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FRIEDRICH GENTZ'S TRANSLATION OF BURKE'S REFLECTIONS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2014

JONATHAN ALLEN GREEN
JONATHAN ALLEN GREEN*
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
*
Trinity Hall, Cambridge, CB2 1TJjag202@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

In his influential work on German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) catalysed the growth of the nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment. This causal thesis, however, ignored the extent to which the Reflections' German translator, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), altered the meaning of the text to suit his own philosophical agenda. Although Burke saw rationalism and revolution as natural allies, Gentz – a student of Immanuel Kant – used the Reflections to articulate a conservative form of rationalism that, he believed, could stand up to the philosophes' radicalism. Through his selective translation, numerous in-text annotations, and six long interpretive essays, Gentz pressed Burke's Reflections into a Kantian epistemological paradigm – carving out a space for a priori right in the logic of the text, and demoting traditional knowledge from a normative to a prudential role. In Gentz's translation, Burke thus appeared as a champion, not a critic, of Enlightenment.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 639 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Many thanks to John Robertson, Joachim Whaley, and William O'Reilly for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The counter-enlightenment’, in idem, The proper study of mankind: an anthology of essays, ed. Henry Hard and Roger Hausheer (London, 1998), p. 243.

2 Ibid., p. 257.

3 Although Berlin included some of Burke's predecessors in his catalogue of counter-Enlighteners – the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and the Westphalian cameralist Justus Möser (1720–94), most notably – he claimed that their impact on eighteenth-century thought was minimal.

4 A conspicuous recent example – albeit one that is critical of Berlin for his supposed complicity in the twentieth-century ‘anti-Enlightenment’ – is Sternhell, Zeev, The anti-enlightenment tradition, trans. Maisel, David (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google Scholar. For a review of others, see Clark, J. C. D., ‘The enlightenment, religion and Edmund Burke’, Studies in Burke and the Eighteenth Century, 21 (2007), pp. 9–38Google Scholar.

5 Stahel, Joseph, Bemerkungen über die französische Revolution und das Betragen einiger Gesellschaften in London bei diesen Ereignissen: Aus dem Englischen nach der vierten Ausgabe übersetzt (Vienna, 1791)Google Scholar. In a letter to Burke dated 21 Feb. 1791, the Parisian bookseller Pierre-Gaëton Dupont mentioned en passant, ‘you know, I suppose, that a German translation [of your Reflections] has been published. I hope that it has been done upon the original & not from the French’: see Dupont to Burke, 21 Feb. 1791, in Hans Schmitt and Weston, John, ‘Ten letters to Edmund Burke from the French translator of the Reflections on the revolution in France’, The Journal of Modern History, 24 (1952), pp. 406–23Google Scholar, at pp. 413–14. On the assumption that Gentz was ‘the first German translator of the Reflections’, Schmitt and Weston reason that the German edition that Dupont referenced was Gentz's; but Stahel, not Gentz, produced the first German translation. Gentz's would not appear for another two years, in early 1793.

6 For Joseph Stahel – not to be confused with the Bavarian printer Johann Jakob Stahel – see Selwyn, Pamela, Everyday life in the German book trade (University Park, PA, 2000), pp. 248–9Google Scholar.

7 Braune, Frieda, Edmund Burke in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1917), p. 19Google Scholar. This translation is my own, as are all forthcoming quotations of German sources, unless otherwise indicated.

8 Gentz to Garve, 19 Apr. 1791, in F. P. Wittichen, ed., Briefe von und an Gentz (3 vols., Berlin, 1909), i, p. 203.

9 Gentz to Garve, 5 Dec. 1790, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, i, pp. 178–9.

10 For the Reflections' classical rhetorical roots, see Locke, F. P., ‘Rhetoric and representation in Burke's Reflections’, in Whale, John, ed., Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: new interdisciplinary essays (Manchester, 2000), pp. 18–39Google Scholar.

11 Gentz to Garve, 19 Apr. 1791, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, i, p. 204.

12 In a letter to Burke dated 8 Feb. 1793, Gentz claimed that he worked ‘nearly for two years’ on his translation. This would suggest that he set to work on his Reflections very soon after his first reading (i.e. nineteen months before the date of publication). See Marshall, P. J. and Woods, John, eds., The correspondence of Edmund Burke (10 vols., Chicago, 1968–78), vii, pp. 346–7Google Scholar.

13 Gentz's sources on the proceedings in France included Mallet du Pan's Mercure de France, Mirabeau's Courier de Provence, the Journal Encyclopédique, the Journal de Paris, and the Moniteur; see Gentz to Garve, 5 Dec. 1790, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, i, pp. 178–9.

