Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.329)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Christopher Jomans, professor of philosophy and literature and head of the department of philosophy at Purdue University. And we're here to talk about his book, The Politics of German Idealism. Dr. Jomans, wonderful to have you on today.
Chris Yeomans (00:19.66)
Yeah, thanks PJ for having me.
PJ Wehry (00:22.273)
Dr. Yeomans, just to start things off, why this book?
Chris Yeomans (00:25.87)
Chris, please, and why this book? Not on purpose. I just had a simple question I wanted to answer, which was I just wanted to see whether Hegel was right about what he calls the estate structure in his philosophy of right. And the estate structure, the German term is Stand for estate.
It's a name for a social grouping. It's different from class. The traditional German estates were what they called the Lehrwehr in Nierstanda, the learned, the fighting, and the nutritive estates. And so that's the clergy and the nobility and the peasantry. But Hegel is using it as a sociology to structure a constitutional monarchy built for the 19th century. And there wasn't great secondary literature on it.
naive me of 10 years ago thought, oh, there's going be a simple answer to this. I'll just go meet some German historians and I'll figure out what the truth of the matter is. And I'll bring that back to Hegel. And that was a rabbit hole that I fairly quickly fell down. And it took me a long time to orient myself, much longer than I think it should. But it was a
PJ Wehry (01:29.039)
Yeah
Chris Yeomans (01:48.174)
a heck of a journey. did, Purdue used to have this great program called the Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline. And they gave you this stay at home sabbatical. Go to another discipline. And so I just went and took history department classes and talked to the modern European historians there for a year. And so I sort of worked out from there.
PJ Wehry (01:58.607)
Mmm.
Chris Yeomans (02:11.96)
to piece together the kind of historicism that I needed to make sense of what was going on. And maybe the key step is to realize the estates aren't just like a given social description. They're a category in which Germans were interpreting the social changes at the time. So there's essentially no right answer in a certain sense.
to what the estates are, but there's a fascinating conversation about how to understand the social structure of society and how that relates to political organization. And once I started to see that, and I started to get my bearings in the way that modern European historians talk about this split between the state and society in the 18th century.
And that as that is happening, you're getting a split between two different kinds of society, a more traditional, largely agricultural and guild society that in German is called the Ständer Gesellschaft and this modern civil society where you have production for the market and coffee houses and all that good enlightenment stuff, right? The Bergerliche Gesellschaft, the civil society. And once I started to get that to make sense of Hegel,
I was still teaching Kant and Fichte and their political philosophies and I started to see things that were going on there. And that led me to this view about Kant on provisionality. So anyway, the long and the short of it is I had a super simple question that was not at all simple. It snowballed over the better part of a decade into this sort of journey to try and figure this stuff out and to try and put the history together with the philosophy and see if they could inform
PJ Wehry (03:47.758)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (04:05.294)
Awesome. Great answer. It does feel a little tongue in cheek to say any question about Hegel is simple, but I appreciate it. appreciate it. It's like, was Hegel right? You like you actually paused there. I was like, I don't think asking if Hegel was right is a simple question. But all right. I'm just trying to piece this together in my head. When you talk about the three estates in the German side of things, is there
Chris Yeomans (04:12.526)
You're right. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Is this a laugh line or what's going on here? Right.
Chris Yeomans (04:33.442)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (04:35.694)
And if I follow the categories you mentioned, they're slightly different. But is there some kind of correlation between that and like the three estates that made up the French Revolution?
Chris Yeomans (04:40.504)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (04:45.462)
Yes, and there's a relation between the estates that Hegel finally comes to. And there's this question in Germany, maybe the best way to talk about the relation between the French and German estates is to talk about the question, what is the third estate? Right, which is so important for the French Revolution. And I take that, at least as the Germans understand that, to be the question, what is an estate?
that doesn't have traditional privileges and prerogatives, right? And how do we figure out how they fit into society? Because you actually have to develop a different model of society in order to do that. You have to develop this model of civil society to understand how you have these people who are in, on the one hand, you want to say they're stripped of social status.
because they don't have these privileges and prerogatives, right? On the other hand, they've been given this very odd new social status. They're an individual bearer of rights who can contract with other people and own pieces of property and so on. And that socially is its own kind of status. And so thinking through that, you had this whole like the clergy, the nobility, the pedantry, everybody's got, well, in local cases at any rate, everybody's got fairly clear rights and responsibilities and, you know, rights even
I'm not going to make an argument for the validity of serfdom or anything, but the peasantry had the right to be supported in times of crop loss by their manorial lords, which is something that, of course, the poor and civil society lose entirely until you get to the welfare state much later. But the traditional society was this kind of rich tissue.
of responsibilities and prerogatives that was sort of deeply personal and very variable and local. And the state as it starts to, particularly the German states under the pressure of Napoleon, so this is another connection with the French, under the pressure of fighting back the French and then once they lose to the French, paying war reparations to the French,
Chris Yeomans (07:02.026)
engage in this huge, and it starts earlier in the 18th century, this huge state building, right? And once you do that, you're really trying to do things to traditional society that'll improve economic development. And so you start to introduce more markets and you start to build civil society in that way. So there's an important sense in which the state is very active in changing this estate structure.
And Hegel is trying to track that in part sometimes under the influence of the French Revolution and what was going on there. think, and so over the course of his career, he sees more and more clearly that the thing that's definitional of an estate is the kind of work that is being done.
