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beyond providing it with a law-governed environment in which it can
safely pursue its desires, with the sole limiting constraint that the enact-
ing of those desires not result in injury to other individuals.
This conception of the liberal state, Hannah Arendt argues in Lectures
on Kant s Political Philosophy, is precisely what Kant promotes in his
political writings. And indeed Kant re ects this conception when he
describes the ideal state as one   which has not only the greatest freedom
. . . but also the most precise speci cation and preservation of the limits
of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of
others.  In Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that if the political state is
properly set up with safeguards for each individual s freedom then, as
Arendt puts it,   a bad man can be a good citizen in a good state 
(Lectures, ). In these arguments, Kant re ects Mandeville s idea that
private vices result in public virtues. For, as Arendt explains, Kant holds
the idea that nature has a providential design for the progress of the
human species as a whole that is worked out through the unfettered
movements of individuals following their own desires. In his political
writings, Kant does not posit a developmental role for the political state
beyond its allowing nature to work out its secret designs.
But, as Arendt points out, this account of human progress in his
political writings contradicts Kant s account of human morality in his
philosophical works:   In nite Progress is the law of the human species;
at the same time, man s dignity demands that he be seen (every single
one of us) in his particularity and, as such, be seen . . . as re ecting
 Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
mankind in general. In other words, the very idea of progress . . .
contradicts Kant s notion of man s dignity  (Lectures, ). In Kant, the
contradiction is between what each individual is ideally, that is, a
rational being who wills the dictates of the moral law, and what each
individual is in reality, a physically determined creature who is under
the compulsion of nature in his actions. The problem is how to develop
the real into the ideal. Kant does not solve this problem because it is not
clear how nature, which for him is behind human progress, can tran-
scend nature. And furthermore Kant s account of progress focuses on
the species as a whole, not on the individual.
Schiller seeks to nd a way for actually existing human individuals to
progress towards the ideal ethical state described in Kant s moral
philosophy. And it is in this context that Schiller promotes the idea of
the reciprocal development of the individual and the state. For if, as the
Kantian model posits, ideal freedom for the individual consists in
realizing and then conforming to the universal dictates of reason and
ethical behavior, then there is room for development for both the
individual and the state as they actually exist. For according to this idea,
the laissez-faire state of British liberalism is only doing half its job. It is
protecting individuals from being victimized by other individuals, but it
is not providing an environment in which individuals can cultivate
themselves to the point that they can willingly enter into the dictates of
the moral law. Like Raymond Williams de nition of cultivation, Schil-
ler s Bildung is something that happens in the mind of each individual,
but it requires a collective e ort to bring it about.
It is at this point that we can appreciate the meaningful ambiguity of
the term state, as describing both the state of mind of the individual, and
the collective body of the political state. In Schillerian Bildung, the
individual state of mind is cultivated by the collective body, and vice
versa. (This same pattern of the dialectical relationship between individ-
ual and universal is seen in Coleridge s account of the symbol, as we will
discuss in the next chapter.) And it should also be noted that Schiller
uses state in its collective sense in a broader sense than what we now
associate with the term political state. Schiller s ideal of the political state is
not a totalizing one. It is neither like the paternalistic states of the
German kingdoms of his time nor the totalitarian states of ours. His
ideal of the political state is based on the model of the free civic
engagement of individuals in the polis of ancient Greece. But, as we
will discuss in chapter below, Schiller is notoriously vague about the
form this would take in the modern era.
Modernity, subjectivity, liberalism, and nationalism
The ideal of a state that would develop the moral perfection of its
citizens has, of course, a long tradition in western thought, beginning
with Plato s Republic. And while the idea of twin development of individ-
ual and state is not unknown in English thought, there are perhaps
historical reasons why the connection between individual and state
self-development comes more easily to German philosophers at the
beginning of the nineteenth century than to the English. I have de-
scribed the traditional contrast between a politically uni ed Britain and
a politically fragmented Germany in the early nineteenth century. And
while I agree with recent scholarship that has questioned the necessary
consequences of this di erence for the question of nationalism in the two
countries, this di erence does remain relevant to the emphasis one nds
on the development of a rational state in German political philosophy.
For German philosophers, the arbitrary political demarcations of the
German-speaking peoples and corresponding hodgepodge of di ering
political constitutions and legal practices could not help but stand in
contrast with their ideals of a rational political state. Furthermore, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]