VON (1750-1822), Prussian reformer.
As chancellor of Prussia from 1810 to 1822, Karl August von Hardenberg was one of the two
Leading figures, along with Karl Freiherr vom Stein, in the Reform Movement (1807-1815), which produced profound legal and socioeconomic changes in Prussia. Hardenberg’s principal legislative accomplishments included two economic decrees of 1810, which moved Prussia toward a free-market economy, and which many historians credit with unleashing powerful long-term economic growth. He also succeeded in keeping the Prussian state intact in the face of political and financial pressure from Napoleon, and he navigated the state from its alliance with Napoleon through the successful War of Liberation against France in 1813-1814. But after Napoleon’s defeat, Hardenberg encountered a backlash against his proposals for further political reforms, and he died without having realized his dream for the adoption of a parliamentary constitution in Prussia.
Hardenberg was born on 31 May 1750 in Essenrode, Hanover, to a wealthy noble landowning family. He studied at the University of Gottingen, and served as an official in Hanover and Brunswick before accepting an appointment in the Prussian civil service, where he made his reputation as the administrator of Prussia’s new territories in Ansbach-Bayreuth, and as a member of the general directory in Berlin after 1798.
From 1804 to 1806, Hardenberg served as Prussian foreign minister. In this capacity he played a pivotal role in formulating Prussia’s foreign policy—initially supporting rapprochement with France, and then advocating war. Hardenberg’s effectiveness as foreign minister was limited by bitter infighting with his rival, Christian von Haugwitz, one of the king’s cabinet councillors. Six months before the outbreak of hostilities with France, Frederick William III (r. 1797-1840) dismissed Hardenberg from office, under pressure from French officials who were upset by Harden-berg’s support for an alliance with Britain. In January 1807 Hardenberg returned to office as the king’s chief adviser, but Napoleon forced the king to dismiss him again in October of the same year.
In May 1810 Frederick William III named Hardenberg chancellor of Prussia, following Stein’s thirteen-month ministry of 1807-1808 and the subsequent eighteen-month ‘‘interim’’ ministry led by Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein and Friedrich Ferdinand Alexander Dohna. As chancellor, Hardenberg sought to fulfill the bold plan for rebuilding Prussia that he had articulated in his Riga Memorandum of September 1807, shortly after Prussia’s capitulation to Napoleon in the disastrous Treaty of Tilsit. Hardenberg had argued that Prussia needed to imitate its conqueror by undergoing ‘‘a revolution... leading to the ennoblement of mankind,’’ which would transform the subjects of the Prussian king into Staatsburger (citizens of the state). This revolution, however, would ‘‘be made not through violent impulses from below or outside, but through the wisdom of the government,’’ and it would culminate in a political system combining ‘‘democratic principles in a monarchical government’’ (quoted in Levinger, p. 46).
Hardenberg successfully promoted several major economic reforms, along with social reforms including the Jewish Emancipation decree of 1812. Although he was forced to retreat from certain controversial proposals, such as a universal income tax, his decrees went a long way toward abolishing the remnants of aristocratic privilege in Prussia, and liberalized the economies of the towns as well. The Finance Edict of 27 October 1810 declared the state’s intention to equalize tax burdens, reform the tariff and toll system, create freedom of enterprise, and secularize church lands. The Gewerbesteueredikt (enterprise tax edict) of 2 November 1810 eliminated the guilds’ monopolies over the practice of trades. Anyone, whether a resident of the countryside or the towns, could now begin practicing a trade simply by paying an annual ‘‘tax on enterprises’’—though a certificate of competence was required for certain occupations. The Gewerbesteueredikt constituted a significant step toward the creation of a fully free labor market in Prussia.