14 Friedrich Gentz, Betrachtungen über die französische Revolution nach dem Englischen des Herrn Burke (2 vols., Berlin, 1793). Gentz's original contributions to the Reflections – his introduction, supplementary essays, and annotated bibliography – have been reprinted in Gentz, Friedrich, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, Günther (12 vols., Zurich, 1997–2004), vi, pp. 6–262Google Scholar.

15 Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 31.

16 Ibid., vi, p. 38–9, italics in original.

17 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 2.

18 For instance, Gentz defended Burke's citation of Ecclesiasticus, a scriptural source that might have unsettled Lutheran readers. Elsewhere, he used a footnote to explain certain peculiarities in the English constitution to German readers. See ibid., pp. 69, 80.

19 These were entitled ‘Über politische Freiheit und das Verhältnis derselben zur Regierung’, ‘Über die Moralität in den Staatsrevolutionen’, ‘Über die Deklaration der Rechte’, ‘Versuch einer Widerlegung der Apologie des Herrn Makintosh’, and ‘Über die National-Erziehung in Frankreich’.

20 This was entitled ‘Über den Einfluss politischer Schriften, und den Charakter der Burkischen’.

21 As Fania Oz-Salzberger and Sophus Reinert have shown, Burke was not the only English author whose ideas underwent radical reinterpretation upon their entrée into German political discourse: see her Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish civic discourse in eighteenth-century Germany (Oxford, 1995) and his Translating empire: emulation and the origins of political economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011), respectively.

22 For evidence of the Gentz's Reflections' widespread reception, see Aris, Reinhold, History of political thought in Germany, from 1789 to 1815 (London, 1965), pp. 251–8Google Scholar; Beiser, Frederick, Enlightenment, revolution, Romanticism: the genesis of modern German political thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 287–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Braune, Burke in Deutschland, pp. 19–26, 41–66, passim.

23 One scholar estimates that Gentz sold around 4,000 copies of his Reflections, a remarkable feat in eighteenth-century German print culture. See Theresa Dietrich, ‘Ideologie der Gegenrevolution: Ursprünge konservativen Denkens bei Friedrich Gentz, 1789–1794’ (Ph.D. thesis, Berlin, 1989), p. 132.

24 In the late 1790s, Gentz's translation was reviewed in the Jenaer Allgemeine Literaturzeitung and the Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen by August Wilhelm Rehberg and Ernst Brandes, respectively.

25 Gentz's Reflections were reprinted in 1967 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), 1986 (Zurich: Manesse Verlag), 1991 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag), 2005 and 2009 (Warendorf: Hoof Verlag).

26 Philip Pirler, ‘Friedrich von Gentzens Auseinandersetzung mit Immanuel Kant’ (Ph.D. thesis, Munich, 1980), pp. 17–70.

27 Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 16.

28 Dietrich, Ideologie der Gegenrevolution, pp. 57–131; and idem, ‘Das Konzept einere “wahren” Politik des Friedrich Gentz’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 38 (1990), pp. 346–53. See also Klenner, Herman, ‘Burke, Gentz und die Geburt des bürgerlichen Konservatismus’, in Burke, Edmund, Gentz, Friedrich, Über die Französische Revolution: Betrachtungen und Abhandlungen, ed. Klenner, Herman (Berlin, 1991), pp. 697–759Google Scholar, esp. pp. 723–32.

29 Kronenbitter, Günther, Wort und Macht: Friedrich Gentz als politischer Schriftsteller (Berlin, 1994), pp. 33–4, 51–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kronenbitter argues that Gentz was emblematic of a distinct class of ‘political writers’ (politische Schriftstellern), as opposed to political theorists or philosophers, who forged what Jürgen Habermas has called a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit).

30 Gentz to Garve, 5 Mar. 1790, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, i, p. 156.

31 Gentz to Garve, 8 Oct. 1784, in ibid., i, pp. 140–1.

32 In the early 1990s, Kronenbitter's Wort und Macht suggested (at p. 32 n. 41) that ‘given the primary sources currently available, the intensity of Gentz's contact with Kant must remain an open question’. But archival documents held at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz indicate that Gentz was indeed enrolled in courses taught by Kant in the mid-1780s. Theresa Dietrich, writing in the former German Democratic Republic, noted these records in the late 1980s; see her Ideologie der Gegenrevolution, p. 200 n. 175.

33 Gentz to Garve, 5 Dec. 1790, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, i, p. 182.

34 Dietrich, Ideologie der Gegenrevolution, p. 50.

35 In a letter to Kant, Kiesewetter complained that ‘that scholarly partisan, the royal adviser Gentz, receives an annual allowance of 800 Reichsthaler from the government to edit an anti-revolutionary journal; I do not know how he actually procured this [stipend], but it is nevertheless clear … that [his journal] is intended as an antidote’ to the pro-revolutionary writers of Berlin. See Kiesewetter to Kant, 25 Nov. 1798, in Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel (2nd edn, 4 vols., Berlin, 1922), iii, p. 268.

