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.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.