Hardenberg’s ambitions for political reform, by contrast, remained largely unfulfilled—in part because of the inherent difficulties in harmonizing democratic and monarchical forms of government. He sought to achieve this goal by rationalizing the Prussian administration and by educating the citizenry for responsible and enlightened political participation. But his program for administrative rationalization met with considerable resistance, although a watered-down version of his plan for a new Prussian council of state was adopted in 1817. Hardenberg had even less luck with several experimental representative institutions that he created between 1811 and 1815. Rather than rallying the ‘‘nation’’ around its king, these assemblies frequently challenged the government’s authority. Although Hardenberg persuaded Frederick William III on three successive occasions to promise the establishment of a Prussian constitution, these negative experiences with representative politics ultimately convinced the king to renege on his pledges—so that Prussia remained without a constitution until the Revolution of 1848.
In 1815 Frederick William elevated Harden-berg to the title of prince, in gratitude for his leadership during the French occupation and the War of Liberation. Hardenberg remained in office as chancellor until his death in November 1822. Confronting an increasingly vocal opposition at court, he acquiesced to certain conservative measures such as the draconian Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. Until the final months of his life, however, he continued to lobby unsuccessfully for a Prussian constitution.
See also Congress of Vienna; Frederick William III;
Germany; Liberalism; Metternich, Clemens von;
Napoleonic Empire; Prussia; Restoration; Stein,
Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hofmeister-Hunger, Andrea. Pressepolitik und Staatsre-form: die Institutionalisierung staatlicher Offen-tlichkeitsarbeit bei Karl August von Hardenberg (1792-1822). Gottingen, 1994.
Levinger, Matthew. Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806-1848. New York, 2000.
Meinecke, Friedrich. The Age of German Liberation, 1795-1815. Edited by Peter Paret. Translated by Peter Paret and Helmuth Fischer. Berkeley, Calif., 1977.
Thielen, Peter. Karl August von Hardenberg, 1750-1822: Eine Biographie. Cologne, 1967.
Vogel, Barbara. Allgemeine Gewerbefreiheit: die Reform-politik des preussischen Staatskanzlers Hardenberg (1810-1820). Gottingen, 1983.
Matthew Levinger
HARDIE, JAMES KEIR (1856 1915), Scottish politician and labor organizer.
James Keir Hardie was a leading political figure in the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party, and his career was a representation of independent Labour politics. His trade union activities thrust him to fame and led to his parliamentary success as the first independent Labour member of Parliament (MP) in 1892.
Hardie was born in Legbrannock, Lanarkshire, in Scotland, on 15 August 1856 the illegitimate son of David Hardie, a ship’s carpenter, and Mary Keir, a domestic farm servant. He became a messenger boy at the age of seven, and worked in a shipyard and became a baker’s errand boy before working in the coal mines between 1867 and 1878. However, there he was victimized for his trade union activities. He opened a stationer’s shop at Low Waters in 1878 and became a correspondent for the Glasgow Weekly Mail, becoming a full-time journalist in 1882. He was editor of the Cumnock News between 1882 to 1886. He also acted as a trade-union organizer and was secretary of the Lanarkshire miners in 1879, of the Ayrshire miners in 1880, and of the Scottish Miners’ Federation in 1886. In 1880 he married Lillie Wilson, by whom he had two daughters and two sons.
In his early years Hardie was a staunch Liberal, but a number of events, including a failure to strengthen Scottish miners’ trade unionism radicalized his politics to the extent that The Miner, his new newspaper formed in January 1887, established links with socialists. In April 1888 he fought a parliamentary by-election at Mid-Lanark as an Independent Labour candidate but was defeated after obtaining only 617 votes, 8.2 percent of those cast. However, in 1892 he was returned to Parliament as MP for West Ham South, presenting himself as the MP for the unemployed. His success projected him forward in independent Labour politics and he chaired the foundation conference of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) held at Bradford in January 1893. His position as leader of the new movement was strengthened by the fact that he formed the Labour Leader, as the successor to The Miner, in 1889 and made it a weekly publication from March 1894.
Hardie lost his West Ham South seat in the 1895 general election and despite contesting other seats, most notably Bradford East in November 1896, was not returned to Parliament until 1900, when he became MP for Merthyr Tydfil, a seat that he held until his death. In his pursuit of a broader alliance, he objected to the fusion of the ILP with other socialist groups such as the quasi-Marxist Social Democratic Federation, and his strategy came to fruition on 27 February 1900 when the trade unions and the ILP formed the Labour Representation Committee. This was a small party but it gained increasing trade union support and made a political breakthrough in the January 1906 general election in which it secured thirty seats. At that point it became the Labour Party, and Hardie acted as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party between 1906 and 1908 and 19091910, although he was traveling the empire and the world in 1907-1908.