And so he starts to group together in the agricultural estate, the nobility and the peasantry. Because they're both essentially involved in agricultural production, which is seasonal, which does has some relation to the market, but only really at the margins in which planning for the next year is about the extent of long-term planning.
PJ Wehry (07:56.056)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (08:20.736)
And that that's quite different from salaried civil servants such as myself and doctors and lawyers and priests and Lutheran pastors and so on. And it's very different from people who produce things for the market and who are exposed to much more uncertainty, but there's also much more upside, right? In terms of potential profits and growth and so on.
And so he more and more starts to see, yeah, that's what's going on. And there's going to be class differences inside those, but there's going to be some common forms of work. So class differences inside those I just mentioned, right? We already talked about the nobility and the peasantry, but within the commercial estate, you're going to have entrepreneurs and owners and managers and workers, right? And you could talk about those as being different classes. And Hegel does use the term. He's familiar with the term.
But the main thing is that these are sort of forms of life with their own distinctive set of possibilities and dangers, with their own distinctive sense of what counts as success. Sometimes Hegel flirts with the thought with their own distinctive kind of morality and their own distinctive ways of holding people morally responsible.
PJ Wehry (09:35.981)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (09:42.558)
And that pushes the kind of social pluralism very, very deep, right? Not just into political forms, but into moral forms and forms of personal relationship.
PJ Wehry (09:55.855)
So, if I'm tracking with you, have the agricultural estate, the commercial estate, and the armed estate, which is like the military.
Chris Yeomans (10:00.034)
Mm-hmm.
So Hegel, the third main estate would be the public estate. Yeah, yeah. Now, where exactly to put soldiers is an interesting question. And it's an interesting question in particular because Hegel had
PJ Wehry (10:10.969)
excuse me, probably could stay, okay.
Chris Yeomans (10:31.054)
personal relations with the military in the sense that his illegitimate son was a member of the Dutch Foreign Legion and actually died in Indonesia at the Battle of Jakarta right around the same time that Heckel died. And when you read the discussions that he has of the soldiering estate in the philosophy of right, they're actually quite poignant.
And he talks about this combination in the soldiering estate of on the one hand, the greatest presence of mind in the sense that under extraordinary danger, the soldiering estate is tasked with acting with valor and with clarity and communication and not panicking. And at the same time, a complete absence of mind, like the orders of the orders and you follow the orders, right?
Maybe what's most interesting about the soldiering estate is Hegel's complete difference from other members of the Republican tradition, like Machiavelli and the English Republicans. They all thought of military service as being bound up with citizenship in an important way. And Hegel thinks the two things got nothing to do with each other. And in fact, soldiering is a very distinctive
kind of life that is really not connected to either the economic life of civil society or the independent thinking that's supposed to be involved for a citizen of the state. And so there's a fascinating difference between, and a big part of that, of course, is people like Machiavelli and the Harringtonian English Republicans, right? They thought
The reason you want a citizen army is you want to avoid a standing army, right? The standing army gives the regime too much power. But Hegel just thinks, man, that ship has sailed. And the only way you can defend yourself right now, you have two options, standing army and mercenaries, and even mercenaries you're not really going to be able to find anymore. And so the only question is, is your standing army open to talent?
PJ Wehry (12:25.344)
Right.
Chris Yeomans (12:47.63)
Is your officer corps just composed of the sons of the nobility? Or are they actually good soldiers who have the respect of their troops and so on? And Hegel very much argues for careers open to talent like he does generally throughout the economy.
PJ Wehry (13:06.306)
That was actually going to be my follow-up question was, was that the rise of the professional outstanding army? So that's, yeah, you anticipated that beautifully.
Chris Yeomans (13:13.858)
Yeah, no, absolutely. mean, look, in part because, and this is another thing I'll say, Hegel is in part interested in Machiavelli because he sees the German states as being in a similar position as quattrocento Italian states, namely too weak to defend themselves against foreign aggression. And for a Germany that
still had, I mean, been a while, but the lessons of the 30 years war, right? Relatively fresh in mind. And then the Napoleonic wars, that's a real danger. And Hegel's more worried about the British or the French running things than he is about Prussia having a standing arm.
PJ Wehry (14:08.094)
different places I want to go but I want to make sure I stay on track here yeah so
Chris Yeomans (14:10.488)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (14:17.646)
Let's take a step back and you start the whole introduction with this idea of, and I think this does even tie into what you've been talking about. You're talking about there's a social structure that provided responsibility for all the peasants. And then you have kind of the tearing, if I understand correctly, the tearing of social fabric through urbanization and industrialization. You have a bunch of people who go into cities and they don't have
Chris Yeomans (14:38.615)
Yeah, that's right.
PJ Wehry (14:45.868)
a manorial lord to take care of them, all these sorts of things. So you call this time a Saddlezeit, if I'm pronounced that correctly. Can you tell us what a Saddlezeit is and why that's important? It really seems to inform your method. You have this focus too on the local and the legal. I'd love to talk about that, but just to start with Saddlezeit. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (14:53.708)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (15:00.812)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Yeomans (15:05.196)
Yeah, sure. Right, right. So the phrase is due to Reinhard Koselic, the great mid-century German historian. And the metaphor is one of what in German you call a bag-saddle. And in German you would call a saddleback. So it's kind of like you've got a mountain range with two peaks and the sort of like semi-valley in between them.
is, I guess, what you call in English a saddleback. Don't ask me about geographical terms. But anyway, that's the metaphor of the saddle site. And the two peaks are early and late modernity. And so Koselic's point is essentially that this is a period in history that is historical in a double sense.
