Light in Germany

Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment

T. J. Reed

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
02 March 2015

European history; Western philosophy: Enlightenment

Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment.

Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.

By: T. J. Reed
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 24mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 3mm
Weight: 595g
ISBN: 9780226205106
ISBN 10: 022620510X
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 02 March 2015
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

T. J. Reed is an emeritus fellow at Queen's College, Oxford, a fellow of the British Academy, and president of the English Goethe Society. He is the author of many books.

Reviews for Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment

This book is a pleasure to read. Reed, a most distinguished scholar of German literature, brings to his subject a lifetime of learning as well as strong convictions and a refined literary sensibility. Reading like a prolonged conversation, it ably demonstrates the many sources of light in eighteenth-century Germany and how they can still illuminate our present. (James Sheehan, Stanford University)