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industry, and agriculture into powerful pressure groups, as well as the
unrepresentative character of Prussian politics, the proposed alliance
between evolutionary socialism and democratic liberalism had little
chance of success." Indeed, when the Weimar Republic was founded
more or less on the basis of such an alliance, these obstacles, rein–
forced as they were by the international political and economic
situation, were still formidable enough to lead to disaster. Willey's
remark that the "vigor of social democracy in the Federal Republic
today is in some measure indirectly owed" to neo-Kantian efforts,
provides only a minor correction to the general verdict of impotency,
even for those who agree with his dubious attribution of vigor to the
socialism of H elmut Schmidt and his colleagues.
The source of this political failure lies, however, in more than the
"serious imbalance between theory and practin:" emphasized by
Willey; for the theory itself, in whatever form, was seriously deficient.
Willey's general sympathy for neo-Kantianism prevents him from un–
derstanding the very serious reasons why it ultimately was abandoned
by most German intellectuals. He never, in fact, pays serious attention
to figures like Emil Lask, who turned against it, or Georg Lukacs, who
wrote its most penetrating epitaph. Instead, he rests content with
generalizations about the "disorder and disillusionment in German life
and the attendant desire for something more conducive to one's
spiritual security than cold logic." In his eyes, this desire meant a
£lagging of the critical spirit and an irrational return to speculation
and mysticism. Although in part this judgment is correct insofar as a
plethora of pseudosolutions, religious and aesthetic as well as political,
were eagerly adopted by many Germans anxious for holistic certainty.
But for others with more sober and responsible intentions, neo–
Kantianism proved equally deficient. Indeed, as Heinrich Levy pointed
out as early as 1927, the so-called "Hegel Renaissance" of the Weimar
era was led by many neo-Kantians themselves.
It
was no less a figure
than Windelband, in his famous lecture of 1910, who first coined that
term
to
describe the sense of impatience with Kantian criticism that
began well before the war.
Indeed, many Weimar thinkers came to insist that neo-Kantian–
ism was not critical enough, especially of its own underpinnings. That
is, it had failed to question its own essentially ahistorical and overly
rationalisti c assumptions about subjectivity and the role of ideas in
shaping social life. Whether from Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Barth,
Lukacs, or Jaspers, the cry was for more concreteness and less abstrac–
tion , for a philosophy that would take into account the lived experi-
