To describe Frederick M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History is to chart a work that treats Johann Gottfried Herder not merely as a source of quotable slogans about Volk, language, and culture, but as an architect of a supple vision in which the formative powers of a people’s speech, memory, and art are constantly disciplined by an ethic of Humanität—a humanity whose scope is universal even as its dwelling place is irreducibly particular. Barnard writes with the conviction that Herder’s celebrated insistence on the embeddedness of human creativity in communal language is only the beginning of the story. What follows is a patiently constructed account of how that embeddedness must be held together with an enlarged moral imagination, a historically conscious sense that every gain exacts a loss, and a method of empathetic inquiry—Einfühlungsvermögen—able to “enter into” the lifeworlds of others without dissolving their incommensurable distinctiveness into comforting abstractions. In this book, Herder’s nationalism is neither a gateway to ethnic fanaticism nor a friendly prelude to homogenizing cosmopolitanism; it is a strenuous ethic of belonging that guards against both temptations by tethering national self-formation to the claims of humanity as such.
Barnard situates this ethical nationalism against the stark political horizons of Herder’s own Germany—terra obedientiae, a political desert in which censorial pressures forced political thought to migrate into the ostensibly non-political genres of philology, aesthetics, and history. The result, as Barnard shows, is a body of writing that is fragmentary in form but synoptic in reach, an unusually capacious intelligence that draws literary criticism and folklore into one field of vision with anthropology, the philosophy of history, and political reflection. From the outset Barnard emphasizes Herder’s insistence that we read the past for the sake of the present and the future—the “golden rule of politics” that demands one take the measure of what-is by imaginatively retracing what-has-been, in order to discern what-might-yet-be. It is precisely because the past is present within us that our futures may be judged with sobriety; and it is precisely because history is not a smooth, cumulative ascent that every new achievement entails “excluded alternatives,” the structural losses that attend the very possibility of cultural advance.
The book’s architecture mirrors this doubleness. Without reducing Herder to program or catechism, Barnard unfolds a continuous argument that moves among the Hebraic sources of Herder’s political imagination, the literary-political milieu of Cultural Romanticism, and the refracting prisms of later interlocutors such as Heine and Masaryk, before turning to causation, continuity, and the contemporary idiom of “globalization.” The thematic arc is not a set of sealed compartments; it is a sequence of interlocking vantage points from which to view the abiding problem Herder set himself: how to conjoin nationality and humanity without allowing either to cannibalize the other. Even the table of contents reads like a relay of that problem across different terrains—ancient Hebraic nationhood, Romantic politics, the tensions between particularism and universalism, the price of progress, and the world-historical pressures that today go by the name of globalization.
One of the book’s great strengths is its refusal to treat Herder’s nationalism as “naturalized” politics. Barnard carefully restores Herder’s own distinction between the organic growth of cultures and the artifactual status of states, insisting that the nation-state, at best, is the least unnatural of artifices, never the decree of nature. Hence Herder’s early and consistent alarm at racist variants and ethnic imperialism—forms of domination that violate the very reciprocity (Zusammenwirken) on which any humane national culture must rest. Far from endorsing a Herrenvolk fantasy, Herder rejects any talk of a “favoured nation,” repudiates the figure of the permanent political patriarch, and sees in the Mosaic constitution not the cult of a ruler but a society governed by law—a “nomocracy”—whose cohesion is sustained by covenant, memory, and liturgy rather than by the person of a sovereign. Barnard draws out how this scriptural-political imaginary equips Herder to imagine republican plurality and distributed authority without surrendering the integrative work of shared practices and common law.
So, too, with method: Barnard returns again and again to Herder’s claim that understanding humans requires a mode of knowing different from the experimental sciences. Einfühlungsvermögen is not romantic caprice; it is the disciplined, imaginative “in-dwelling” that lets us grasp a form of life from the inside, where motives, moods, customs, and aims hang together in lived patterns of significance. The point is not to license subjectivism but to expand judgment—the “enlarged mentality” by which one sees ideas, myths, prejudices, songs, and rites as the connective tissues of cultural worlds. Barnard is especially deft in showing how Herder’s language of metaphor—far from being decorative—humanizes concept and theory, making explanation itself answerable to experience. If language is the house of a people’s Weltanschauung, metaphor is, for Herder, its heartbeat. It is no surprise, then, that Barnard’s Herder can be both a skeptic of facile Enlightenment universalism and a defender of universality—provided universality arrives by way of plural particulars rather than as a bulldozing predicate.