36 Gentz, Friedrich, ‘Über den Ursprung und die obersten Prinzipien des Rechts’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 18 (1791), pp. 370–96Google Scholar; reprinted in Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vii, pp. 7–33.

37 In the early 1790s, Möser was best known for his Osnabrückische Geschichte (1780) – a historical defence of the aristocratic and agrarian episcopate that he administered throughout the late eighteenth century – and was associated with Herder and the Sturm und Drang. See Knudsen, Jonathan, Justus Möser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Möser, Justus, ‘Über das Recht der Menschheit als den Grund der neuen französischen Konstitution’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 15 (1790), pp. 499–506Google Scholar; reprinted in Justus Möser, Sämtliche Werke (14 vols., Hamburg, 1943–90), ix, pp. 140–4.

39 Gentz, ‘Ursprung’, in Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vii, p. 32.

40 Ibid., pp. 11–12, italics in original.

41 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

42 Ibid., p. 19.

43 Ibid., p. 13, italics in original.

44 Ibid., p. 16.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., pp. 18, 20.

47 Ibid., pp. 21, 22.

48 Ibid., p. 43.

49 It bears noting that Gentz assembled this derivation of political right two years before Kant made the political ramifications of his metaphysics explicit in ‘Theorie und Praxis’ (1793), and well before he published his Metaphysik der Sitten (1797).

50 Gentz to Burke, 8 Feb. 1793, in Marshall and Woods, eds., Correspondence, vii, p. 346–7.

51 Burke to Gentz, post 8 Feb. 1793; in ibid., pp. 347–8.

52 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA, 2001), p. 151.

53 Ibid., p. 220.

54 Ibid., p. 218.

55 Ibid., p. 251.

56 Ibid., p. 182.

57 Ibid., p. 221.

58 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 92.

59 Ibid., pp. 92–3, italics in original.

60 Ibid., p. 93, italics in orginal. In a separate footnote, Gentz objected to the Reflections' opposition of right and prudence. Prudential reasoning, he argued, is useful only once one has a teleological end in sight: see ibid., p. 88.

61 Ibid., p. 95. Gentz seems to have borrowed this metaphor from Kant; see his ‘Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?’ (1786).

62 Ibid., pp. 92–3, italics in original.

63 Ibid., p. 91.

64 Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 85.

65 Ibid., vi, p. 84. Gentz defined a ‘total revolution’ as an attempt to sculpt a ‘constitution that is new in its most essential points … and that gives no practical consideration to the old order’; see ibid., p. 85.

66 Ibid., p. 99, italics in original.

67 Ibid., p. 98.

68 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, pp. 217–18. Drawing on this passage in the Reflections, Gentz used one of the original essays appended to his translation to argue that total, unmitigated freedom is incompatible with civilized, social existence. See his ‘Über politische Freiheit und das Verhältnis derselben zur Regierung’, in Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 47–73.

69 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 88.

70 Ibid., p. 90.

71 Ibid., pp. 89–90; Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, p. 218.

72 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 73.

73 Ibid., pp. 179–81.

74 Ibid. , p. 95, italics in original.

75 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, p. 152.

76 Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 219.

77 Ibid., p. 65.

78 Ibid., p. 213.

79 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

80 Ibid., p. 27.

81 This is the description of Friedrichian Enlightenment that Kant provided in his ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784), published while Gentz was his student at Königsberg.

82 ‘The Kantian philosophy has degenerated, in the hands of a certain sect, into an intellectually and morally bankrupt system’, Gentz wrote to a friend in 1803. ‘This is the fault of foolish men who, in their stupidity, perverted this negative programme into a positive one.’ See Gentz to Brinkmann, 25 Apr. 1803, in Wittichen, ed., Briefe, ii, p. 123.

83 Gentz, Schriften, ed. Kronenbitter, vi, p. 31.

84 Ibid., p. 16.

85 Ibid., p. 20.

86 Ibid., pp. 28, 26.

87 Ibid., p. 9.

88 Ibid., p. 29.

89 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 2.

90 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, p. 235.

91 Only once did Gentz translate ‘enlightened’ as ‘aufgeklärt’: see his Betrachtungen, i, p. 309.

92 See, for instance, Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, pp. 49, 124.

93 Ibid., p. 224.

94 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, p. 183; Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 43.

95 See, for instance, Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (London, 1791), and James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (London, 1791).

96 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, pp. 238–40.

97 Gentz, Betrachtungen, i, p. 114.

98 Ibid., p. 115.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid., pp. 115–16.

101 Bourke, Richard, ‘Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in Dwan, David and Insole, Christopher, eds., The Cambridge companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 27–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 28.