PJ Wehry (15:42.318)
That's a different guest.
Chris Yeomans (16:02.732)
It's historical in the obvious sense that it's one time among many, but it's historical in a deeper sense that it understood itself as a period of transition. It understood itself as a period of change. And so the question was not, and this makes Hegel's republicanism different also, which we could talk about too, but the question is not, how are we going to preserve what we have right now?
The question is, what are things going to look like in five or 10 years? Right? And so that kind of understanding, I think, suffuses all of the concepts of German idealist political philosophy. And if you think that, then they take on a very different character, I think.
And so that's a big part of why it's important to me. And then the more specific version of that is this tearing of the social fabric in these three directions, essentially, into this traditionalist, Stendig-Gesellschaft corporate society direction, into this very modern, accelerationist bourgeois, if you like that term, civil society on the other side, and this state.
right? Trying to hold everything together, trying to make the next reparation payment to the French, trying to see if you could stand up some more state courts and improve the training of judges and so on. And I'll just add one additional thing. A lot of it does have to do with urbanization, but there's also a lot of social mobility from one side of the country, one part of the countryside to the other.
PJ Wehry (17:47.128)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (17:55.672)
So you get this whole problem of rural poverty also in Germany that really even accelerates after Hegel's death. And that becomes one of the big flash points for the 1848 revolutions in Germany is this sort of big social. But anyway, yeah. So I see this Saddle site period is really essential. Sorry, go ahead, PJ. Didn't mean to cut you off.
PJ Wehry (18:15.16)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (18:19.916)
No, no, no, you're fine. And I just want to, so when you talk about mobility inside Germany, are you talking about Prussia or are you talking about they were moving across into the other small states?
Chris Yeomans (18:31.574)
It was easier in lots of respects to move like within Prussia, but people were moving across state boundaries as well. I mean, the extent of border control is very small, right? And of course, most Prussia was considered to have very advanced information on their population because they more or less had an idea how many people lived in the country.
PJ Wehry (18:38.445)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (18:56.75)
Like most other German states probably would have been off by 20%, 25 % if they had guessed how many people were living in their states. And so that has all sorts of ramifications in, right, exactly. Travel across borders, within borders. There's not extraordinary central control over what's going
PJ Wehry (19:21.88)
Well, and that's kind of the whole Saddle site thing is that we're watching this move from Prussia and the states into, you know, eventually like Bismarck with moving it all into one state, right? That's is that kind of would that be the other peak when we talk about late modernity or is it be a little.
Chris Yeomans (19:30.604)
Yes. Yeah. That's right.
Chris Yeomans (19:37.494)
Politically speaking, you could, yeah, that would be the other peak industrialization and the final build out of things like the Zollfein, the customs union, I guess is how it's usually translated, the building out of extensive property rights and so on. But yeah, that would be the other peak. And you're sort of in Hegel's time,
Right, in 1818 with the Vienna Congress, you're halfway in between. You go from the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, which of course Voltaire famously joked was neither Holy nor Roman. He might have added, nor was it an empire, nor was there a German nation of which anything could be. mean, none, it's the most hopefully named political entity, but absolutely sui generis, right? Hundreds of political entities from
PJ Wehry (20:20.811)
Nord Empire.
Chris Yeomans (20:36.046)
on the one hand in Austria, which were only sort of half in and half out of the Holy Roman Empire and kind of empires on their own, down to, you know, some little valley that an imperial knight from the Crusades had, right? I mean, all like officially voting together on policy. this is the other reason that it really seemed transition.
PJ Wehry (20:55.278)
Hahaha!
Chris Yeomans (21:02.338)
was that people already in the 18th century were looking at Germans were thinking, really the Holy Roman Empire? This is our political organization? This can't be the case, right? This cannot be true. So you, under the pressure of Napoleon, you get a lot of consolidation, right? Bavaria picks up a whole bunch of states. Prussia picks up a whole bunch of states.
And so you go down from hundreds to, gosh, I want to say there's somewhere in like 25 states in the German Confederation, right? And then it's most of those that then get unified in 1871 by Bismarck into what we now call Germany.
PJ Wehry (21:52.377)
Yeah, and then there's the whole interplay with Austria and that's a whole other thing. It's very complicated!
Chris Yeomans (21:55.554)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great, yes, I'm blanking on the name. There's a German historian who has a great little book on 19th century Germany. the first line is something like, the 19th century Germany sets out as a fight between Austria and Prussia. And the winner was Napoleon.
PJ Wehry (22:21.55)
That sounds about right. So I think to get into what you're doing with the book, can we return now to you're talking about there's a third estate without traditional rights and the philosophers are trying to answer that. what are some of the one who is that group of people who don't have traditional rights and
Chris Yeomans (22:24.62)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (22:40.044)
Yeah, yeah.
Yep. Yep.
PJ Wehry (22:47.404)
What is Kant's answer? What is Fichte's answer? What is Hegel's answer? Because you kind of set it up, those three each time. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (22:52.108)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's a great way of posing the question, right? So as an estate, so Hegel names it as an estate and he calls it the Standesgewerbes. The estate of commerce, the estate of trade and industry, sometimes it's translated. The correlative, so that's to describe the group of people that compose it.
If you want to talk about it as an institution, you would use the term civil society, bürgerliche Gesellschaft. And even that is interesting. So bürgerlich is the sort of German equivalent of bourgeois. But Hegel complains that French has bourgeois and citoyenne, right, as these two terms, like an economic term and a political term. And German doesn't. German tries to collapse everything into bürgerlich.
