Revolution and revitalization: Karoline von Gunderrode's political philosophy and its metaphysical foundations

This paper adds to efforts to retrieve the long-neglected philosophical contributions of Karoline von Gunderrode (1780-1806), and is one of the first to seriously address the political commitments in Gunderrode's work, especially regarding revolution. This idea gains an unusual status in the context of Gunderrode's metaphysics, and is key to understanding the connections between Gunderrode's more obviously philosophical writings and her literary work. I argue that Gunderrode's concept of revolution resembles, in some respects, the ideas of other thinkers of her time, but has ramifications for conceiving of human individuals and their relationships to society and nature that are unique to Gunderrode. First, I use a comparison with the work of contemporaries on revolution to justify interpreting Gunderrode's metaphysics in relation to her thought on politics. Gunderrode often masks her political thought in the form of plays, and the paper next considers the theme of revolution in her playsMuhammad, the Prophet of Mecca, andUdohla. Lastly, the paper contrasts Gunderrode's position on revolution to claims by Herder and Fichte, arguing that Gunderrode's conception of a cycle of enhancement and decay of natural forces, political power and social cohesion differs from androcentric models that emphasize the development of consciousness.