In reality, Hardie was an excellent propagandist but not a particularly accomplished organizer of the Labour Party, and his period in office was marred by controversy. He was a great advocate of women’s suffrage but favored the approach of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her Women’s Social and Political Union, which emphasized that women should be first given the parliamentary franchise on the same terms as men, which was rejected by many in the Labour movement who wanted the full enfranchisement of men and women and not simply a measure that would only give some middle-class women the vote. This led Hardie to threaten to leave the ILP and the Labour Party. He also faced criticism from the Left over his ambivalent attitude toward the White Australia policy although his antiracist attitude in South Africa and his condemnation of British rule in India, which provoked a storm in Britain, restored his credibility with independent Labour.
From 1910 until his death Hardie was effectively Labour’s elder statesman who would take up the vital issues of the day. He supported the industrial struggles of the immediate prewar period but was consumed by the threat of war in Europe. He hoped that the Second International, of the socialist movement, would prevent war and was faced with a difficult encounter with patriotism in his constituency on 6 August 1914, just after the war broke out. He died, a rather disillusioned man, on 26 September 1915.
The Times obituary of Hardie, which appeared the day after his death, was grudging of his achievements and suggested that he was ‘‘an ineffective leader of the independent group which owed its existence in great measure to his unflagging energy.’’ In 1917 A. G. Gardiner added that ‘‘he was the one man in the parliamentary Labour Party who was unqualified to lead it.’’ Nevertheless, he fought for the right of workers and for the preservation of peace in the face of war, and the Merthyr Pioneer of the 2 October 1915 rightly suggested that with his death the ‘‘member for Humanity has resigned his seat.’’
See also Asquith, Herbert Henry; Great Britain; Labor Movements; Labour Party; Lloyd George, David; Pankhurst, Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia; Second International; Socialism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benn, Caroline. Keir Hardie. London, 1992.
Hughes, Emrys. Keir Hardie. London, 1956.
Morgan, Kenneth O. Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist. London, 1975.
Keith Laybourn
HARDY, THOMAS (1840-1928), English novelist and poet.
The son of a stonemason and former house servant, Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet on the edge of a heath near the county town of Dorchester, in the western shire of Dorset. His early education at home and in different schools ended with his apprenticeship to a local architect at the age of sixteen. When he was twenty-two, Hardy took employment in London with an architect, a large part of whose business was in restoring ancient Anglican churches, an activity that Hardy in later years regretted (because of the accompanying destruction of original stone and wood tracery and fabrics).
In his spare time Hardy wrote poetry, without attaining publication. He turned to prose and had some success with his second published novel,
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The acclaim for his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), led him not only to leave architecture in order to write full-time but also to marry Emma Lavinia Gifford, who for several years assisted him by recopying his draft manuscripts, but who by the time of her death in 1912 had developed religious and social obsessions that seriously strained the marriage. A succession of novels and short stories from 1870 to 1896 earned him fame and financial security. Some of the novels before and after The Return of the Native (1878) were unsuccessful experiments in form and subject; but beginning in 1886 with The Mayor of Casterbridge, and continuing with The Woodlanders (1886) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and culminating with Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy’s increasingly biting irony, painful denouements of his characters’ lives, and eloquent critiques of conventional social, sexual, and religious beliefs made him controversial even as the sales of his books grew.
