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transcend class differences. In a long footnote directed against Fritz
Heinemann's charge that Cohen's philosophy in particular repre–
sented "the swan song of the middle class, the final apologia for the
cultural manifest destiny of the bourgeoisie," Willey points to Cohen's
social democratic political sympathies and his universalistic refusal to
assign a privileged role to the middle class. What Willey, however,
ignores is the way in which Cohen's abstract universalism fits well with
the traditional
Bildungsburgertum's
pretensions
to
transcend class
conflict. Although it is true that more cynical and realistic ideologues
in Wilhelmian Germany had turned to franker defenses of class
superiority, it had long been a staple of bourgeois ideology to cloak
that defense in universalist terms. This tactic was especially attractive
to the mandarinate whose ties to the bureaucracy meant that they
identified themselves with the state as a whole. Cohen's universalism,
to be sure, was more genuinely Kantian in its relatively cosmopolitan
tenor than was most of theirs, but it was no less illusory.
It
was no
coincidence that it served a particular function for those German Jews,
for whom Cohen was a leading spokesman, who sought assimilation
as "German Citizens of the Jewish Faith" on the grounds that Juda–
ism was little more than neo-Kantianism in religious garb. Abstract
universalism was an antidote to both class and ethnic hostility, or so it
seemed for a few brief decades. By the end of Cohen's own life in-t918,
however, the folly of this assumption had become all too obvious;
Cohen himself spent his last years returning to Jewish concerns and by
the 1920s new figures in the Jewish community like Gershom Scholem
and Franz Rosenzweig had rejected neo-Kantianism altogether.
The failure of neo-Kantianism as a bridge between Jewish and
gentile Germany, which Willey treats only in passing, was emblematic
of its general political recklessness. Rickert and Windelband's attempts
to find transcendent values and answer the relativistic implications of
historicism were in vain, as Troeltsch and Weber came to recognize.
The Baden School, for all its sophisticated methodological analysis of
the cultural and social sciences, had nothing direct to say about
concrete political problems. Their colleagues in Marburg, who para–
doxically were more interested in the epistemology of science than in
history, did try to influence the political scene, but with little real
impact. Concerned with moral dignity and rational discourse, but
construing these in essentially formal terms, they had little to offer a
society in which consensus was proving increasingly difficult to
obtain. Moreover, as Willey himself concedes, "given the refeudaliza–
tion of the German middle class and the organization of commerce,
