Adam Müller

Adam Heinrich Müller (30 June 1779 – 17 January 1829; after 1827 Ritter von Nitterdorf) was a German-Austrian conservative philosopher, literary critic, and political economist, working within the romantic tradition.

Müller was born in Berlin. It was intended that he should study Protestant theology, but from 1798 he devoted himself in Göttingen to the study of law, philosophy, and natural science. He was a student of Gustav Hugo. Returning to Berlin, he was persuaded by his friend Friedrich von Gentz to take up political science. He had early formed a close intimacy with Gentz, his elder by 15 years; and this connection exercised an important influence both on his material circumstances and his mental development in after life. The two men differed widely in character and in their fundamental principles, but agreed, at least in their later period, in their practical political aims, and the friendship was only terminated by death.

Müller worked for some time as referendary in the Kurmärkische Kammer in Berlin. Müller's relations with the Junker party and his co-operation with them in their opposition to Hardenberg's reforms made any public employment in Prussia impossible for him. He travelled in Sweden and Denmark, spent about two years in Poland, and then went to Vienna, where he was converted to the Catholic faith on 30 April 1805. Through Gentz he became acquainted with Metternich, to whom he was useful in the preparation of state papers.

Via Poland, Müller traveled to Dresden, where he held lectures on German science and literature (1806), in which he showed himself to be a follower of Schlegel's romanticism.

From 1806 to 1809, he lived at Dresden occupied in the political education of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and lecturer on German literature, dramatic art, and political science. In 1808 he edited with Heinrich von Kleist the periodical Phoebus. In 1809, he returned to Berlin, and in 1811 to Vienna, where he lived in the house of Archduke Maximilian of Austria-Este and became the friend of Clemens Maria Hofbauer.

He developed his central political ideas in his 1808/09 lectures, which he published in 1809 under the title The Elements of Statecraft. In accordance with his motto that the "state scholar" must stand by the statesman, Müller propagated the basic ideas of political romanticism, of which the elements are to be regarded as the main work: he opposed the modern contract theory to the idea of the organically grown monarchical corporate state, combining tradition and the present; against the modern economic theory of Adam Smith (whom Müller hated throughout his life), he propagated the idea of a strict social bond of property. Even later he repeatedly criticized modern economic life. His admired as well as hostile definition of the state is: The state is not a "manufactory ... or mercantile society, it is the most intimate connection of all physical and spiritual needs, all physical and spiritual wealth, all inner and outer life nation, into a great, energetic, infinitely moving and living whole."

In 1809, after marrying Sophie von Haza-Radlitz, Müller went to Berlin, where he gave further historical-political lectures and published articles in the Berliner Abendblatt newspaper (1810/11) edited by Heinrich von Kleist. Müller, now back in the Prussian civil service, rejected the reform efforts of Karl August von Hardenberg, the state chancellor who had been in office since 1810, and tried to trigger a public discussion about the reform policy with his articles critical of the government. In 1811 he also acted as a close political adviser to the leader of the Prussian nobility opposition, Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz. But Hardenberg smashed the opposition: Marwitz was imprisoned, the “Abendblatt” had to cease publication and Müller was deported to Vienna as a diplomatic reporter.

Driven back to Berlin by the war, Müller drafted a bill of indictment against the state chancellor von Hardenberg on behalf of the Kurbrandenburgische Ritterschaft after the latter had refused Müller's request for employment in the civil service. In this indictment, intended for the king, he accused the chancellor of revolutionary principles.