¹ The essay is a slightly revised version of the Lewis Fry Memorial Lecture, delivered at the university of Bristol in April 1988.

² Cf. Tocqueville's comment on the French people's attitudes to the king before the Revolution: ‘Ils avaient pour lui tout à la fois la tendresse qu'on a pour un père et le respect qu'on ne doit qu' à Dieu’. L'ancien régime et la révolution, livre 11, ch. xii.

³ Quoted in Storz, Gerhard, Karl Eugen. Der Furst und das ‘alte gute Recht’ (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 69Google Scholar.

⁴ ‘Geb er sich zufrieden, ich will sein Vater sein!’ Quoted in Minor, Jakob, Schiller, Sein Leben und seine Werke (Berlin, 1890), I, 90Google Scholar.

⁵ ‘Was Vaterland – ich bin das Vaterland’. Quoted in Storz, , Karl Eugen, p. 109Google Scholar.

⁶ See the later chapters of Storz, Karl Eugen. For a lively popular account of eighteenth-century princely behaviour in general and the Wurttemberg tradition in particular, see FauchierMagnan, A., The small German courts in the eighteenth century (London, 1958)Google Scholar. The authoritative work is Carsten, F. L., Princes and parliaments in Germany from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar.

⁷ For a fuller account see my essay ‘Coming of age in Prussia and Swabia: Kant, Schiller and the duke’, London German Studies (forthcoming).

⁸ Über den Gemeinspruck, das mag in der Theorie richtig sein…Kanis Werke, ed. Cassirer, Ernst, VI (Berlin, 1914), 388 ffGoogle Scholar. Kant is suggesting, in a quite unconfrontational way, that a ruler will wish to learn what is wrong in his realm so as to put it right.

⁹ It echoes among others Frederick the Great. When Sulzer told him that education in Silesia had improved since adopting the principle of basic human goodness, he replied ‘Vous ne connoissez pas assez cette maudite race à laquelle nous appartenons’. Quoted in Kant, , Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Werke, v (Berlin, 1922), 227Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Quoted in Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: an interpretation, vol. II, The science of freedom, p. 484Google Scholar.

¹¹ Quoted in Parker, Geoffrey, Philip II (London, 1979), p. 36Google Scholar.

¹² For both the genesis of the German ‘public’ and the socio-political issues involved, see Habermas, Jürgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962)Google Scholar. An interesting hint of change is Goethe's comment in a letter of 17 November 1787 to Karl August, duke of Weimar, on the recent tendency ‘to deal with so many things publicly which used to be treated in secret’: Goethe, , Briefe, Hamburger Ausgabe, II, 73Google Scholar.

¹³ Kritik der praktischen Vemunft, Kants Werke, v (Berlin, 1914), 165Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Anküindigung der Rheinischen Thalia. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Fricke, and Gopfert, (Stuttgart, 1959). V, 854 ffGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Besides being scathing about the unreal politics conducted by French writers, Tocqueville also points out that the aristocracy thought it all mere play – ‘des jeux fort ingénieux de l'esprit’ – and joined in willingly ‘pour passer le temps’. L'ancien regime et la revolution, livre in, ch. ii.

¹⁶ Gellert's account of his audience with the king is reprinted in Deutsche Dichtung im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Adalbert Elschenbroich (Munich, 1960), pp. 186 ff.

¹⁷ Agathon, Bk. ix, ch. iii. Wieland, Christoph Martin, Werke, ed. Martini, and Stiffen, (Munich, 1964), 1, 710Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Cf. D'Alembert, , Essai sur la société des Gens de lettres et des Grands, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1822), iv, 357fGoogle Scholar: ‘C' est ce qu'on apergoit surtout dans les conversations où Ton n'est pas de leuravis. Il semble qu'à mesure que l'homme d'esprit s'eclipse [i. e. gets the worst of it] l'homme de qualité se montre, et paraisse exiger la déférence dont l'homme d'esprit avait commence par dispenser’.

¹⁹ Cf. Storz, , Karl Eugen, p. 47Google Scholar.

²⁰ In a letter of 6 January 1772 to Sophie von La Roche, Wieland confesses he has not read much of Haller's political novel Usong: ‘C'est que je me suis endormi à la 7^me page’. Quoted in Wieland, , Politische Dichlungen, ed. Jaumann, Herbert (Munich, 1979), p. 725Google Scholar. This puts the presentational problem in the motif-terms central to Wieland's own novel. See below.

