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IN MEMORIAM
REGINE OTTO
A veritable tidal shift in Herder scholarship has taken place over the last quarter century, primarily but not exclusively in German.1 This review essay seeks to evoke the richness and vitality of this revival with the hope of persuading American academics that some ill-founded opinions still circulating concerning Herder's "irrationalism" and chauvinistic, even racist nationalism, and his philosophical naivety and literary effrontery, might at last be put to rest. The "rationalist" reconstruction of German Enlightenment, with Kant as its overweening hero, now appears to have cast into unwarranted shadow many other endeavors towards Enlightenment - including Herder's - that current historiography is recovering.2 "True Enlightenment" in late eighteenth-century Germany was emphatically not just Kant's critical philosophy.3 We must pluralize our notion of Enlightenment.4 The recent revival has brought sharply to the fore two crucial aspects of Herder. First, there is the contribution of Herder's thought to the emergent cultural and social sciences. The recognition extended Herder in the histories of various disciplines in the human sciences has not been misguided;5 the problem is that it has not been synthesized effectively enough across these disciplines to demonstrate his truly seminal importance. Second, for Herder the "science of man" was also a natural science: the division between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been such a hallmark of the age from Kant until very recently did not exist for him. As Hans Adler puts it, "Nature, the anthropological, and the history of humanity belong together for Herder."6 Accordingly, there has been a second and even more striking recognition of Herder's involvement with the emergent natural sciences of his day.
It is routinely acknowledged that Herder played a major role in the gestation of many of the "interpretive" cultural and social sciences - most prominently, cultural anthropology, history, and literary-philosophical hermeneutics. At a conference devoted to Herder and anthropology in 2006, Michael Forster brilliantly sketched the lines of Herder's impact on the emergence of cultural anthropology.7 Others have discerned this Herderian influence, as well, most notably the dean of historians of anthropology, George Stocking.8 With regard to history, the historicist invocation of Herder is well-trodden ground, though the notion of "historicism" developed by Rudolf Stadelmann and Friedrich Meinecke was deeply flawed by...