MOSÈ, Justus. – Publicist and historian, b. at Osnabrück on 14 Dec. 1720, d. there on 18 Jan. 1794. A lawyer, he took part in the public life of his native city: in 1742 he became secretary, and later mayor, of the Ritterschaft, and in 1747 advocatus patriae.
A scholar of Germanic antiquities, he defended the native origin of the national character from French influence (cf. Versuch einiger Gemälde der Sitten unserer Zeit [Hannover 1747] and the drama Arminius of 1749), extolling, against rationalistic poetic imitation of classical canons, the creative imagination of the artist, and against aesthetic moralism, the value of the passions. In Arlequin oder Verteidigung des Grotesk-Komischen (1761) he painted popular customs; at the same time he studied the historical origins of Germanic society, identifying in landed property the source of freedom and the basis of the nation. Along these lines, in the incomplete Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768-1824), he traced a constitutional and social history of his homeland, in which he showed himself hostile to enlightened despotism and supportive of self-government by peasant communities; themes he took up again in Patriotische Phantasien (Berlin 1774-78). A Protestant, he showed open understanding for Catholicism. After a youthful contempt for Christian virtues, inspired by libertine motifs of the Seicento, he acknowledged, in Schreiben an den Herrn Vicar in Savoyen (1765), the value of positive religions against deism; he attributed to them, above all to the Catholic, a political value in defence of freedom. He also gave a political character to the Catholic-Lutheran antithesis in Schreiben... über die künftige Vereinigung der Evangelischen u. Katholischen Kirche (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1780).