Like many another student and lover of the past Riehl was a man of conservative habits of mind, without, however, deserving to be classed as a confirmed reactionary.  His anti-democratic tendency of thought sprang plausibly enough from convictions and beliefs which owed their existence, in some part at least, to strained and whimsical analogies.  His defense of a static order of society rested at bottom upon a sturdy hatred of Socialism, then in the earliest stage of its rise.  This ingrained aversion to the new, suggested to him a rather curious sort of rational or providential sanction for the old.  He discerned, by an odd whim of the fancy, in the physical as well as the spiritual constitution of Germany a preeestablished principle of “trialism.”.  According to this queer notion, Germany is in every respect divided in partes tres.  The territorial conformation itself, with its clean subdivision into lowland, intermediate, and highland, demonstrates the natural tri-partition to which a like “threeness” of climate, nationality, and even of religion corresponds.  Hence the tripartition of the population into peasantry, bourgeoisie, and nobility should be upheld as an inviolable, foreordained institution, and to this end the separate traditions of the classes be piously conserved.  Educational agencies ought to subserve the specific needs of the different ranks of society and be diversified accordingly.  Riehl would even hark back to wholly out-dated and discarded customs, provided they seemed to him clearly the outflow of a vital class-consciousness.  For instance, he would have restored the trade corporations to their medieval status; inhibited the free disposal of farming land, and governed the German aristocracy under the English law of primogeniture.

Altogether, Riehl’s propensity for spanning a fragile analogy between concrete and abstract phenomena of life is apt to weaken the structural strength of his argumentation.  Yet even his boldest comparisons do not lack in illuminative suggestiveness.  Take, for example, the following passage from Field and Forest: “In the contrast between the forest and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious rejuvenating power of our nation.” (See p. 418 of this volume.)

The predisposition to draw large inferences coupled with that pronounced conservatism detract in a measure from the authenticity of Riehl’s work in the department of Social Science, which to him is fundamentally “the doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind.” (See p. 417 of this volume.)

That Riehl, despite his conservative bias, is not a reactionary out and out has already been stated.  He stands for evolutionary, not revolutionary, social reform; in his opinion the social-economic order can be bettered by means of the gradual self-improvement of society, and in no other way.  Unless, moreover, the improvement be effected without the sacrifice of that basic subdivision of society, the needful social stability is bound to be upset by the “proletariat”—­namely, the entire “fourth estate” reinforced by the ever increasing number of deserters, renegades, and outcasts who have drifted away from their appointed social level.