In his book German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, author James J. Sheehan examines the beginnings of liberalism, which he describes as "an attempt both to understand and to change the world" (1). The political thought, subsequent political movement, and related institutions of liberalism have become vitally important in the West, and in this book Sheehan examines the manifestation of liberalism in Germany. In so doing, Sheehan shows how the general tenets of liberalism are shaped and molded by the traditions and models of the society which adopts liberalism. The liberalism of western Europe was changed and reshaped in its encounters with other cultures, a process Sheehan calls translation and which he says has become more problematic the further liberalism has moved from its sources. Sheehan makes it clear at the outset that the Germans encountered difficulties in translating the ideas of liberalism to their particular social and cultural context, and he offers an examination of both liberalism and German society to show how these relationships developed and influenced one another.
The title Sheehan gives to his introductory section shows the thrust of his thinking about liberalism in the German context--"Liberalism in an Illiberal Society." Sheehan traces the rise and fall of German liberalism from the latter third of the eighteenth century to the First World War, and he finds the failure of liberalism at least in part in terms of the "traditional" German social institutions that resisted liberal thinking. The focus of the book is on the clash between liberal thought and German institutions. Sheehan divides his book into sections according to different eras in the history of liberal thought in Germany, from the period in which the basic concepts were developed and adapted to the German context through the ultimate decline of liberal thought.
Sheehan describes the origins of liberalism as part of the cluster of deve...