The Faculties of Conflict: Prussian Statecraft and Martial Culture in German Romantic Political and Aesthetic Thought

Abstract

This interdisciplinary dissertation considers the development and proliferation of notions of statecraft in the context of Prussia during the early part of the 19th century, roughly 1800-1870. I adopt a mix of discourse analytical and intellectual historical methods to reconsider the role of the intellectual production of concepts and practices related to statecraft, particularly drawing from a mix of thought that spans from high culture, such as literature, poetry, and philosophy, but also sources that contributed to the development of Prussian martial culture which I locate in part in the proliferation of 'mirrors to the prince' writings during this period along with a broader turn to Machiavelli. These analyses help situate a particular nexus that includes the Romantic concepts of Bildung, Staatsform, Heimat, and Lebensform, which elucidate their views on questions of community, freedom, interpretation, (un)certainty, organicism, and coalesce to reshape Prussian society and state, thus contributing to the later unification of Germany in 1871. I document the evolution of this nexus and its impact on the organizational cultures of the Prussian military, higher education, and police state. This trajectory should prompt IR scholars, in particular, to reconsider the conventional progression of techniques of statecraft in relation to culture. The Romantic turn to the 'mirrors to the prince' genre challenges a clean understanding of reason of state as merely calculative rationality, and a deeper analysis into the intellectual production of symbols, metaphor, myths, concepts, and practices offers a warning about the possibility of cooptation and complicity of aesthetic, philosophical, or academic conceptual developments into the project of (nation)-state building. I offer a cultural interpretation of historical statecraft that understands contemporary concepts such as the national interest and practices of national security as constituted by aesthetic and discursive forms of representation that shape how political reality becomes intelligible.