by quite different political sensitivities.
Against the conventional view of Herder as an uncompromising cultural relativist, a number of scholars are redescribing the extent to which he was committed to certain aspects of Enlightenment universalism. For example, Sonia Sikka refers to Herder as a “qualified relativist” or “Enlightened relativist,” highlighting how his emphasis on the formative role of local culture in shaping the human subject must be seen alongside his belief in a common human nature (Sikka 2011). Sikka argues that the tendency to overlook Herder’s commitment to Enlightenment universalism is based both on his association with culturalism that continued to develop from his work, and the fact that his name is often invoked without knowledge of his substantive writings.4 She notes particularly how Herder’s notion of cultural identity is often misleadingly presented by those who wish to argue that identity is purely constructed:
For Herder, cultures are the product of Bildung, of processes of education and cultivation involving the active exercise of specifically human, reflective faculties. Individuals become members of cultures by participating in these processes, which they begin to do as soon as they are born into a human society. (7)
While Herder clearly did not consider membership of one’s own culture voluntary, his concern was with understanding how we become human in different ways that are determined by our local context. Herder’s strong theory of social identity (i.e., the belief that you are enculturated whether you approve of your origins or not) was used to rationalize actions against the supposed threat of “internal foreigners” or assimilated Jews later in the century, yet his initial formulation was more complex than constructivist and anti-essentialist critiques allow.
Like Goethe’s trip to Italy, and Burney’s trip to German-speaking lands, it was a moment of travel that crystallized Herder’s anthropological agenda—namely, his sea journey across the Baltic and North Seas to the West in 1769. Herder wrote in his journal from the journey that:
For this purpose I wish to collect data about the history of every historical moment, each evoking a picture of its own use, function, customs, burdens and pleasures. Accordingly I shall assemble everything I can, leading up to the present day, in order to put it to good use.
(Herder [1769] 1976, in Herder and Bohlman 2017, 5 and 266)
In other words, Herder aimed to be both ethnographic and historical, charting a map of all things that was both horizontal, across all cultures of our time, and vertical, across all cultures from all times. Isaiah Berlin pointed to Herder’s theological background as a Lutheran preacher as informing his approach in this respect. Berlin argued that Herder held to the universalizing tendency of Christianity, in opposition to the commitment to Fatherland and “Republic” of the ancient Greeks, believing that “all large wars are essentially civil wars, since men are brothers, and wars are a form of abominable fratricide” (Berlin 1976, 157–158). Nevertheless, as Berlin further emphasized, Herder was opposed to imperialism, state centralization, and state self-interest or aggression. He believed that these forces annihilate cultural difference, and it was difference, and differentiation, that fascinated him.
Herder’s training as a theologian and significant contributor to theological scholarship (particularly his aesthetic approach to religion) should not be considered separate from his work on folk song, and indeed from music and nationalism more generally but, rather, as a part of a linked project. These factors speak to the universalizing aspect of his agenda, which Bohlman described as “Herdian Humanism” (Herder and Bohlman 2017, 16). According to Herder:
If you seek only religion in biblical times, as well as seeking virtue, lessons, and bliss as we understand them to be, then you will preach only the virtues of your own age! Oh, how much must I do, that I become able to seek in such ways! How much have I achieved, however, should I seek in this way!—What a marvelous theme it would be to show how one can be what one should be, neither Jew nor Arab, neither Greek nor uncivilized, neither martyr nor pilgrim. Rather, one can be the enlightened, lettered, noble, rational, educated, virtuous and pleasure-loving human being that God has led to the steps of our culture. (Herder and Bohlman 2017, 8)
For Herder, universalism or the notion of “humanity” was not simply to be rejected in the face of evidence of radical cultural difference. Rather, it was “performative principle” (Barnard 2003, 77) achieved through practices such as anthologizing and comparative and historical study, and indeed in the very invention of the “folk music” as a “world” phenomenon.
