Can Reason Tell Us How to Run a Country?

Imagine you’re playing a game with your friends. You’ve all been playing by the same rules for years. The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but everyone knows them. Then someone says: “These rules don’t make sense. Let’s throw them all out and write new ones from scratch—rules that are logical, fair, and based purely on reason.”

That might sound good. But here’s the puzzle: can you actually do it? Can you design a perfect set of rules for a country, just by thinking hard enough? Or are there things about human life that reason alone can’t handle—things that depend on history, tradition, and judgment that you can only get from experience?

In the 1790s, a German philosopher named August Rehberg watched his neighboring country, France, try exactly this experiment. The French Revolution was an attempt to tear down the old government and rebuild it according to the principles of reason. Rehberg thought this was a catastrophic mistake. And he spent years trying to explain why.

The Problem with Pure Reason

Rehberg was not a fan of the old French government. He knew it had been unfair: heavy taxes on the poor, aristocrats with unearned privileges, kings who ruled by whim. France needed reform. But the revolutionaries weren’t just reforming—they were demolishing.

Why did they think they could just start over? Because they believed that reason alone could tell them what a just society looks like. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that there is a “general will”—what every rational person would want if they thought purely and fairly. If you can figure out the general will, the revolutionaries thought, you have a blueprint for government. Just build that.

Rehberg said: it’s not that simple. Here’s why.

Reason can give you general principles. “Treat people fairly.” “Don’t harm others.” These are good rules, but they’re extremely vague. They don’t tell you which specific laws to make. Should there be a king or a president? Should anyone who owns land get to vote, or everyone? Should taxes be high or low? Reason alone can’t answer these questions. The general principles of justice fit with many different systems.

The revolutionaries made a mistake Rehberg called “hyperrationalism”—thinking reason could do more than it actually can. They assumed that if a law wasn’t perfectly rational, it must be irrational and should be destroyed. But most real-world laws and traditions aren’t perfectly rational—and that doesn’t mean they’re bad. They grew up over time, adapting to the needs of real people in real situations.

Why Judgment Matters More Than Principles

Think about learning to ride a bike. Someone can tell you the principles: “Keep your weight balanced. Pedal steadily. Turn the handlebars in the direction you want to go.” But knowing those principles doesn’t mean you can ride. There’s something else needed—a kind of skill that only comes from practice. Philosophers call this “judgment.”

Rehberg picked up this idea from Immanuel Kant, the most famous philosopher of the era. Kant had pointed out that judgment is the ability to apply a rule to a particular situation—and there can’t be a rule for how to apply rules, because you’d need another rule for that, and so on forever. Judgment is something you develop through experience.

This was crucial for Rehberg’s politics. The revolutionaries assumed that if you had the right principles, you could just apply them mechanically. Rehberg said: no. Applying principles to real life is hard. It requires knowing the details of a country—its history, its people, its problems. It requires the kind of wisdom that comes from living through things, not just thinking about them.

So who should make political decisions? Not everyone, Rehberg thought. Judgment is unevenly distributed. Some people, through experience and expertise, develop better judgment than others. He believed government should be run by an elite—not necessarily aristocrats by birth, but people with the right experience and wisdom. Democracy, he feared, would let people without judgment make decisions about things they didn’t understand.

Inheritance, Tradition, and Why We Can’t Just Start Over

Here’s another way Rehberg thought the revolutionaries were wrong. They believed that people are born free and independent, and that they choose to join society through a “social contract.” If society isn’t working, they argued, people have the right to tear it up and make a new contract.

Rehberg thought this was nonsense. Nobody chooses the society they’re born into. You don’t wake up one day and decide to accept your country’s laws. You’re born into a family, a community, a country with a history. The very criteria you use to judge your society—your ideas of fairness, justice, good and bad—were shaped by that society. You can’t step outside it and judge it from nowhere.

He took this argument further. Think about promises. If your parents made a promise before you were born, should you have to keep it? Most people would say no—you didn’t make that promise. But Rehberg said: if every generation could ignore the promises of the previous one, society would collapse. Nobody would make long-term agreements if they knew the next generation could just walk away. A country is like a chain of promises stretching across generations. You inherit obligations along with property, rights, and responsibilities.

This is why Rehberg defended tradition and even aristocracy. Not because he thought the old ways were perfect—he didn’t—but because he thought you can’t just scrap everything and start fresh. You have to build on what exists, carefully and slowly.

Clash with Kant: The Theory-Practice Debate

There’s a famous debate between Rehberg and Kant that gets to the heart of the issue.

Kant had developed a moral philosophy based on the “categorical imperative,” a principle that says: act only according to rules that could apply to everyone. He thought this principle could guide not just personal morality but politics too. In 1793, Kant published an essay arguing that there’s no gap between theory and practice. Reason works just as well in the real world as in the study. The same principles that tell you how to be a good person should tell you how to structure a government.

Rehberg disagreed. He actually agreed with Kant’s moral philosophy in general—he wasn’t the kind of critic who said morality should be based on consequences or feelings. But he thought Kant was overreaching.

Consider one of Kant’s principles: “Treat people as ends in themselves, never merely as means.” This sounds noble. But Rehberg pointed out that in real life, we constantly use each other as means. Your teacher uses their knowledge as a means to educate you; you use your parents as a means to get food and shelter; everyone depends on everyone else. The principle works for “a nation of angels,” Rehberg said, but not for real human beings who need each other to survive.

