"THE SECRET OF THE ORDER OF COSMOPOLITANS"
CHAPTER XIII 

Since, according to the Cosmopolitans, the most rational form of government—toward which human affairs advance with slow but steady steps—is best promoted by the widest dissemination of reason, the broadest spread of fundamental truths, and the utmost transparency in all matters—facts, observations, discoveries, inquiries, improvements, or warnings—of benefit to societies, states, or humanity as a whole, they see freedom of the press as the ultimate bulwark of humanity. Its preservation is vital to any prospect of a better future, while its loss would trigger an era of unpredictable disasters. 

This issue must not be judged narrowly or superficially. Press freedom invites both scorn and dire warnings of its dangers. Likewise, seemingly valid arguments are frequently invoked to justify the alleged necessity of arbitrary restrictions. Yet all such reasoning falls apart once press freedom is curtailed beyond what its very nature allows. 

It has long been firmly established that press freedom must face no restrictions beyond those already imposed by general criminal and civil law—any further limitation inevitably leads to its gradual erosion. 

All writings whose publication is, by nature, a crime in any well-ordered state—such as those containing direct insults against named or clearly identified individuals, as expressly forbidden by law; those that openly call for rebellion or unrest against legitimate authorities; those that directly attack the constitutional foundations of the state; or those aiming at the outright destruction of religion, morality, and civil order—are as culpable as treason, theft, or murder. 

The key issue is this: the word direct is no mere formality—it is the very crux of the matter. 

For if a censor or judge were allowed to condemn a work not for its actual content but based on conclusions shaped by personal ideology, worldview, or prejudice, then no legal certainty would remain. And who is unaware of the examples set by nations under arbitrary censorship? It is often the most insightful and valuable books that are the first to be banned. 

Whether a book censor is installed as a bureaucratic formality or whether the courts are tasked with judging supposedly dangerous writings—one fact remains undeniable: A censor may only ban books if their publication, under general law, constitutes a crime—one that falls under judicial jurisdiction. 

Whether a book is new or old, engaging or trivial, seemingly beneficial or harmful, whether its author argues with wisdom or folly—none of this falls within the censor’s remit. Only the public and time have the right to determine a book’s value, for they alone render the final verdict. 

To suppress a book on such pretexts would be nothing less than a direct attack on the fundamental rights of science and literature. These—like Christianity itself—exist independently of the state, provided they do not actively subvert its core principles. 

For science, literature, and the printing press—humanity’s greatest invention since writing itself—belong to no single nation, but to all mankind. 

Blessed is the nation that recognizes their value, that embraces, nurtures, promotes, and protects them, granting them the freedom to thrive in their true domain: the unfettered spread of knowledge. 

More than any other people, the German nation has reason to see itself as a defender of press freedom. For it was from its midst that the inventors of the printing press emerged. And it was courageous men from Germany who, through the free use of this invention alone, were able to liberate half of Europe from the tyranny of the Roman court. 

Through the printing press, they upheld the rights of reason against ancient prejudices and awakened the free spirit of inquiry from a slumber of more than a thousand years. Gradually, the light of enlightenment spread across all fields of human knowledge. How unworthy it would now be to betray this very achievement—to halt the progress of the sciences in the midst of their most vital growth, or to impose artificial limits on enlightenment, to which Germany already owes so much and from which it has even more yet to gain! 

For enlightenment, in accordance with the nature of the human mind, is as limitless as the perfection toward which humanity must and shall strive with its help. 

The Cosmopolitans will never make a secret of the fact that press freedom can have no more zealous defender than their order. For in truth, it is the only means by which they can fulfill their stated purpose on a broader scale and in proportion to their abilities. Without it, they could not carry out one of their most essential duties. 

Indeed, if those who recognize no higher interest than truth were not allowed to speak freely—then the stones would have to cry out!

