D.G. Monrads liberale manifest fra 1839

Resumé

D. G. Monrad’s Political Manifesto from 1839:

The first issue of Ditlev Gothard Monrad’s Flying Political Papers, published in Copenhagen in 1839, may be regarded as a manifesto of the early Danish liberal movement in its struggle to overcome the existing absolutist conglomerate state in favour of a constitutional national state, a result gradually achieved with the constitution of 1849 and the national centralization of the ensuing years. Influenced by Hegelian political philosophy, Monrad regarded his own times as marked by a great historical crisis and transition, evincing the political acknowledgment of the ‘people’ and its national unity as the outcome of a long-term dialectical development towards a synthesis of order and liberty, with existing absolutism representing a historically necessary, though now obsolete, stage. Further strengthening of the nation and the state now implied the political involvement of the ‘core of the people’, i.e. the educated middle class, whose culture allegedly rendered it capable of representing the interests of the people as a whole. Thus, Monrad’s liberalism was an ideological defence of the rule of a quite narrow social layer, a particular political reflection of an internationally conditioned transition to capitalist commodity production carried out in Denmark mainly via the state as an avenue between a dominantly agrarian production and the world market.