In 1780 Christian Dohm, a ranking Prussian civil servant, collaborated with the Berlin Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on a memorandum submitted on behalf of the Jews of Alsace to the French Council of State. A year later Dohm issued his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, a treatise on the civil improvement of the Jews, which contained a comprehensive program for increasing the general utility of the Jewish population. By that time, the European debate over the Jews was already long in progress. The seventeenth century had dealt with the question of readmission and the first half of the eighteenth century less successfully with naturalization. Both debates had centered in England, although the issues involved were pertinent to Holland, France, and to some extent Italy as well. Both debates had also produced a considerable number of polemics. Most recently, a 1753 bill sponsored by the Pelham government sought to facilitate the process of naturalization for Jewish immigrants. The so-called Jew Bill precipitated a wide-ranging public debate on the status of the Jews in England.

Until the 1950s the historical reputation of the eighteenth-century rulers of Hesse-Cassel rested primarily upon their practice of financing state and court expenses by leasing conscripted and trained military units to Europe's major powers. Over the course of the last forty years another picture has emerged which stresses that these petty German absolutists participated in a movement of “Enlightened” reform. More recent attempts to reconcile apparent enlightenment with a military and financial system based on involuntary military servitude have noted contradictory labyrinths of means, ends, theory, and practice. What I offer in the following pages is not an attempt to soften these antinomies but an effort to highlight them through historical analysis of the military reforms of Landgrave Frederick II (1760–85). In this way I hope to contribute to a critical account of bureaucratic “rationality” as eighteenth-century absolutist princes practiced it.

The vague figure of Rudolf Haym, founding editor of the Preussische jahrbücher, hovers hazily in the background of many discussions of nineteenth-century German Liberalism. He has been relegated to obscurity by more forceful and impressive personalities: Dahlmann, Gervinus, and Hansemann in 1848, Max Duncker and Georg von Vincke in the 1850s and 1860s, Treitschke and Mommsen in the 1860s and 1870s, to name a few. Yet in a long career whose accomplishments are modest only in historical perspective, Haym possessed a quality shared by none of his more famous contemporaries: a gift for being at the center of moderate liberal opinion, sometimes a few years in advance of more renowned liberals. This gift was expressed in his philosophical work on Hegel, and above all in his political journalism in the Preussische Jahrbücher.