And so there's fights over the time about what that means, but I won't go down that rabbit hole. So you have a civil society and the commercial estate. And yeah.
PJ Wehry (23:59.215)
Real quick, reason that they don't have that distinction though is partly because that their state is not as strong. Is that part? Okay, like that be like to keep it simple without I Understand the need to dive down rebels, but I yeah
Chris Yeomans (24:06.83)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And not as visible.
Yes. Right, right. And the economy is less developed. So it's less developed on both sides. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, because it's fractured and also it just contingent historical circumstances that like England develops first and then France and then Germany in terms of on the economic side. So it's fractured, but in a way it's not pulled apart as far as it is in France.
PJ Wehry (24:20.354)
Because it's fra- it's because it's fractured. Okay, okay, okay. Sorry, continue.
Chris Yeomans (24:42.062)
But in France, the political dimension is so much more visible because you've got the monarchy and you've got the whole French government. so it's a, yeah, it's a different setup. yeah. right. So, but to go back to Kant, right? So Kant really struggles with this. And I think he understands, here's what he understands.
PJ Wehry (24:48.397)
Right.
Chris Yeomans (25:07.48)
that he doesn't really get the institutional dimension.
But he sees the consequences of these social changes for the normativity of law and political normativity. And so he can see that there's a form of normative validity that is distinctively social, which is private law, which is sort of provisional.
right, and constantly capable of being renegotiated and that there's another kind of validity which is attached to the state and public law which could in principle be peremptory in the sense of cutting off all debate. But then in the historical works Kant thinks we should never do that.
We should never think of human culture as finished and human laws as not capable of improvement and so on. And so it's clear that he can see that there are these two forms of normative validity, but Kant is no sociologist. Kant has essentially no interest in the institutional design of government. It's just not his thing. And so that's, it's a...
PJ Wehry (26:27.864)
Hahaha!
Chris Yeomans (26:30.638)
brilliant move to see the consequences in these different forms of normativity. But that's where he gets. Fichte sees the issue, I think, rather clearly. And Fichte is constantly, I would say, maybe this is the best way to put it in a nutshell.
Fichte is constantly pushing back against what he calls the anarchy of trade.
He's constantly pushing back against the kind of uncertainty.
and poverty that civil society naturally generates, which, which Hagel is just going to take on board as something that happens. And we're going to try and mitigate it. We're going to try and do some different things, but Hagel has no thought really, as far as I can tell anywhere in his career, that you could have a number one, that you could have modern society without civil society. And number two, that you could have civil society without poverty.
Right? are like, that's just facing facts as far as Hegel is concerned. But Fichte doesn't want to go that way. Fichte is very concerned about workers. Right? For Fichte, the fundamental property right is not your right to own something and sell it. The fundamental property right is your right to earn a living. Your right to support yourself with your own work.
Chris Yeomans (28:09.906)
And there's a status dimension of that. That's your right to be self-sufficient, to walk down the street and to go into church on Sunday with your head held high as somebody who contributes to the community, as somebody who's responsible for him or herself, right? And so everything in Fichtas' political philosophy is designed
to manage the economy, to plan the economy to the extent that you can preserve that. And so in the closed commercial state, it's just absolutely such a fascinating document. You get this mixture of kind of modern day socialism with very much old regime, almost guild style production relations.
But it's all in an attempt really to try and fight the anarchy of trade and to prevent the, in a certain sense, I think it's right to say, to really prevent the development of the estate that Hegel just thinks is here, it's coming down the pike. And the only question is how we integrate that into our society.
PJ Wehry (29:35.567)
I think as you're talking about this, I could see why the inheritance section is in some ways a great case study for this because like Fichte talking about the absolute and the relative, because in some senses, it doesn't matter what gets passed down. You know, for it's a purely economic question for Fichte. There is that status side of it. And it's fundamentally changed because in an agricultural, if I understand correctly, in agricultural set, you always get you always have the farm and you always have access to food.
Chris Yeomans (29:42.725)
yeah.
Chris Yeomans (29:50.284)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (30:03.053)
Yeah, that's
PJ Wehry (30:05.71)
through the farm if you work. But with urbanization and industrialization, you don't have that. And so how does inheritance work? so do you mind sharing how FICTA works through this absolute and relative sense of inheritance?
Chris Yeomans (30:07.374)
That's right.
Chris Yeomans (30:22.318)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um...
So absolute relative property for Fichte are the fundamental form of property, which is your right to earn a living. And then this kind of secondary form of property and stuff. And I mean, before I even go on, it's not that crazy in the early of the 19th century to say the vast majority of what you cared about.
PJ Wehry (30:50.222)
You
Chris Yeomans (30:56.886)
was being able to earn a living. The number of like physical items that people owned was very small, right? I have a friend who teaches history, teaches material culture. And she likes to tell her students like, go home, count how many items of clothing you have in your closet, in your dorm room. And then when we come back, she'll explain that this is like 10 times more clothes than Marie Antoinette had, right?
The like stuff and passing down your stuff, right? Maybe not so important. And then that becomes taken up in many respects in Hegel's distinction between property proper, what he calls eigentum, and resources, what he calls femurgan, right? Resources are things like the family farm or things like your ability to be involved in work relations and so
And so you're right, for Fichte, it is that conception of property as tied to your job that is the most important thing. And so among the things that you would like, in fact, most, if you were the child, say, of a blacksmith, are blacksmith tools, right? But essentially, Fichte thinks
primarily, and this is very common in Germany at the time, Fichte thinks primarily of inheritance as a way in which other members of the family are taken care of. And only secondarily in terms of what we would now think of as a private property right. And then Hegel, for all intents and purposes, just takes this over.
