A landmark collection that gave voice to the common people and helped shape European Romantic nationalism
What the Work Is
Folk Songs (originally published in German as Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern, or Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs) is a poetry collection compiled by Johann Gottfried Herder, first published in 1807. Written in German, the work gathers folk songs, ballads, and traditional poetry from diverse cultures and peoples, presenting them as expressions of national character and collective identity. The collection stands as one of the foundational texts of European folkloristics and played a significant role in the Romantic movement’s celebration of vernacular culture.
What the Book Is About
The collection embodies Herder’s conviction that the true spirit of a nation—what he called the Volksgeist—is most authentically expressed through its folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances. Rather than viewing such material as crude or inferior to refined literary art, Herder argued that these vernacular traditions represented the purest and most powerful form of cultural expression. The work presents songs gathered from various peoples as evidence that every nation possesses its own distinctive voice, shaped by its language, history, and way of life. In collecting and publishing these songs, Herder sought to preserve cultural traditions he feared were disappearing and to demonstrate that poetry belonged not to an educated elite but to the common people (das Volk).
Key Ideas and Themes
Central to the collection is Herder’s belief that language and culture are inseparable from national identity. He maintained that thought itself is fundamentally shaped by language—that people think within the frameworks their language provides. This understanding led him to treat folk songs not merely as entertainment or antiquarian curiosities but as vital expressions of how a people perceives and understands the world.
Herder’s approach to folk poetry was revolutionary for its time. He argued that poetry achieved its greatest purity and power in nations before they became “civilised,” pointing to examples such as the Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer as evidence that the most profound poetic expression emerges from pre-civilisational cultures. He sought similar virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology, elevating material that Enlightenment thinkers had typically dismissed as primitive.
The collection also reflects Herder’s conviction that every nation contains its own standard of perfection, independent of comparison with others. He insisted that nationalities differ in poetry, appearance, tastes, usages, customs, and languages, and that these differences should be celebrated rather than ranked hierarchically. This pluralistic vision stood in contrast to the universalising tendencies of Enlightenment thought, which tended to measure all cultures against a single standard of civilisation.
Herder’s concept of the Volk was itself a novel contribution. He insisted that “the people” was not the rabble but encompassed all classes of society, from the king to the peasant. This understanding of the nation as a unified body, bound together by shared language and cultural traditions, provided a foundation for German cultural unification at a time when German-speaking peoples lived in politically unconnected territories.
Structure and Approach
The work is organised as a collection of folk songs gathered from various peoples and nations, reflecting Herder’s conviction that folk poetry was a universal human phenomenon deserving serious scholarly attention. His approach was that of a collector and editor who saw his task as preserving and presenting authentic cultural expressions. The collection’s method—gathering songs from diverse sources and presenting them together—was itself a statement of Herder’s belief in the equal value of all national cultures.
Herder’s editorial approach proved enormously influential. The poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano later used Stimmen der Völker as a source for their own celebrated collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), which became a landmark of German Romanticism in its own right.
Significance and Influence
The publication of Folk Songs helped initiate a great craze in Germany for folk poetry, a topic that had been largely neglected by the literary establishment. Herder’s collections demonstrated that vernacular traditions deserved serious attention and provided a model for subsequent collectors throughout Europe.
The work’s influence extended well beyond Germany. Herder’s focus on language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a nation inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales, and his ideas about the relationship between language, thought, and national character anticipated what would later become known as linguistic relativity. His emphasis on the interdependence of thought and language—his insistence that language is “the organ of thought”—launched a new tradition in the philosophy of language that would be developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and others.
Herder’s celebration of folk culture also carried political implications. By arguing that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people, he gave Germans new pride in their origins and provided a cultural foundation for national consciousness. His conviction that “in a certain sense every human perfection is national” and that “he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself” resonated with the emerging Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century.
At the same time, Herder’s conception of nationality was not exclusionary. He refused to adhere to rigid racial theories, writing that “notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth.” He argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy full rights and obligations as Germans, and he warned that “national glory is a deceiving seducer” that could blind a people to foreign impressions. These qualifying stipulations, however, were often overlooked by later thinkers who found inspiration in his celebration of national identity while ignoring his cautions against national arrogance.