Partly in resentment at the denunciations by some of his critics (and in spite of his fame and the admiration of many distinguished readers and critics), he finally declared his intention to write no more fiction and returned to poetry, publishing his first book of poems, Wessex Poems and Other Verses, in 1898, and his second, Poems of the Past and the Present, in 1901. In his own judgment his chef d’oeuvre was The Dynasts (published in three volumes, 1903-1908), a verse-drama in nineteen acts (130 scenes), consisting of a melange of prose stage directions intermixed with extensive verse passages. This work, influenced by the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), interprets the events of the Napoleonic Wars as determined by Spirits of the Age, much in the manner of classical Greek and Roman myths. As the product of a famous novelist, Hardy’s verse was initially greeted with skepticism and impatience, but by the publication of the third volume of The Dynasts he was one of Britain’s most respected poets, and the subsequent six volumes of verse he published solidified his stature. The poems written in regret and mourning for Emma after her death in November 1912 (twenty-one of which were published under the blanket name ‘‘Poems of 1912-13’’) are generally admired as some of the finest, most poignant love poems in the English language. In early 1914 Hardy married Florence Dugdale, who had been informally working as his secretary. Hardy died 11 January 1928.
The attacks on convention that had caused conservative reviewers and readers of the nineteenth century to scorn Hardy’s novels did not have a comparable effect on the reception of his verse (although there was tongue-clucking over such poems as ‘‘Hap’’). Some of his most effective poems lament the pointlessness of war, as in ‘‘Drummer Hodge,’’ regarding the Boer War (1899-1902), and ‘‘Channel Firing,’’ written just before World War I (1914-1918). For Hardy, in both his fiction and his poetry, it is the human life that continues to go on during national crises and economic conundrums that merits respect and attention (‘‘In Time of‘The Breaking of Nations’’’).
This priority is true for his fiction as well as for his poetry. Early in his career he realized that by concentrating on a single section of Britain (which he called Wessex, comprising Dorset and parts of five other southwestern counties of England) he could find ample material to demonstrate general truths and in effect to interrelate all of his writings. This decision also in time came to inspire a large tourist industry that continues to the twenty-first century, as admirers search for the actual locales in which Hardy imagined his stories and poems taking place. Even after he ceased writing new novels he continued to revise old ones for new editions. One of his principal concerns was to adjust Wessex settings, others were to clarify personalities and to bring sexual dilemmas into sharper relief. The reasons for, and the aesthetic effects of, these revisions constitute still unresolved controversies in Hardy scholarship, which are extremely well surveyed by Simon Gatrell.
Numerous other controversies about Hardy exist. Biographically, basic questions about Hardy may never be ‘‘solved,’’ such as whether his affection for his cousin Tryphena Sparks was erotic, and whether his tendency to be infatuated with such society women as Florence Henniker resulted from the unsatisfactoriness of his marriage to Emma or the marriage became emotionally bland because of this tendency. The most reliable authority on biographical issues is Michael Millgate, but among others Robert Gittings offers interesting alternative views and information.
Still of substantive interest are Hardy’s views of gender and his presentation of women: although he is accused by some of condescension toward women, others admire him for a deep empathy with women in a patriarchal society that in effect condoned rape and exploitation. Marxism and its assorted poststructuralist and political variants have offered some of the more provocative avenues into this area of Hardy’s work and continue to attempt to place Hardy within both Victorian and modern culture.
Hardy remains an extraordinarily approachable touchstone for an understanding of nineteenth-century life and writings. Eschewing the phantasm of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and the constricted social range of Jane Austen (1775-1817), along with these two writers he is the most widely read (by nonacademicians) of the plethora of fiction writers of the nineteenth century. Most of his poetry was written in the twentieth century, and suitably he has been one of the chief models for British poets since his time; but he also stands not much lower than Robert Browning (1812-1889) and Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) as widely read poets who can be classed as Victorian.
See also Dickens, Charles; Eliot, George; Gaskell, Elizabeth; Great Britain; Tennyson, Alfred.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. Sussex, U. K., 1982.
Gatrell, Simon. Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography. Oxford, U. K., 1988.
--. Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, U. K., 2003.
Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. Harmondsworth, U. K., 1975.
--. The Older Hardy. London, 1978.
Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford, U. K., 2004.
Taylor, Dennis. Hardy’s Poetry, 1860-1928. Rev. ed. Basingstoke, U. K., 1989.
Widdowson, Peter. Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London and New York, 1989.
Dale Kramer
World History
