[PEN-L:1435] Re: Honor of the Anglo-Saxons

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>     Having forwarded without asking his permission to do
>so the private message to me from Victor Kasper in which
>corrected me on some mistakes regarding my remarks about
>the ancestry and ethnic background of the Prussians, I
>thought I would take the opportunity to make a few more
>pokes at the list's House Big Cheese Neoclassical, Brad De
>Long

Alas. My main point appears to have been lost...

The point I first ran across in Franklin Ford's excellent book, _Robe and
Sword_, on the feudal reaction to royal absolutism in eighteenth century
France. Ford pointed out that the principal ideologues of and the center of
power and influence of those who harked back to the Frankish conquest of
Gaul and claimed that the king was (or should be) merely first among and
the servant of the nobility were from the noblesse de robe, those
*bureaucrats* who had been enobled by previous kings in an attempt to
control the noblesse d'epee. And Ford carefully traces how those who served
Moliere as his models for the bourgeois gentilhomme hypnotize themselves
into believing that they have some ownership of the feudal trappings of
blood and ancestry

I simply wanted to point out that advocates of Germanic blood and
bone--Herder and Hegel among them--are living in an equal fantasyland: they
would have struck the real stem-Germans--people like my seventh-century
ancestor Leofric Earl of Mercia--as effete half-Slavs good for nothing
other than to be made slaves.

I mean, when did Hegel ever carve the body of a slain enemy into the blood
eagle?

For more on this, read _The Invention of Tradition_ as well as _Robe and
Sword_...


Brad DeLong