 Concerning domestic politics: Schleiermacher was always somewhat reticent about fundamental constitutional questions (no doubt due to a certain aversion to the state as such, a greater concern to protect against it than to develop it). To judge from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, his republican-democratic model of an ideal church in On Religion, and his advocacy of the democratic nature of the university in Occasional Thoughts on Universities in a German Spirit, together with an Appendix on One about to be Founded (1808), the early Schleiermacher was strongly attracted to republicanism and democracy (like Herder and the young Friedrich Schlegel). However, his later position—while it still makes consent a conditio sine qua non of any genuine state—is more sympathetic to aristocratic and monarchical forms of government. Thus in his lectures on the theory of the state from 1829–33 he argues that whereas smaller and “lower” states are naturally democratic, larger and “higher” ones are naturally aristocratic or monarchical.