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Updated: June 28, 2025
It was the external authority which the revolutionary party had won in Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the struggle. Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German peasantry—characteristics which subsist amid a wide variety of circumstances.
According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by distinguishing the former as Centralized Land and the latter as Individualized Land; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest space.
This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of economical classification, but not of social classification. In his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion of the other great social groups; it is the sign and result of the decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society.
Riehl never lost sight, in any of his distinctions, of that inalienable affinity between land and people; the solidarity of a nation, its very right of existing as a political entity, he derived from homogeneity as to origin, language, custom, habitat.
Riehl: Philosophical Criticism, 1876-87; Address On Scientific and Unscientific Philosophy, 1883. With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content.
By a formulation so comprehensive and exacting, Riehl himself stood committed to the investigation of the national life not only in the breadth and variety of its general aspect, but also in its minuter processes that had so far been left unheeded.
On the whole, the inclusion of Riehl among the most eminent German writers of the nineteenth century is due far less to his works of fiction than to a just recognition of his primacy among historians of culture, on account of the extraordinary reach of his influence. This influence he certainly owed as much to his rare art of popular presentation as to his profound scholarship.
After the notable failure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view of abstract democratic and socialistic theories, after the practical demonstration of the evils resulting from a bureaucratic system, which governs by an undiscriminating, dead mechanism, Riehl wishes to urge on the consideration of his countrymen a social policy founded on the special study of the people as they are—on the natural history of the various social ranks.
Riehl justly urges the importance of simplifying law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity at its source, and also of encouraging, by every possible means, the practice of arbitration. The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same reason that he does not make love and marry in summer—because he has no time for that sort of thing.
The younger son of a prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any vocation; and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science; his pursuit will be called a “passion,” not a “calling,” and to the end of his days he remains a dilettante. “But the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical calling can alone satisfy the active man.” Direct legislation cannot remedy this evil.
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