The collection’s publication in 1807, four years after Herder’s death, ensured that his ideas about folk culture and national identity would reach a wide audience at a crucial moment in European history. As Romantic nationalism gathered force across the continent, Folk Songs provided both a model for cultural preservation and a philosophical justification for the idea that each people possessed a unique spirit worthy of expression and defence.
The collection appeared in 1807, four years after Herder’s death in 1803. Herder had been ennobled in 1802 by the Elector-Prince of Bavaria, which added the prefix “von” to his last name. The work was published posthumously, ensuring that his ideas about folk culture and national identity would reach a wide audience at a crucial moment in European history.
Herder’s Broader Intellectual Context
Herder was born in Mohrungen (now Morąg, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia, the son of teacher Gottfried Herder and his second wife Anna Elizabeth Herder, née Peltz. He grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father’s Bible and songbook. In 1762, at age 17, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant and an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a philosopher who disputed the claims of pure secular reason. Hamann’s influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that “I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy.”
In 1764, as a Lutheran pastor, Herder went to Riga to teach at a Lutheran school, producing his first major works of literary criticism during this period. In 1769 he traveled by ship to Nantes and continued to Paris, after which he produced an account of his travels and experienced a shift in his self-conception as an author. In September 1770, he met the young Goethe in Strasbourg—an event that proved a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder’s literary criticism to develop his own style, marking the beginning of the Sturm und Drang movement. In 1771, Herder took a position as head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg under William, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe. By the mid-1770s, Goethe used his influence at the court of Weimar to secure Herder a position as General Superintendent, where he moved in 1776 and his outlook shifted towards classicism.
Herder married Maria Karoline Flachsland on 2 May 1773 in Darmstadt. They had seven children, all of whom survived childhood. Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, earning the enmity of many colleagues, and experienced a personal split with Goethe. His unpopular attacks on Kantian philosophy were another reason for his isolation in later years.
Related Works and Intellectual Influences
Herder was influenced by his academic advisor Immanuel Kant, as well as seventeenth-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz. In turn, he influenced Hegel, Nietzsche, Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Boas, and Walter Rauschenbusch.
In 1772, Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language, in which he defined language as “the natural organ of the understanding.” Even earlier, in 1768’s Fragments on Recent German Literature, he explained that thought is fundamentally dependent on and delineated by language. Herder did not adhere to the prevailing Enlightenment view that tied meanings with referent objects or ideas, but rather tied meanings to word-usages in practice. In his conjectural narrative of human origins, he characterized language as the appropriation of the outer world experienced by the senses within the human mind by means of distinguishing marks (merkmale).
In an important essay on Shakespeare and Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Justus Möser, Herder wrote that “A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.” Herder—most pronouncedly after Georg Forster’s 1791 translation of the Sanskrit play Shakuntala—was influenced by the religious imagery of Hinduism and Indian literature, which he saw in a positive light, writing several essays on the topic and the preface to the 1803 edition of Shakuntala.
Herder’s Systematic Philosophy of History
After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder began developing his systematic approach to history and human development, culminating in his most ambitious work, the four-volume Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), published between 1784 and 1791. The Ideas represented his mature synthesis of earlier insights about language, culture, and human development into a unified philosophy of history. In this comprehensive treatise, he attempted to trace the development of human culture from its origins through various stages of civilization, combining natural philosophy with cultural theory. The work largely originated the modern school of historical thought and established many foundational concepts in anthropology and cultural studies.
Herder’s philosophy was deeply subjective, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, and arguing that “one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one’s way into everything.” The historian should be the “regenerated contemporary” of the past, and history a science as “instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit.” In what scholars consider the most philosophically significant section of the work, the 15th book, Herder articulated his belief that human progress follows natural laws toward greater reason and justice, arguing that “by the very nature of law, reason and justice must inevitably gain influence among mankind, advancing a more enduring humanity.”
Herder’s Views on Nationality and Culture
Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism. He carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that “there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant.” The explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of “the people” as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.
