Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the German Romantics

A few scholars had indicated to me, and other reading had suggested, that in his Addresses to the German Nation Fichte lays out an understanding of how languages make nations. Other people suggested that the German Romantics, a school of thought which was greatly influenced by Fichte, also supported this idea.

Fichte is more than a philo-German, he is anti-everyone else. No human beings, except Germans, are capable of original thought. The reason, says Fichte, is that, by hacing their language changed from Celtic to Roman, the other people of Western Europe had lost their claim to be "original people." This change in the natural history of a people, says Fichte, prevented them from thinking.

The German Romantics didn't write much political philosophy, they were interested in poetry. They did think that the greatest political philosophy should be poetic (Novalis, Faith and Love , (1797?)). I've found nothing which indicates any greater theory of the role of language in nationalism, or the role of language in world history, in my review of the early political writings of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Friedrich Schlegel, or Friedrich Daniel Schleiermarcher, as collected in Beiser1 .