This chapter discusses Herder’s Fragments: On Recent German Literature. In this work, Herder provided a comprehensive ‘patriotic’ assessment of the current situation of the German language and literature, including also excerpts from several smaller essays on the origins of poetry, language, and society. Previous scholarly discussions have mainly focused on Herder’s evolving historicism, aesthetics or philosophical hermeneutics as set out in these early essays. However, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that Herder’s theory of German linguistic and literary patriotism rested on a philosophical history of humanity, which he devised in dialogue with several other such histories. Engaging with Iselin’s and Goguet’s ideas, Herder sought to provide a response and alternative to Rousseau’s account of early human history. His own account closely paralleled that of John Brown. Both Brown and Herder traced all human culture and politics back to humans’ original creative agency, while Herder also drew rather optimistic conclusions from this. If it was the human capacity for poetry that demonstrated the dignity of human nature and had, from the earliest times, sustained human societies, one could hope that some form of poetry could also supply a remedy to the ‘current malaise of the world’.

Two early essays from the year 1765 set the scene for Herder’s lifelong engagement with the topic of patriotism. Both are focused on the question of modern patriotism. Reading them side-by-side one is nevertheless struck by their contrasting tenor. An earlier unfinished essay, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People, is highly critical of modern society and politics, while Do We Still Have the Public and Fatherland of the Ancients celebrates modern developments, including luxury and modern freedom. In an effort to explain these differences, this chapter argues that these essays represent an important intersection between two kinds of debates on Rousseau’s moral and political thought in German-speaking countries. Herder entered the debate as a self-avowed ‘Rousseauian’, while he soon also became aware of economic and political debates that were originally shaped by Montesquieu. In these debates, Rousseau had come to be seen as a defender of austere democratic republicanism modelled on early Greek societies. This was not the Rousseau Herder wished to associate himself with. The second essay is thus replete with implicit references to Abbt, Hume and Hamann. The same orientation was shared by the local elites in Riga.