The nation, however, was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having “wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters.” Herder praised the tribal outlook, writing that “the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species,” isolated since “each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.” With no need for comparison since “every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others” for “do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?”
Following a trip to Ukraine, Herder wrote a prediction in his diary (Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769) that Slavic nations would one day play a significant role in Europe. He praised Ukraine’s “beautiful skies, blithe temperament, musical talent, bountiful soil,” and expressed hope that “someday will awaken there a cultured nation whose influence will spread throughout the world.” Herder also speculated that the Hungarian nation might assimilate into surrounding Slavic cultures, a prediction that sparked considerable debate in Hungary and continues to be referenced.
Herder’s Political and Religious Views
Herder lamented that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, questioning whether Germany had paid too high a price for adopting Christianity at the expense of its true nationality. His patriotism at times bordered on national pantheism, as he advocated for German territorial unity, stating: “He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions.” He also warned against the loss of genuine folk traditions: “But now! Again I cry, my German brethren! But now! The remains of all genuine folk-thought is rolling into the abyss of oblivion with a last and accelerated impetus. For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland.”
In his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Herder observed: “Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things.” Herder, who opposed absolutism and Prussian nationalism, embodied the spirit of the German Volk. As a historical theorist, he distanced himself from the rationalist ideas of the eighteenth century, instead seeking a balance between sentiment and reasoning. He believed that knowledge is inherent in the soul, beginning with sensuous and intuitive perception that gradually develops into self-conscious rationality.
Herder understood and feared the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. He argued that Jews in Germany should enjoy the full rights and obligations of Germans, and that the non-Jews of the world owed a debt to Jews for centuries of abuse, and that this debt could be discharged only by actively assisting those Jews who wished to do so to regain political sovereignty in their ancient homeland of Israel. He also announced that “national glory is a deceiving seducer. When it reaches a certain height, it clasps the head with an iron band. The enclosed sees nothing in the mist but his own picture; he is susceptible to no foreign impressions.” The passage of time was to demonstrate that while many Germans were to find influence in Herder’s convictions, fewer were to note his qualifying stipulations.
Herder had emphasised that his conception of the nation encouraged democracy and the free self-expression of a people’s identity. He proclaimed support for the French Revolution, a position which did not endear him to royalty. He also differed with Kant’s philosophy for not placing reasoning within the context of language. Herder did not think that reason itself could be criticized, as it did not exist except as the process of reasoning, a process dependent on language. He also turned away from the Sturm und Drang movement to go back to the poems of Shakespeare and Homer.
Individuality and Cultural Expression
Herder additionally advanced select notions of myriad “authentic” conceptions of Völk and the unity of the individual and natural law. Herderian ideas continue to influence thinkers, linguists and anthropologists, and they have often been considered central to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and Franz Boas’ coalescence of comparative linguistics and historical particularism with a neo-Kantian/Herderian four-field approach to the study of all cultures, as well as, more recently, anthropological studies by Dell Hymes.
Herder also fostered the ideal of a person’s individuality. Although he had from an early period championed the individuality of cultures—for example, in his This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774)—he also championed the individuality of persons within a culture; for example, in his On Thomas Abbt’s Writings (1768) and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778). In On Thomas Abbt’s Writings, Herder stated that “a human soul is an individual in the realm of minds: it senses in accordance with an individual formation, and thinks in accordance with the strength of its mental organs. … My long allegory has succeeded if it achieves the representation of the mind of a human being as an individual phenomenon, as a rarity which deserves to occupy our eyes.”
Herder as Proto-Evolutionary Thinker
Herder has been described as a proto-evolutionary thinker by some science historians, although this has been disputed by others. Concerning the history of life on earth, Herder proposed naturalistic and metaphysical (religious) ideas that are difficult to distinguish and interpret. He was known for proposing a great chain of being. In his book From the Greeks to Darwin, Henry Fairfield Osborn wrote that “in a general way he upholds the doctrine of the transformation of the lower and higher forms of life, of a continuous transformation from lower to higher types, and of the law of Perfectibility.” However, biographer Wulf Köpke disagreed, noting that “biological evolution from animals to the human species was outside of his thinking, which was still influenced by the idea of divine creation.”