²¹ Der Goldene Spiegel, Zweiter Teil, ch. 1.: Wieland, , Sammtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1794), VII, 54 fGoogle Scholar.Further references in the text are to volume and page of this edition, reprinted Hamburg, 1984.

²² In this, the eighteenth-century philosopher was of course the secular heir of preachers, just as the Enlightenment was a worldly version of the Christian ethics which earlier rulers were sometimes confronted with: Cf. McManners, J., ‘The religious observances of Versailles under Louis XV’, Enlightenment essays in memory of Robert Shackleton, ed. Barber, and Courtney, (Oxford, 1989), esp. pp. 184 fGoogle Scholar.

²³ Egmont, Act iv, ‘Residence of the duke of Alva’, Goethe, , Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, iv, 429–24Google Scholar.

²⁴ Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? Kants Werke, iv, 169. Further page references are given in the text.

²⁵ Voltaire had used a similar tactic in the Lettres philosophiques (close of Letter13): ‘Le nombre de ceux qui pensent est excessivement petit, et ceux-là ne s'avisent pas de troubler le monde.’

²⁶ L'ancien regime el la revolution, in a lengthy note on the Prussian reformedcode appended to Bk n, ch. i. Tocqueville is knowledgeable and penetrating on German affairs – except perhaps in saying, as part of his critique of French men of letters and their political influence, that German writers by contrast were ‘entièrement étrangers à la politique, et retirés dans la domaine de la philosophic pure et des belles-lettres’ (opening of Bk in, ch. i). It sounds as if, in matters of literary culture, Tocqueville was taking over unquestioned the idealised account of an other-worldly German culture given in Madame de Staëls De I'Allemagne.

²⁷ Gay, Peter, Enlightenment, 11, p. 682Google Scholar, calls the survival of the term ‘enlightened despotism’ a case of the ‘tenacity of a cliché’. His bibliography (ibid.) traces the still fairly recent growth of resistance to it. The trouble has always been not that historians did not know their history, but that they did not know their literature and philosophy. ‘Enlightenment’ itself was for them a cliche of no very precise meaning. It is still rare to find a direct comparison of absolutist practice with specified principles which will allow the case to be judged precisely. A start was made in 1947 by Reinhold Wittram, ‘Formen und Wandlungen des europaischen Absolutismus’, reprinted in Absolutismus(Wege der Forschung cccxiv)(Darmstadt, 1973). Wittram actually says (p. 114): ‘If we stick to Kant's famous definition of enlightenment… then it must be said that the first effect of enlightened absolutism was everywhere to exacerbate the immature dependence of subjected humanity’. For an excellent brief survey of what the ‘enlightened’ absolutists actually did, with what motives, and for what reasons the philosophes and others went along with the half-cock results, see Gagliardo, John G., Enlightened despotism (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

²⁸ See the prefatory note to his Histoire de man temps of 1742: ‘I hope that the posterity for which I write will be able to distinguish the philosopher from the prince and the decent man from the politician.’

²⁹ Lessing's friend Nicolai, a member of the Berlin Enlightenment community, had praised Prussian freedom. Lessing's reply runs: ‘Don't talk to me about your Berlin freedom. It boilsdown to no more than the freedom to parade as many stupid attacks on religion as you like. And that's a freedom any honest man must soon be ashamed to make use of. But just let somebody in Berlin try writing as freely on other matters some time. Let him try telling the aristocratic court mob the truth. Let somebody in Berlin stand up [‘auftreten’ – the word for a public, especially a theatrical appearance] and speak for the rights of subjects and against exploitation and despotism, and you will soon find out which land is to this day the most slavish land in Europe…’. 5 Aug. 1769. A further striking case of ‘constructive flattery’ in Kant's manner is another essay from the Berlinische Monatsschrift, number III of the same year, 1784, on ‘Freedom of thought and freedom of the press’ (author unknown). Itmakes its case entirely out of quotations from Frederick's writings, thus in the most clear-cut way settingthe philosopher in him against the ruler. Reprinted in Norbert Hinske's anthology of pieces from the Berlinische Monatsschrift entitled Was ist Aufklarung?, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1977), pp. 389 ff.

³⁰ In a foreword to the first publication of Act 1, in the Rheinland Thalia, spring 1785, Schiller wrote: ‘If this tragedy is to move the spectator, it must – it seems to me – be through the situation and character of King Philip. […] People expect I know not what monsteras soon as they hear the name of Philip II-m y play collapses as soon as they find such a creature in it.’ Schiller, , Samlliche Werke, 11, 222 fGoogle Scholar.