Because the Gemeinschaft is such a compelling and powerful German concept, we should pay some attention to arguably its most interesting apologist before we succumb to the overriding authority of the state. More than anyone, Justus Möser takes us into the world of the integrated and authentic German community. His eighteenth-century History of Osnabrück is, in its very detail, a statement of the ordinary in all its modest glory. Osnabrück may have been but a tiny bishopric of a few thousand inhabitants, but therein lay the attractions of Möser's work to German historians and thinkers. Here, apparently, was a way of escaping French and Enlightenment universalism by setting before it modest and indigenous virtues. This was not merely a nationalist gesture, rather it implied, at the very least, an alternative and superior notion of the business of understanding history, a wholly different epistemology. For instance, Meinecke's observation that “Möser has given us an unforgettable portrait of the Osnabrück farmer's wife sitting as she had been accustomed through long tradition in the middle of the house and keeping a close watch on all that went on around her” is telling. We are confronted by the banal fact that the study of history has, in this example, been so reduced that our theoretical authority figure can indeed keep an eye on everything. But this reduction should not under any circumstances be seen as a loss. Rather it is redolent with riches, riches that come about not because of any retreat into the macabre world of the Grimms, or for that matter into the more fantastic flights of fancy of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Nor do they direct us—at least not in the first instance—to mystical notions of nation and race. Instead they amount to a groundbreaking first step in undercutting the metacommentary of eighteenth-century thought that saw human nature as a constant, reason as intrinsic to the world, and Natural Law as a first principle.