I think there's not that much originality to Hegel's view here, to be perfectly honest. And simply says, look, I think Hegel's view actually is the fundamental form of property of resources is community property, what we would call community property now. The family owns the property, right? Now he's patriarchal enough to say, yeah, and the husband disposes over the property for the family, right?
Chris Yeomans (33:20.536)
But conceptually speaking, it's family property. then look, but you also, each of the members of the family, well, they've got some sort of property rights. They should have something over which they could dispose. And so there should be a little bit of the estate over which the decedent gets to say, so and so gets my Bible. And I don't know, so and so gets my boots or something like that, right?
But it's very much grounded. It's a key case, the inheritance case is a key case for thinking about what property rights look like and how they're integrated into a concern to keep the social fabric from tearing too much. And then Fichte and Hegel have their own sort of ways of doing this in the end.
Fichte wants to do it through a kind of planned economy where, you know, every five years we're going to get together and decide how many blacksmiths are going to be and who they are. And if we decide that you're a blacksmith, that's also us deciding that I'm going to buy my horseshoes from you. And Fichte is very clear about that, right? If you give somebody the right to work as a blacksmith, you are obligated to buy stuff from them. Otherwise, what is the right to work as a blacksmith like worth, right? Nothing.
Hegel, again, just thinks, really going to be able to make that work for civil society. But he thinks you can make it work for agricultural society with what was called Maiorat. And in the book, I more or less run Maiorat together with primogeniture. But I'm convinced by a recent book by Elias Buchetmann that that's a little bit of a mistake.
So, but basically, Mayahot basically says the farm passes in its entirety to the nearest oldest male relative. But that could be an uncle. Whereas primogeniture says it passes to the firstborn son. Right? We're really down in the weeds, PJ. Sorry. Here's the important thing for Hegel. The whole farm passes as a piece.
PJ Wehry (35:35.37)
No, no, this is great. No, no, it's good.
Chris Yeomans (35:47.094)
because that's something that can provide subsistence for a family. And if you start parceling it out, what actually happens is people sell their little parcel to the local large landowner. And you just build up these giant industrial farms and then everybody has to go to work for them. And what you really want as much as possible are family farms, right? And you can do that for the agricultural part of the population.
Hegel thinks, which is still 80 % of the population in the 1820s, right? It's a lot of people. It's not nothing. But for civil society, I mean, this goes along with the discussion of Hegel on poverty and so on. Hegel really does not see an easy answer. Yeah. Sorry, you were about to say something.
PJ Wehry (36:31.822)
Yeah, no, that's great. No, no, I was going to say, forgive me if we had too far down the rabbit hole. was really in. I love that you got into the weeds. I have started to read as background for my own studies, some German history and went too far down the rabbit hole. So I appreciate that. I'm not the only one who does that. But are you familiar with the book, The Faithful Executioner?
Chris Yeomans (36:48.464)
huh.
Chris Yeomans (36:52.238)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (36:58.93)
I don't think so. Not Hitler's willing executioners. That was the one I was doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. The faithful executioner. No, I don't know it.
PJ Wehry (37:01.774)
All right, so it's from... No, no, no, no. So this is the... It's a 16th century executioner for Nuremberg. And the reason I bring this up and I... It's a biography of... Based on... So, and I'll try and keep this brief. And I do have a point with it.
Chris Yeomans (37:18.146)
Like an autobiography or an oral history or?
PJ Wehry (37:30.242)
I think most people hearing this discussion do not realize, and I think this goes back to the Zaddelzeit, when we hear Hegel and Fichte talking about this, when you talk about Fichte's old school kind of combination of the old estates with the new modern, we recognize ourselves in Hegel and Fichte, kind of, and then there's like little weird things. But it wasn't until I started reading in the 16th century that I was like, this is a foreign land.
Chris Yeomans (37:45.827)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (38:00.066)
Like this is so alien. So you mentioned, and the reason I wanted to bring this up, you mentioned the inheritance of the right to work. And so an executioner could not go to church. An executioner could not be married in the church, could not be baptized in the church. Often their wives died because the midwife would not go in their house. Even though, so this particular executioner, right as it was becoming
Chris Yeomans (38:00.43)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (38:07.81)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (38:30.318)
a more socially acceptable position. So you see this kind of in the medieval times, the criminal punishment would be done by basically mercenaries. And so everyone thought of the executioner as a thug, but Nuremberg was more advanced. so they had him and they paid him probably 10 times what your average person made a year. So he made a lot of money, but no one literally no one would talk to him because it was seen as dishonorable, which is
Chris Yeomans (38:50.091)
huh.
Chris Yeomans (38:55.608)
Fascinating. Yeah, yeah, sure.
PJ Wehry (38:59.592)
It's so strange. It was passed down to him by his father. the reason this all starts is he keeps a catalog of all the work he does. And then he sends it with letters of recommendation to the emperor to try and make sure that his son does not become an executioner because he wants his son to be able to do honorable work. And so when you... Anyways, I know that was kind of like a long tangent, but I think for me, that's important context. I'm listening to you because when you talk about...
Chris Yeomans (39:01.016)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (39:19.382)
Yeah... Yeah...