CHRISTOPH MARTIN WIELAND - BIOGRAPHY

When Christoph Martin Wieland published his essay The Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans in 1788, he was fifty-five years old and had spent the better part of two decades as the most celebrated man of letters in the German-speaking world. The son of a Pietist pastor from the small Swabian town of Oberholzheim, he had traveled an unlikely path to literary fame. At seventeen, he fell in love with his cousin Sophie Gutermann, a young woman of considerable intelligence who would later become, as Sophie von La Roche, Germany's first commercially successful female novelist. Their engagement dissolved under the pressure of disapproving parents and geographical separation, but they remained friends for life, and she was the muse behind much of his early poetry. 

In his youth, Wieland had been an earnest disciple of the Swiss critic Johann Jakob Bodmer, who invited him to Zurich expecting a pious protégé. Bodmer found instead a young man increasingly drawn to worldly pleasures and ironic detachment, and the apprenticeship ended in mutual disappointment. Yet the Swiss years transformed Wieland. By the time he returned to Biberach to serve as town clerk in 1760, the austere Pietist had become something closer to an Epicurean, a man who could hold his convictions without clenching them. 

The defining achievement of his middle years came in the early 1760s, when he produced the first German translations of twenty-two Shakespeare plays. These versions opened a window onto English dramatic imagination for an entire generation and helped pave the way for the Sturm und Drang movement, even as Wieland himself remained skeptical of its excesses. In 1769, he accepted a professorship of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, where he lectured to packed halls. Three years later, Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar, impressed by his political novel Der goldne Spiegel, summoned him to tutor her two sons. Wieland proved, by his own admission, an indifferent teacher. But he found in Weimar what he needed most: a position of comfort and prestige that allowed him to write, to edit, and to observe. 

He founded Der Teutsche Merkur in 1773, and for thirty-seven years this journal served as one of the leading platforms for Enlightenment ideas in Germany. It was in this journal that the present essay first appeared. 

Wieland wrote these pages in a Europe already trembling toward transformation. The American Revolution had concluded the year before, the United States Constitution freshly ratified. In France, the financial exhaustion of the crown had reached the point where reforms seemed impossible and upheavals inevitable. Within twelve months of this essay's publication, the Bastille would fall. 

The essay itself is an exercise in ambiguity, and one suspects Wieland enjoyed the game. On one level, he is satirizing the proliferation of secret societies in late eighteenth-century Germany, on another level, he appears to be articulating, under the cover of playful fiction, his own philosophical commitments: the conviction that progress comes through gradual cultivation rather than violent rupture, and that reason, given time, will prove more durable than force. The Cosmopolitans he describes are not really a secret society at all. Their "secret" is simply that they are decent, thoughtful people who recognize one another without passwords or ceremonies, bound together by what he calls "a natural kinship and a profound inner accord." 

Whether Wieland genuinely believed in the possibility of such a fellowship, or whether he was constructing an ideal type against which to measure the follies of his age, is a question he wisely leaves unanswered. Passages of the essay suggest he sensed that large changes were imminent. He advocates for what he calls "the gentle, persuasive, and ultimately irresistible force of reason," and expresses confidence that Europe would experience a revolution "that spares fire and blood." History had other plans. The French Revolution would be neither gentle nor persuasive, and the Napoleonic Wars that followed would remake the map of Europe. 

Wieland lived to see much of this upheaval. In 1797, he purchased a small estate at Oßmannstedt near Weimar, hoping for a quiet rural retirement, but financial troubles forced him to give it up after six years. In October 1808, at the age of seventy-five, he was presented to Napoleon Bonaparte at Weimar, alongside Goethe. The two writers received the cross of the Legion of Honor. According to Talleyrand, Wieland declared that Napoleon, whom he regarded as "a man of letters" above all, had made him "the happiest man on earth." Whether this was flattery, genuine admiration, or the careful maneuvering of a man who had spent his life navigating the demands of courts and patrons, we cannot know. 

He died in Weimar on January 20, 1813, at the age of seventy-nine, with Napoleon's empire crumbling around him. Goethe, Herder, and Schiller had all joined him in that small Saxon town over the years, creating what came to be known as Weimar Classicism. Of the four, Wieland was the oldest and the least remembered.