Herder’s idea of collective self-becoming through language and myth (embodied in folk song) was in essence an ontological claim about the existence of the “nation.” The nation was not merely a collection of institutions aimed at enforcing the social contract, as the “state” was for Locke and Kant. Herder’s claim about the origins of language meant that nationality was not something that was entered into voluntarily, as we have seen, nor was it a result of social organization based purely on mutual sympathy, shared interests, and values. Rather, the nation was synonymous with a kind of communal will, and it had a meaning and binding force that preexisted public recognition of it by virtue of the fact that thought was rooted in language and language was by nature communal. The ethnic necessity of Herder’s conception stood in contrast with the view of the nation from within a number of traditions of philosophical liberalism—namely the nation as a collective of individuals coming together in order to protect themselves from external sources of coercion and secure their property rights, as a corollary to the ideas of individual self-determination and autonomy based in natural jurisprudence. For writers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Smith, social relations were rationalized not on the tradition of social contract but on commercial transactions—transactions that reach beyond close-knit groups and which promote a cosmopolitan ethic.
Herder’s claims about the nation as a shared will of the people reflected his inurement in Romantic aesthetics, which made his philological work into a critique of the universal rationalism that was proceeded essentially from an aesthetic basis. His ideas about language saw all thought as being a matter of expression and emotional feeling rather than as a rational discovery of natural law. As Paul Kelly has noted, this aesthetic premise was ultimately combined with ideas from philosophical liberalism in the course of the transformation of Herder’s work into the very crucible of nationalist claims. This combination can be seen in the rhetoric of political agitators across Europe and Britain, such as Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894), Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), and Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), forging an alliance between nationalism and a burgeoning political liberalism in the nineteenth century (Kelly 2015).
John Stuart Mill was a part of these positive claims for the nation, though unlike Herder he viewed the nation in terms of a history of shared political institutions and traditions—an idea that acknowledged that we tend to cooperate more with some people over others, and that discussions of shared aspirations and a shared history produce a kind of mutual emotional commitment. Mill described this idea within a treatment of the proper constitution of noninterventionist representative government in his 1861 text “On Considerations on Representative Government.” There he notes how “a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality” if they possess a “community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” While Herder’s cultural relativism saw no ingrained hierarchy between cultures, for Mill not all nations were equal, and he believed that some cultures would benefit from being absorbed into other nations that were less “backward.” Mill worked for the East India Company for a period, and he acknowledged that ultimately any cultural majority would call for self-determination. Nevertheless he maintained a surprising conviction that Britain had a moral responsibility to spread what he viewed as its civilizing benefits:
When proper allowance has been made for geographical exigencies, another more purely moral and social consideration offers itself. Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another; and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race, the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection and the dignity and prestige of French power—than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolting in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation. (Mill [1861] 1977, 314)
Mill believed that a communal sense of national aspiration—and thereby the good function of representative government—is put under pressure by the presence of multiple language-groups because self-government was based on the possibility of achieving consensus in public opinion. Yet Mill’s discussion of nations employs the language of “sympathies in common” and “communit[ies] of interest,” so that while “nationality” does actually exist for Mill—in the sense of being a political expression of sympathies, against others to whom one is less sympathetic—he diverges from Herder’s insistence on shared language traditions.
Mill’s use of terms associated less with reason and more with feeling—sympathy, aspiration, recollection, humiliation—demonstrates a remnant of an earlier strain of his thought that David Russell has called “aesthetic liberalism.” As Russell points out, even as late as On Liberty (1859), Mill remained concerned not only with questions about the basis of state intervention or the free market but also with ideas about self-development and ways of safeguarding individual creativity and freedom of “inclination” (Russell 2018, 47). Mill’s ideas in this area were not simply designed to support eccentricity or intuitionism, but they did support lifestyle experimentation as long as these forms of experimentation could be justified and subjected to public debate. Mill’s concern here was how to ensure that individuals were free to foster within themselves ideas and modes of living that diverged from the prejudices of social convention, and when these modes of living are submitted to public debate they result in social progress. In order to achieve this freedom, the individual must cultivate a “liberal” temperament, involving a combination of character, rational thought, and emotional conviction. As I have noted elsewhere, the requirement that these individual forms of expression needed to be rationalized in a public forum and submitted to debate curtailed the type of expression that could be practiced, because not all forms of life can be reduced to rational justification (Collins, 2019). Nevertheless it is important here to recover the basis of Mill’s liberal ideas in aesthetics—a basis that is not often acknowledged in the history of liberalism, and which has a bearing on how we view Mill’s support of the “nation” as a political institution in his later works.