PJ Wehry (39:29.42)
the inheritance, you inheriting the right to work to honorable work. It's like, what does that even like today, the right to work is like, most people are like, no, I want the right to live. It's like I should be taken care of. Like the idea that you could actually be excluded from certain types of work because your father, anyways, I don't know if that sparks any thoughts from you, but that like, yeah.
Chris Yeomans (39:32.684)
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (39:40.13)
Yeah, that's great.
Chris Yeomans (39:45.867)
Yeah!
Yeah. Yes, yes, it absolutely does. I mean, which is a big part of why Fechtenhegel care about it is actually set by Kant, which is what, where to start here. It goes back to the burger conversation we were having before, right? So the more usual phrase in German through most of the 18th century was Stadt.
PJ Wehry (40:08.046)
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (40:18.542)
with a DT, the resident of a town. And then it started being used as Staatsbürger, the citizen of a state. And you have these letters from the Prussian bureaucracy, the reforming bureaucracy addressing members of the nobility using this term Staatsbürger. And then writing back, I don't know what the hell this word means. Why are you calling me this?
PJ Wehry (40:30.542)
Mm.
Chris Yeomans (40:48.654)
I live in Stavinau. Can we talk about Stavinau? What is this state that I'm supposed to be a citizen? What does that mean? Right? And really rejecting it polemically. But the reason I mention is the very character or persona.
of what Kant would call an active citizen.
somebody with enough strength of character through self-assertion, with enough self-sufficiency through economic work, to be counted as the kind of citizen in the Republic who gets some input on what things are going on, this is actually a very practical problem.
And in fact, I'm sure it wasn't the last podcast you recorded, but the last one I think you published, which I was just looking at, Jennifer Herd, is talking about Bildung in exactly these terms, right? That the key is to educate people up to citizenship, right? And so this is a huge issue, the right to work, the right to have honorable work, and what kind of work exactly?
PJ Wehry (41:51.958)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (42:12.238)
ought to be required to satisfy the requirements of active citizenship are really important. So I mean, we'll make the following sort of distinctions, right? And the blacksmith, we'll go back to the blacksmith, always my favorite. I don't know why. I couldn't make a horseshoe of my life dependent on it. It's not perfect. But a blacksmith can be an active citizen. Why? Blacksmith has got his own shop.
PJ Wehry (42:28.459)
that's great example. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (42:42.274)
Right? You want horseshoes? You say, hey, I'll pay you for this amount for the horseshoes. And that's an ordinary commercial transaction. The stable boy who just lives in the stables and does whatever you ask him to do with the horses is only a passive citizen. Right? Why? Well, he's, if you like it in the Republican language at the beck and call of his master.
He doesn't show up in society with the kind of independence that is required.
in order to be that kind of citizen. And these are, this is not idiosyncratic to Kant, this is very common throughout the 18th and 19th century, particularly in the Republican literature. As a partial plug in digression, if you want to see how this starts to change in the 19th century, Alex Gerovich has great stuff on 19th century labor republicanism, where labor republicans start to say, you know what, wage labor is enough.
Like you go to work, you get paid a wage and you can quit your job if you wanted to. That's enough independence to count as a kind of active citizen who ought to be involved in the activity of the Republic and so on. But anyway, it's in that context in what are sometimes called political theories of property. That is theories of property where the importance of property is not so much economic advancement or that you control some piece of the world, my pen, right? But rather,
No, you have the kind of independent economic basis that allows you to serve as an active and independent citizen in the Republic. That's the important thing. And Fichte sees that very clearly, but also knows a little bit more about how market economies work and thinks, you know what?
Chris Yeomans (44:45.526)
Market economy is not going to make hardly anybody an active citizen. The only way we're going to make people active citizens is a planned economy. I mean, look, Fechta, I mean, you cannot ever complain that Fechta doesn't bite his bullets, right? When Fechta understands that to do this, you're to have to close the borders, you're going to have to plan the economy, the economy is not going to grow.
But all of that will be worth it, Fichte thinks, if you can make everybody citizens, real active citizens. And for Fichte, even unmarried women, even unmarried adult women can be active citizens in this way. And so, for sure. For sure, yeah. Yeah, right, certainly not something that Kant or Hegel are willing to contemplate. That's for sure.
PJ Wehry (45:26.958)
which would be pretty radical for the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll say the quiet part out loud there, yeah.
Chris Yeomans (45:41.57)
Yeah. And so, but that like concern.
with social status. And this is why, so I have one of these Cambridge elements coming out in about a month or two where I talk about Hegel against the background of the Republican tradition. And one thing that the Republican tradition is traditionally very good at thinking about is the interaction between status and politics.
and this really comes to Hegel, through Montesquieu. I think that's really the primary source. He'd read Machiavelli sympathetic to Machiavelli, but it's really coming through Montesquieu, think. but this thought that a lot of what political society has to do is, you know, like I was saying before, let people walk down the street with their heads held high. Like when Hegel's worried about poverty, he's not worried that we won't be able to feed people. He doesn't think that's a hard.
Nobody's gonna starve. The hard problem is not infantilizing people who are on the dole.
not turning them into a rabble. He worries about the rabble precisely that they don't feel like they can go to church like your executioner. They don't feel like they're welcome in the social spaces. And remember, most Germans are living in very small towns. Everybody knows everybody else. That's what he's worried about. And that interaction between status
Chris Yeomans (47:28.846)
which is this very traditional form of society which has not left us, still with us, right? But between that and rights and the kinds of policies and bureaucracy of the state, that's what I find so fascinating to see swirling around in Hegel's political philosophy in particular and in Fichte's to a slightly less degree, but the whole problem is set by Kant. It really is.
