Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
In September 1862, Otto von Bismarck, the new prime minister of Prussia, went to the Prussian Chamber of Deputies to confront the Budget Committee. His face still sunburned from a trip to the south of France, he urged the lawmakers not to waste time in political debate while Germany remained ununited. “It is not to Prussia’s liberalism that Germany looks,” he said, “but to its power. . . . It is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by Eisen und Blut” (iron and blood).
Across the Atlantic, Abraham Lincoln reached a similar conclusion—or so Edmund Wilson argued in his 1962 book Patriotic Gore. In Wilson’s reading, Lincoln, too, had used “iron and blood” to achieve his goals: both he and Bismarck had “established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia.” Other scholars have made the same argument more recently.
Was Wilson right to find a similarity of method and purpose in the two greatest statesmen of their age?
Lincoln and the Moral Imagination
Across the Atlantic, Abraham Lincoln reached a similar conclusion—or so Edmund Wilson argued in his 1962 book Patriotic Gore. In Wilson’s reading, Lincoln, too, had used “iron and blood” to achieve his goals: both he and Bismarck had “established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia.” Other scholars have made the same argument more recently.
Was Wilson right to find a similarity of method and purpose in the two greatest statesmen of their age?
Lincoln and the Moral Imagination