What about equality? Kant argued that everyone should be equal before the law. Rehberg agreed—but said this doesn’t mean everyone should have equal rights. It just means whatever rights you have should be protected equally. If aristocrats have more rights than commoners, that’s not equal rights—but it could still be equal protection of whatever rights each group has. Kant’s principle, Rehberg said, was too vague to rule out the kind of hierarchical society he favored.

The bottom line for Rehberg: there really is a gap between theory and practice. Pure reason gives us direction—it tells us to be fair, to be just, to treat people well—but it doesn’t give us a map. For the details, we have to rely on experience, judgment, and tradition.

How History Fills the Gap

If reason can’t tell us exactly what to do, what does? Rehberg’s answer: history.

Think about it this way. You have a general principle: “People should have a say in their government.” That principle is true and important. But what form should that “say” take? Who should be allowed to vote? How often should elections happen? Should representatives be chosen by district or at-large? These aren’t questions reason can answer. But they are questions that real communities have worked out over time, through trial and error, through argument and compromise.

For Rehberg, history isn’t just the past—it’s the accumulated wisdom of generations. The institutions, customs, and traditions of a country are the result of countless experiments, failures, and adjustments. They contain knowledge that no single person or group could come up with by thinking alone.

This idea became very influential in Germany. Other thinkers developed it into a full-fledged philosophy called “historicism”—the view that you can’t understand a society without understanding its history, and that each society has its own unique character that can’t be judged by universal standards.

So Was Rehberg Right?

It’s a complicated question. Rehberg was certainly right to warn that pure reason isn’t enough to run a country. The French Revolution did end in violence and chaos, and many people think the revolutionaries’ confidence in abstract reason was partly to blame.

But Rehberg’s skepticism had a dark side too. His defense of tradition and hierarchy could be used to justify all kinds of injustice: slavery, sexism, class inequality, hereditary privilege. “This is how we’ve always done it” is not always a good argument; sometimes it’s just an excuse for keeping things unfair.

Rehberg himself was a reformer, not a reactionary. He wanted change—just slow, careful change that respected what already existed. He was against both revolutionaries who wanted to destroy everything and reactionaries who wanted to change nothing. That middle ground, he believed, was the only sensible path.

Most political philosophers today think Rehberg was too pessimistic about reason and too optimistic about tradition. But his core insight—that judgment matters, that experience counts, that you can’t just design a society from scratch—is still alive in political debates. Every time someone argues for “evidence-based policy” rather than “ideology,” or warns that social engineering can have unintended consequences, they’re echoing Rehberg’s skepticism.

When you’re thinking about how to run a country—or even just a classroom or a team—there’s always a tension between the ideal and the real. What does reason demand? And what does experience teach? Rehberg’s answer was: you need both, but don’t pretend reason can do the whole job.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Hyperrationalism	The mistake of thinking that reason alone can tell us exactly how to run a society
Judgment	The ability to apply general rules to specific situations—something that can’t be taught by rules alone
General will	Rousseau’s idea that there is what every rational person would want for society—the revolutionaries thought they could figure this out
Social contract	The theory that society is based on a voluntary agreement among free individuals—Rehberg thought this was false
Historicism	The view that societies can only be understood through their unique histories, not judged by universal standards
Tradition	The accumulated customs, institutions, and wisdom of the past—Rehberg thought these were valuable and shouldn’t be discarded lightly

Key People

August Rehberg (1757–1836): A German philosopher and government official who became one of the sharpest critics of the French Revolution. He argued that reason alone can’t determine how to run a country.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): The most famous philosopher of the era, who argued that moral principles derived from pure reason could guide both personal ethics and politics. Rehberg admired him but disagreed on this point.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): A French philosopher whose ideas about the “general will” and popular sovereignty inspired the revolutionaries. Rehberg thought his ideas were too vague and dangerous.
Justus Möser (1720–1794): A German thinker who taught Rehberg to appreciate local traditions and the unique character of small states. He was a major influence on Rehberg’s historicism.

Things to Think About

Rehberg says we inherit obligations from the past—promises made by our parents and ancestors. But where does this stop? Are you obligated to follow rules made by people who lived 500 years ago? What if those rules were unjust?
He argued that judgment is better in some people than others, and that government should be run by the wise few. But how do you decide who is wise? What if the people who think they’re wise are actually just protecting their own power?
The revolutionaries believed in starting from scratch. Rehberg believed in slow reform. But sometimes slow reform doesn’t work—injustices just keep going. How do you know when it’s time to throw out the old rules and start over?
Rehberg was skeptical about democracy. But if you don’t let everyone have a say, how do you make sure the rulers actually care about ordinary people’s needs?

Where This Shows Up

Debates about revolution and reform today: Every time people argue about whether to tear down a system or try to fix it from within, they’re grappling with Rehberg’s question.
Arguments about “tradition” in politics: When someone says “we shouldn’t change things just for the sake of change” or “this is how we’ve always done it,” they’re using a version of Rehberg’s argument.
The limits of formal rules: Think about why a classroom or sports team needs more than just rules—it also needs people with judgment, experience, and a sense of the group’s history. That’s Rehberg’s insight in miniature.
Culture and relativism: The idea that each society has its own unique character that shouldn’t be judged by outsiders’ standards is a direct descendant of the historicism Rehberg helped develop.