Light in Germany

The German Enlightenment is often held in disregard by those who see it as driven by an outdated theory of knowledge, an unrealistic idealist-utopian vision, and even an evil proto-totalitarian motivation.  The present book by T. J. 'Jim’ Reed presents a very different picture by focusing on relatively disregarded or "unknown” aspects of the German Enlightenment.  The text is mindful throughout of the "twenty-first century relevance, not to say twenty-first century moral” of the specific themes and works it addresses. The book is significant far beyond the important concerns of other monographs on the Enlightenment for it takes into account the writers (such as Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing), and on occasion the rulers (such as Frederick the Great), who realized its ideas and values in philosophy, art, and politics. Light, for Reed, only dawns fully in their writing. This book is not a description of the Enlightenment narrowly defined as a movement in abstract thought, much less a catalogue of every last minor  participant, but an account of the spread of light - that is, of lucid and active liberal thinking - wherever it can be found in German eighteenth-century culture. The emphasis is indeed on the last third of the century, what is commonly called "the late Enlightenment,” not as a separate phase, but as a maturing of the branches of a single tree with its imaginative harvest. In short, this book brings to life the most significant episodes and arguments of the German Enlightenment, and shows them as scenes in a larger drama - at any moment, there is related action going on in another part of the field.