  Rehberg's historical importance lies chiefly in his critique of the French Revolution.  In the early 1790s he became renowned as its foremost conservative critic.  He was the chief spokesman for the so-called ‘Hannoverian Whigs’, a group of conservative writers based in Göttingen who defended the old Ständesstaat (i.e., a state based on the old society of estates) against revolutionary  ideology.[4]  Rehberg provided the philosophical foundations for the politics of the Hannoverians, and he saw more clearly than they, or any other conservative writer of his day, the general philosophical issues raised by the Revolution.  The basis for his attack on revolutionary ideology was his skeptical epistemology, which grew out of his study of Hume and Kant.  For all these reasons, Rehberg has been rightly regarded as a founding father of German  conservatism.[5]