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Johann Gottfried Herder
Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism
Translated and edited by Philip V. Bohlman
Oakland: University of California Press, 2017
Johann Gottfried Herder was an 18th-century German philosopher, theologian, translator, and critic. He wrote on many subjects: political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of history, metaphysics, linguistics, philology, art, religion, mythology, and music. (more…)
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“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West.”–“Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin IV
It was with the advent of Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) that a direct link was first made between national culture and the simplicity of peasant life. (more…)
3,096 words
The pursuit of truthfulness has been a uniquely Western ambition since the ancient Greeks came to discover that humans have a faculty called “mind” or “nous” that is distinguishable from bodily appetites and the “spirited” personal emotions, which allows human beings to think rationally in accordance with logical principles and factually demonstrated evidence over and above one’s inclinations and the taken for granted conventions of the time.
3,733 words
English original here
1 – Fichte e o Destino da Nação Alemã
J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), o primeiro dos grandes idealistas alemães pós-kantianos, é uma figura importante na ascensão do nacionalismo alemão – e tem sido muitas vezes acusado de ser um dos pais fundadores do Nacional-Socialismo.
Philipp Veit, “Germania,” 1848
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Portuguese translation here
1. Fichte and the Destiny of the German Nation
J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), the first of the great post-Kantian German Idealists, is an important figure in the rise of German nationalism – and has often been accused of being one of the founding fathers of National Socialism.
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“Before they addressed themselves to the impractical task of changing men by changing laws, the justices might have pondered the words of Savigny, who wrote, ‘Law is no more made by lawyers than language by grammarians. Law is the natural moral product of a people . . . the persistent customs of a nation, springing organically from its past and present. Even statute law lives in the general consensus of the people.'” –Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (1981) (more…)
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German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) developed the concept of romantic or organic nationalism, a form of ethnic nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy from historic cultural or hereditary groups. The underlying assumption is that every ethnicity should be politically distinct. Herder’s ideas on the subject were expressed in his theory of the Volksgeist. (more…)