It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that the similarity between the ideas of Thomas G. Masaryk and those of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is at times so striking as to be truly breathtaking.¹ Perhaps the most characteristic affinity lies in a persistent desire on the part of both men to bring together concepts that are usually held to be in tension, "dialectically' opposed, if not altogether contradictory. In this paper, I wish to focus on one such tension, the tension between autonomy and heteronomy, which, in their thinking, largely parallels the tension between human beings' understanding of themselves as self-directing agents and possessors of freedom, on the one hand, and as other-directed servants, instruments or victims, within an order not of their own making, on the other. It is the central thesis of both Masaryk and Herder that it is modernity's separation and opposition of these modes of self-understanding which bring them into internal conflict, thereby creating the prevailing malaise of modern man.