The Reforming Spirit in the Age of Revolutions: The Counts of Bernstorff, Commercial Monarchy, and the Invention of Modern Liberty

This project offers the first comprehensive account of the Counts of Bernstorff and the part they played in the making of enlightened reforms in eighteenth-century Denmark.

Through a detailed study of the personal and intellectual networks of Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff (1712-1772) and his nephew Andreas Peter von Bernstorff (1735-1797), two reform-minded Hanoverian counts, who served as chief ministers to the Danish monarchy, REFORMARCHY reconstructs a series of intellectual exchanges between Copenhagen, Geneva, and Gttingen.

In so doing, the project elucidates the efforts of the Bernstorffs to reform the Danish monarchy in view of contemporary challenges to the European states system and recovers their main contribution to Enlightenment thought, that is, their vision of modern liberty in a commercial monarchy.

Drawing on intellectual currents introduced to them through the various centres of their networks, this vision was moulded by such diverse languages as republicanism, monarchism, natural law, cameralism and political economy.

The main objectives of the project are thus to map the personal and intellectual networks the Bernstorffs, to analyse the key concepts of their political vision, and to examine the imperial response to global commercial competition that underpinned their enlightened reform programme.

Reconstructing the reforming spirit of the Counts of Bernstorff, REFORMARCHY not only makes an innovating contribution to historical scholarship on enlightened reform, it also brings into view the historical and conceptual relationship between freedom and the state.

By returning the concept of modern liberty to its eighteenth-century origin in the dialogue between republicanism and monarchism, REFORMARCHY offers a novel perspective on our current political imaginary.

The vision of modern liberty that comes out of this context sees the state not as an impediment to individual freedom, but rather as its requisite.