At the heart of Mill’s thinking on aesthetics in his essays from the 1830s—including “On Genius” (1832), “What Is Poetry” (1833), “Two Kinds of Poetry” (1833), and “The Writings of Alfred de Vigny” (1838)—is the idea that although there should be public debate, there are limitations to debate that relies solely on propositional logic and dogmatic assertion. Instead, Mill emphasizes the qualities of poetry as a form of expression that does not seek to persuade or coerce or even necessarily to communicate or contribute to reaching consensus but, rather, is simply evidence of a process of individual reflection. Poetic forms of expression invite others to engage in a similar process, even if to dissimilar ends. The idea here is that the poet (and latently the essayist) enables the type of vivid sociality that is best constitutive of a liberal society not moribund in social convention and prejudice.
While this idea is contrary to Mill’s later emphasis on clarity, reason, and public consensus, in the 1830s Mill argued that social relations were defined by sympathetic interaction rather than propositional debate. This is distinct from Herder’s notion of sympathy that requires the traveler to adopt the worldview of others in order to fully understand the basis of their difference, without ever being assimilated into it. Mill’s sympathy in his 1830 essays on poetry is more about a shared process of self-development as constitutive of social relations—there is no content to be conveyed in poetry, no knowledge to be entered into, and no consensus to be reached.
Although Mill’s essays that exhibited a brief moment of primacy of the aesthetic in his thinking of the 1830s are about poetry, he had a profound personal relationship with music that has been shown to have had a formative influence on his broader thinking. Kate Bowan has described how music, and the personality of one musician in particular, shaped a change in thinking for a group of radical liberal intellectuals with whom Mill associated during the 1830s who gathered at the Unitarian South Place Chapel, including its preacher William Johnson Fox (1786–1864) and the composer Eliza Flower (1803–1846), as well as Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) and Harriet Taylor (1807–1858) (with whom Mill had an intimate relationship and who was an important influence upon his work) (Bowan, 2019).
Admired by Felix Mendelssohn and lauded as an ethereal genius by South Place Chapel congregation, composer Eliza Flower is depicted as a female aesthete possessed of a singular temperament and creative originality. Exemplifying the link between imagination and individualism, she embodied just the type of agency that Mill was keen to secure in his political writings. Mill wrote a range of reviews of Flower’s music between 1831 and 1833 in the Examiner at the same time as he was writing his essays on poetry that reflect his “aesthetic liberalism.” As Bowan shows, Mill’s reviews emphasize Flower’s originality and lack of imitation, shaping Mill’s concept of poetic expression as not merely the conversion of concepts into poetic language but also the outward manifestation of a poetic way of knowing—exemplifying a “poet of nature” rather than a “poet of culture.” Flower became, for Mill and Taylor and their associates, their exemplary liberal “individual.” Mill was concerned with safeguarding the vitality of the relationship between individual expression and collective consensus—the basis of a legitimate popular sovereignty. His nation of sympathetic individuals was to be secured through universalizable principles of procedure and aesthetics.
Emphasizing the normative nature of perspectives on music that see the idea of “world” as something to be actively constructed allows us to view the ongoing operation of music’s “worlding” characteristics. It presents a way of recognizing difference without the tendency to homogenize, on the one hand, and without unquestioningly conceding to relativism which precludes a common grounding and robust debate, on the other. The point here is that knowledge about ourselves is intimately tied to our knowledge about others, drawing a line of relation that brings us into the same orbit, even while acknowledging that these relations are never fixed.