PJ Wehry (47:35.202)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (47:57.967)
There's two things, if you don't mind. One is there's such a clear background here in coming out of the Renaissance and the way that that had become accepted in Greek and Roman background to all these questions, right? Like when you talk about the rabble, the fear of the rabble, that's first and foremost a Roman question. that's, And then the other one is even as we're talking about this and...
Chris Yeomans (48:15.672)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (48:18.936)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (48:26.03)
especially in central Florida, I'm in, I'm in Lake County. So I'm not even like in Orlando, which is like people like, why do you guys talk about this stuff? I, the, the parallels with Jefferson, we don't have the same social fabric. Right. To that, holds things together and that does create a difference. But when you talk about that Greek and Roman background, which, you know, learning about like Washington posing as Cincinnati, that sort of thing, but also.
Chris Yeomans (48:30.251)
Uh-huh.
You
Chris Yeomans (48:39.027)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (48:54.67)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (48:55.66)
The idea of one of the choices that Jefferson makes is to really push the landed male. I mean, that's right alongside of what Hegel's saying. But there's differences, as you're talking through this, really gives us alternatives, ways of seeing, and also noticing that these things aren't set in stone for America.
Chris Yeomans (49:07.02)
There you go.
Chris Yeomans (49:19.98)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think for Jeffersonian Republicans, for Harringtonian Republicans in Britain, commerce is the enemy, right? And John Pocock has told that story brilliantly and at great length, but absolutely brilliantly. And Hegel, there's really no nostalgia in Hegel.
There's a deep kind of realism to him. Now, and let me be clear, I don't think there's nostalgia in Fejta either. Like Fejta's closed commercial state is not an attempt to go back to a guild system. It really is an attempt to push forward. It's just very clear-eyed about what the consequences of that are gonna be for economic growth and development. But there is very much a sense in Hegel at any rate,
that there has to be some way within commerce, within this hall of mirrors where things are operating on credit rather than landed property, where there's the possibility of speculation, where things are more anonymous. That, I mean, Hegel thinks you've got to find the particular form of virtue, as it were.
that is appropriate to that. Fichte is more skeptical, right? And Fichte really does think you let speculation loose, you let the anarchy of trade loose, and you're going to lose the ability to give everybody citizenship because you're going to lose the ability to give them work by which they can sustain themselves. And that for Fichte is the fundamental enlightenment.
That's what made it worth fighting the French Revolution. That's what makes it worth reforming Germany. It's not so that we can have more stuff, right? Or that we can improve our material wellbeing. It's so that we can be citizens. And in a certain sense, that's like...
Chris Yeomans (51:41.87)
very classically Republican in the sense that, right, there's something about us as human beings that requires political participation and come hell or high water or just subsistence economy, we're going to put that together. Now look, that's, but Fichte is responding in a different way than Hegel.
But in a certain sense, they're responding to the same problem in one kind of put by Montesquieu, where Montesquieu says, look, democracy sounds great, but you know what the Athenians were first and foremost? Dirt poor. They had no property worth caring about. Wives stuck at home making everything run. They got all the time in the world to sit around and debate things. But as soon as you add property to the equation,
PJ Wehry (52:23.079)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Chris Yeomans (52:39.082)
everything changes. And then you need different forms. mean, so this is right. mean, Montesquieu, and to some degree, Hegel think of constitutional monarchy as a more modern form of government than democracy. I never tire of pointing that out to my students, right? Because they think democracy presupposes economic relations that we can't and maybe shouldn't have anymore. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:53.986)
Hahaha
PJ Wehry (53:07.0)
Hmm. No, that's great. mean, that's
Chris Yeomans (53:07.128)
Sorry, but now I can't remember how we got to that. Greek and Roman. let me just say one other thing about Roman real quick. The other bit of Rome that is floating around here is the Roman conception of property rights, right? Which is a kind of absolute conception, which is something like Blackstone's soul and despotic dominion, which has no place in German law until the 19th century.
can't find it anywhere. Ficha says this explicitly, right? He uses the, it's not solar despotic dominion, not that phrase, but something like that. And he says, I've never seen any of this. Nobody's ever had any of this. But that becomes a way of thinking about a potential commercial future. And so it's often, yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:57.375)
Forgive me. Do you mind defining that a little bit more? What the solo? Yes. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (54:01.49)
sure. Right. Yeah. So, soul and despotic dominion being, the kind of, English, it's called fee simple property. And that's the kind of property that, if you like this language ties together all of the sticks in the bundle, you're right to use something. You're right to exclude something. You're right to alienate something. You're right to profit from something. You're right to waste something.
Like Proudhon has this great line that like the owner of property can milk his cows onto the soil or pour salt on his fields. Like Quay property owner, the property owner cannot do anything wrong with their property because it's theirs. If they hurt somebody else with it, that's a different story, right? But you know, if in, I don't know, 16th century Germany,
you went out and poured salt on your field, somebody would stop you. Like the village needs stuff growing there, right? And that might be your farm, but there would be a whole tissue of rights and responsibilities that would be involved in it. Some would include labor on the part of the manorial Lord, helping the manorial Lord bring in his harvests. It would include the right to subsistence from the manorial Lord in times of
crop loss and so on. Like everybody had something to do, like the wife had a certain number of pounds of butter that you had to put it. Anyway, this whole tissue of rights and responsibilities and really well into the 18th century, this is also bound up with marriage. And you could only get married if you had a farm and you could only take over a farm if you were married. And so you had this whole package of things that came very closely together. And that's completely different from whatever Archie Daniels Midlands
PJ Wehry (55:34.573)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (55:55.214)
owns in Kansas or Ohio or Illinois or Indiana, where you're growing soybeans and corn for commodity crops. But that kind of sole and despotic dominion, people talk about it as the classical property law, but there's nothing traditional about it in Germany. It's entirely this foreign thought derived from Rome.