Nowhere is Barnard’s synoptic tact more visible than in his handling of the “modern” discussion of world culture. He opens his treatment of globalization by recalling Harold Lasswell’s early complaint that political analysis must expand to include “the larger array of symbols and practices in culture.” Herder, Barnard argues, anticipated this expansion by refusing the tidy separations—material from immaterial, technology from value, artifact from meaning—that made it easy to imagine an exportable “world culture” free of spiritual consequences. For Herder, culture is an inseparable whole: tools, techniques, and trade are bound to inherited beliefs, arts, and norms; what is transmitted is never reproduced intact, and what is imported transforms the fabric into which it is woven. Against the Enlightenment hope that development would march forward uniformly, Barnard draws on Herder to insist that values collide, priorities differ, and choices incur costs—that the very successes of diffusion generate the “crises of rising expectations” that unsettle polities and persons alike. If there is a Herderian antidote to globalization’s unreflective triumphalism, it lies in this double caution: that nothing cultural is merely “material,” and that no progress is costless.
Barnard’s comparative chapter with Heine probes the metaphysical nerve of Humanität by reading it as methexis: participation in a principle that joins what seems to resist joining—finite embodiment and infinite aspiration, the singular lives of nations and the shared horizon of humanity. Here Barnard’s Herder is neither quietist nor messianic engineer. Aspirations must be tempered by Besonnenheit—reflective composure—and by Mitsein, the felt awareness of being-with others in a shared world. Barnard retrieves an ethic of imaginative action—Wirken—that lets us hope for the extension of judgment and compassion without mistaking hope for omnipotence.
The dialogue with Masaryk then anchors the book’s ethical-political center of gravity. Barnard shows, with striking clarity, how both thinkers bind human autonomy to limits disclosed by religion, using “titanism” as the cautionary name for an unbounded humanism that forgets measure. The consequence is not clericalism but a principled refusal of reductionism: moral agency cannot be explained away by impersonal causality, and accountability cannot be derived from social mechanics. In both Herder and Masaryk, religion supplies scale, orientation, and the practical intelligibility of moral sanctions; without it, reason risks becoming a formal filter detached from substantive goods, and modernity risks installing pseudo-science as civil religion. The way out is not to deny science but to refuse its monopoly on meaning. Barnard’s sensitivity to this balancing act is exemplary: he neither baptizes Herder nor secularizes Masaryk; he lets each thinker display how Humanität is safeguarded when freedom learns its proper bounds.
Methodologically, the study is anchored in the Suphan edition of Sämtliche Werke, and Barnard’s footnotes make that anchorage visible; the scholarly apparatus is exacting because the argument requires textual precision at precisely those junctures—on language, religion, causation, and historical continuity—where easy generalities abound. Readers will find the apparatus a guide rather than a barrier: it is the scaffolding for a carefully proportioned edifice.
The provenance of the volume also matters. Conceived for students of the history of ideas yet written with an ear for Herder’s metaphoric power, the book gathers revised essays and fresh material into a coherent whole—fittingly, in the bicentennial year of Herder’s death—under the aegis of the McGill-Queen’s “Studies in the History of Ideas.” The continuity across chapters is real: each returns, from a different angle, to the central question of how to think nationality and humanity together without absorption, how to practice historical inquiry that is at once empathetic and unsentimental, how to reckon with the price tags on our modern ideals.
Barnard’s ultimate claim is modest in form and radical in consequence. Herder did not solve the elusiveness of “culture,” the perplexities of historical causation, or the paradoxes of plural universality; he showed us, with an unusually steady hand, what those problems are not, and how to think within their tensions without defaulting to dogma or despair. In our present, where talk of identity too often hardens into belligerence and appeals to the universal too quickly flatten difference, Barnard’s Herder reopens the space of judgment: to love one’s own not as the measure of all things but as the matrix of creativity; to prize world culture not as a solvent but as a testing ground for priorities; to pursue progress without forgetting the alternatives we cancelled to achieve it; and to practice Humanität as an ongoing work of reflective, empathetic, historically alert participation. In this sense, Barnard’s study does not merely explicate Herder; it models the very fusion Herder sought—of particular and universal, method and morality, language and life.
If there is a single sentence that could serve as the book’s quiet thesis, it is this: the dignity of peoples and the dignity of persons rise and fall together, and both depend upon the imaginative discipline to see from within what we are tempted to judge from without. Barnard’s Herder gives that discipline its deepest rationale and its most humane form.
Simon Gros 
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