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THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN NEW FOCUS

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SteffenMartus, Aufklärung: Das deutsche 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Epochenbild (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2015)
T. J.Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
AndreasPečar and DamienTricorne, Falsche Freunde: War die Aufklärung wirklich die Geburtsstunde der Moderne? (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2017

RITCHIE ROBERTSON
RITCHIE ROBERTSON*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Oxford E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Enlightenment scholars have had some difficulty in getting the German Enlightenment in focus. If one's conception of the Enlightenment has been shaped by reading Peter Gay and Robert Darnton, then the German Enlightenment fails to fit their model. France offers us the picture of an intelligentsia, largely located in the capital, maintaining a degree of independence with some help from patrons, and in many cases opposed to the governing regime. Whether, like Gay, one focuses on the high-profile frequenters of the Paris salons, or, like Darnton, on half-starved hack writers, one has something approaching the modern conception of the intellectual, and hence a flattering genealogy for present-day intellectuals. It is easy to forget that philosophes could also be professional administrators, like the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and that Enlightened thinking was also diffused throughout the provinces by academies and scholarly networks.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 849 - 863
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 See Roche, Daniel, Le siècle des lumières en province: Académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar; Brockliss, Laurence, Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 Schiller, Friedrich, “Ankündigung der Rheinischen Thalia,” in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, 12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1992–2005)Google Scholar, vol. 8, Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz (1992), 897–903, at 897.

3 See Norton, Robert E., “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/4 (2007), 635–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whaley, Joachim, “‘Wahre Aufklärung kann erreicht und segensreich werden’: The German Enlightenment and Its Interpretation,” Oxford German Studies 44/4 (2015), 428–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Raeff, Marc, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983)Google Scholar.

5 Wakefield, Andre, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the “Encyclopédie”, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1979)Google Scholar.

7 Cf. the similar approach by Eifert, Christiane, “Das Erdbeben von Lissabon 1755: Zur Historizität einer Naturkatastrophe,” Historische Zeitschrift 274/3 (2002), 633–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 649–61.

8 Martus follows the careful historical approach taken by Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger in the editorial introduction to their collection of research papers, Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastrophendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2008), a book that is not as well known outside Germany as it deserves to be.

9 Gottlob Krüger, Johann, Gedanken von den Ursachen des Erdbebens, nebst einer moralischen Betrachtung (Halle, 1756)Google Scholar, partially reprinted in Breidert, Wolfgang, ed., Die Erschütterung der vollkommenen Welt: Die Wirkung des Erdbebens von Lissabon im Spiegel europäischer Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt, 1994), 25–50Google Scholar, esp. 50.

10 This is an expanded version of a shorter book addressed to a German readership: Reed, T. J., Mehr Licht in Deutschland: Kleine Geschichte der Aufklärung (Munich, 2009)Google Scholar.

11 See Neiman, Susan, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (London, 2009)Google Scholar; Neiman, Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, rev. edn (London, 2016).

12 See Daniel Wilson, W., Das Goethe-Tabu: Protest und Menschenrechte im klassischen Weimar (Munich, 1999)Google Scholar; Wilson, “Goethe, His Duke and Infanticide: New Documents and Reflections on a Controversial Execution,” German Life and Letters 61/1 (2008), 7–32.

13 See Gage, John, “Turner's Annotated Books: Goethe's Theory of Colours,” Turner Studies 4/2 (1984), 34–52Google Scholar.

14 I have given my own, more sceptical view of Goethe's science in Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2016); cf. Nisbet, H. B., Goethe and the Scientific Tradition (London, 1972)Google Scholar. Reed does not cite the argument by Schöne that Goethe's campaign against Newton was essentially religious: see Schöne, Albrecht, Goethes Farbentheologie (Munich, 1987)Google Scholar.

15 Friedrich Schiller, “Selbstrezension,” in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, Dramen I, ed. Gerhard Kluge (1988), 293–311, at 302.

16 Rasmussen, Dennis C., The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (Cambridge, 2014)Google Scholar, 15 n.

17 Kant, Immanuel, Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1798), in Kant, Werke, ed. Weischedel, Wilhelm, 6 vols. (Darmstadt, 1958)Google Scholar, vol. 4, 556–9. Cf. the comments on Kant's sexual morality in Hull, Isabel V., Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 299–313Google Scholar.

18 See Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and its sequels; Pagden, Anthony, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (Oxford, 2013)Google Scholar.

19 Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1987), 629–30Google Scholar; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, in Kant, Werke, 1: 821–84, at 880, 882. For an example of the unwarrantedly broad conclusions that have been drawn from these passages, see Popkin, Richard, “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism,” in Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Watson, Richard A. and Force, James E. (Indianapolis, 1993), 79–102Google Scholar.

20 See, especially, the study of the Histoire by Israel, Jonathan in Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011), 413–42Google Scholar, cited by Pečar and Tricorne at 129.

21 More recently Pečar has taken a similar approach to the philosophical essays by Frederick the Great, arguing that they should be read primarily as exercises in self-presentation: Pečar, Andreas, Die Masken des Königs: Friedrich II. von Preußen als Schriftsteller (Frankfurt am Main, 2016)Google Scholar.

22 This phrase owes its fame to Haskell, Thomas L., Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar.

23 See Schrader, Hans-Jürgen, “Mit Feuer, Schwert und schlechtem Gewissen: Zum Kreuzzug der Hainbündler gegen Wieland,” Euphorion 78/3 (1984), 325–67Google Scholar.

24 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 3rd edn, 10 vols. (Geneva, 1781)Google Scholar, 1: 181–224. The chapter criticizing China is among the passages identified as Diderot's in Diderot, Denis, “Extraits de l'Histoire des deux Indes,” in Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Lewinter, Roger, 15 vols. (Paris, 1969–73)Google Scholar, 15: 399–580.