PJ Wehry (56:18.446)
That's fascinating.
Chris Yeomans (56:24.15)
And so it is lectures often, Hegel is very interesting, will use Rome as a way of thinking about the future. Like maybe civil society will go in this direction. Like maybe once everything can be owned and everything has a money value and everything can be bought and sold, it'll kind of look like Rome, right? And the other thing, I mean, if you know Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history, when he comes to Rome, he basically says, look, the
PJ Wehry (56:42.744)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (56:51.242)
original Romans had nothing in common. It's just shepherds and bandits. The only thing they could think of in common was the property right. And so that's like the one norm that they have. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Marriage, that's a property right. Kids, that's a property right. I mean, this is Hegel's understanding of Rome. And so that has an influence too. And the thought also...
that if we start to build out very consistent codes of law like the Romans did, it'll have a kind of content like the Romans gave it, namely the one with this kind of fee simple property at its
PJ Wehry (57:37.113)
Thank you. And I appreciate you stopping to define that because I was not entirely familiar with that, but man, it, the line like just straight to American politics is fascinating. So I want to be respectful of your time. If you don't mind, kind of the last question I'd love to ask is after someone listens to this episode, what is something that you would
Chris Yeomans (57:40.151)
sure.
Chris Yeomans (57:48.684)
Yeah, very much so.
PJ Wehry (58:04.942)
recommend or kind of give as an application, like what's something someone should think about or something someone should do over the next week after listening to this podcast episode.
Chris Yeomans (58:14.648)
Think of how, in Bruno Latour's great term, we have never been modern. Think of how the urban-rural divide is important in American and German politics now. Think of the role of status in this thought that you have that like the rural part of the country feels like they're condescended to by coastal elites. Think about the power of
PJ Wehry (58:21.87)
Yeah
PJ Wehry (58:28.334)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (58:44.662)
those kinds of traditions, right, whether they are invoked in good faith or in bad, right, that sort of sense of things. And I am very much, think, a kind of humility, particularly among academics of my ilk, right, in
our perspective being one among many, and in a robust sense of a political society as composed of groups of people that are honestly leading different forms of life and have to somehow be co-citizens together. I mean, we're not leading the forms of life that Contra Fichter Hegel talked about.
Right. Even, mean, Indiana farmers are like small business people, right? You need, I don't know, two or three people to farm 3000 acres here. But what you need is a million dollars worth of combines and all of the rest of it. Right. And then you've got farmers playing the futures markets as a hedge against bad crops and so on. Right. It's a very different sort of thing. But nonetheless, like backing away from it, I often find
that there's an orientation here and there's some concepts here for thinking through the historical moment in which we find ourselves, which is essentially a transitional moment, right? Whatever the university system looks like in five years, it is not going to be what it looks like now. Whatever the federal government looks like is not going be what it looks like now. But one in which
these kinds of status divides are important and in which people are talking past each other because they're leading these forms of lives that have very different kinds of dangers, very different kinds of opportunities, very different kinds of virtues and vices, and having a kind of willingness to be in that space. So I was just hearing a talk from Roberto Salinas-Leon, one of our alums who came here.
Chris Yeomans (01:01:05.248)
And he was talking about Newman, John Henry Newman. Newman has this great line that the gentle person is, how does he put it? Merciful in the face of the absurd. And I think other forms of life can't help but look absurd to us, right? And those of us in academia should be particularly.
PJ Wehry (01:01:19.779)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (01:01:32.312)
cognizant of this fact and how we look to our students and to people outside of the university ecosystem entirely and how they look to us and so on. But that willingness to recognize really like ground level differences in the way human freedom can manifest itself. I mean, this is another thing that Jennifer and you were talking about the herder, right?
that I was thinking about this sense that Hegel very much gets from Heretot that there's just all of these different ways in which freedom manifests itself, in which the value of human life manifests itself. And what I try and argue in the book, at least with respect to Hegel, is there's these inevitable trade-offs, right?
Hegel is clear-eyed about the advantages of the agricultural estate as its disadvantages. He'll say about the, he thinks the people in the agricultural estate, they're superstitious, but they can actually be happy and satisfied. Whereas in the commercial estate, there's a kind of insatiability, a kind of lack of rootedness in time and place that just fundamentally afflicts that form of life. So anyway,
PJ Wehry (01:02:44.557)
Hahaha
Chris Yeomans (01:02:56.578)
You know, we lead different forms of life, but the pluralism of those forms of life, the way that they coalesce into social groups that make different kinds of political claims, like that all seems to me more relevant.
PJ Wehry (01:02:56.984)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (01:03:09.742)
And it's okay and it's actually a good thing. It's yeah. What a beautiful way to end. Chris, Dr. Yeomans, absolute joy having you on today. Thank you.
Chris Yeomans (01:03:21.24)
Thanks for having me PJ. And like I said, you're doing the Lord's work here, getting philosophy out and putting it in a different form. I love it.
PJ Wehry (01:03:29.935)
Appreciate it.