“As a result there developed in the Prussian middle classes the impression that the king’s wars were nothing to do with them; and from that it was a small step to the belief that, if it were not for the king and the nobility who fought his wars, those wars need never happen at all. Immanuel Kant was only one of the many Prussian writers who from 1780 onwards were arguing that if only the affairs of States were in the hands of rational, humane men, the world might enjoy perpetual peace. It was a view dominant in Prussian university and intellectual circles until the catastrophe of Jena shocked them into political awareness and set on foot the new nationalist movement that was to have such momentous consequences.”