What does that have to do with your post and what has happened since that time? What were the conditions in Germany leading up to the emergence of these men and their view of life?

Dear @roleerob,
that's a very interesting question.
Sometimes there are locations where very bright people emerge and form circles. These come to mind:

• 1800 Germany, especially the city Jena where philosophers like August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel and Novalis met. This book is about that circle: https://www.amazon.com/Jena-1800-Republic-Free-Spirits/dp/0374178690
• the Austrian Economists who formed the Vienna circle: Böhm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, ...
• Athens around 400 BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, Sophocles and many more
• the great American Revolution where exceptional minds gathered like Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Hamilton, ...
• perhaps even the "PayPal mafia" that gets increasing influence in American politics

I don't know why that happens. Regarding Germany around 1800 I have my own theory. Until Bismarck united Germany (between 1860 and 1871), there was no real Germany. This territory was very fragmented.

Many people evaluate this fragmentation (of the Holy Roman Empire) as bad. But this political fragmentation enabled people to easily move between different counties, duchies, city states. When the ruler of a territory became abusive towards its citizens, the citizens had the possibility to "just" move 5 or 15 miles to another territory. The language, the currency and most of the customs were the same. Thus, freedom-loving people or poets and thinkers chose the territory or the ruler that gave them what they looked for. In the case of Goethe and Schiller that ruler was Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (wiki). Unfortunately, Napoleon and later on Bismarck ended that freedom (including the freedom of mind).

Germany as it should be 😉

source