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Ladies and gentlemen, I can detect the kind of expectant hush, so although it's not quite 5:15 yet.

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Let me do my warm up act by introducing the speaker and also saying something about this occasion.

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The best one lecture given every year, by the way, for newcomers, there are seats down here.

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The front, please don't be shy. The best one lecture is the high point of the year for the Best Will Centre for the Enlightenment

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that was founded as an offshoot of the Voltaire Foundation some years ago by Nicholas KROQ.

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It's now been absorbed into the torch programme on the Enlightenment torch,

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as also will know is the acronym for the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.

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The Oxford counterpart to crash in Cambridge there was some dispute, as with a torch,

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was entirely appropriate name because some people associated with the act of torching.

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But we thought that the sense of torch light enlightenment was far, far superior.

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The Vestibule Decimal Centre, also in this new guise, is reaching out much more than in the past beyond France to the international enlightenment.

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And one side of this extension of our mission is we've invited a scholar of the German Enlightenment,

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Professor Andrew Willy from Cambridge to give this year's lecture.

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Drew Willy is professor of German history and thought at Cambridge and a fellow of his college, he began with a book about toleration in Hamburg.

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From 15, 29 to 18, 19, the book soon afterwards appeared in German.

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He's published many first-rate articles,

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but one of the most remarkable things about him is that he's one of the rare academics who can hold their nerve

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and work for many years on a massive research project without worrying about the demands of excessive ease,

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the RDF, which provides plenty material in the form of first rate articles.

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Anyway, the book in question is Germany and the Holy Roman Empire 50 493 2006 two volumes total of some fourteen hundred pages,

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which appear from up in 2012 as part of the Oxford history of early modern Europe.

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There are many books commissioned for Caesar that don't get finished.

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This one has been finished. It's available in paperback. And if you wish, you can buy.

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The German translation was published two months ago. And apparently the first printing is already sold out.

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Has these projects on hand now, one of which is the volume in Europe's very short introduction series on the Holy Roman Empire.

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But today he's going to speak to us on the theme of true enlightenment can be both achieved and beneficial.

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The German enlightenment and its interpretation to.

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Thank you, Richard, for those very kind words of introduction, thank you also to you again,

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Richie and Nicholas Cronk and his colleagues for having firstly invited me in for

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having made the arrangements for my stay in Cambridge really so smooth and agreeable.

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Of Cleveland can at once the concise and true enlightenment can be both achieved and beneficial,

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or perhaps to use more colloquial sounding but actually quite appropriate 18th century terminology.

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True enlightenment can be achieved and make us happy.

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One could be forgiven for thinking that my title was taken from one of those numerous 18th century essays by German writers,

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associate with the oft claim that later critics denounced as typically facile thoughts of a superficial and hopelessly idealistic movement.

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It is, however, nothing of the kind the statement can be found in the 11th edition of the podcast.

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Encyclopaedia, published in 1860 for one of the key handbooks of the German building,

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spoke to the equivalent in many ways of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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To find such an affirmation of the Enlightenment and a key German publication of this time is in fact rather surprising.

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It's not so much that it's the exception to the rule.

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On the contrary, similar statements may be found throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th century.

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What is remarkable, however, is that such statements don't fit into the commonly accepted interpretation of the German Enlightenment and its legacy

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for the story that emerges for much of the scholarly literature of the 19th century to the present is rather different.

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The German Enlightenment is said, died in the 1790s.

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What followed was an allegedly an increasingly radical series of reactions to it and rejections of its fundamental principles and values.

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Attempts to arrive revive its ideals, for example, in the 1920s for short lived.

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Even after 1945, it was often suggested and is still suggested today that those who wish to try once more to

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connect with the ideals of the 18th century struggled at least initially against the tide.

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Then a Schneiders, for example, considered by many to be the leading German modern German scholar of Enlightenment

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Thought argues that the oft claim effectively ended in the 1780s and that thereafter,

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as he wrote. The fact that Germany too had been a country of the Enlightenment was forgotten for a very long time.

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Frederic Vizer went even further when he wrote in 1992 that the attack on the old

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club in the 1790s cast a shadow over Germany's future to not a negligible degree.

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The shadow remains. I shall return to this dark narrative in a minute,

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but first I'd like to address some key issues that preoccupied Enlightenment scholarship generally in recent years.

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Speaking of a German enlightenment and of a specifically German interpretation of the Enlightenment brings to mind

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the debate provoked by the arguments developed by Jonathan Israel in a series of three massive volumes so far,

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totalling over three thousand pages in print. And in addition, his book On The French Revolution.

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Numerous articles, reviews and savage and polemical responses to his critics.

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He's not here. The debate about this body of work has become so important, however,

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that I believe no serious discussion of the Enlightenment can now take place without clear reference to it.

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The essence of Israel's argument is easily stated.

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He suggests that the late 17th and 18th century saw the development of what one might describe as a unitary enlightenment.

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It was founded on the radical new interpretation of God and the world by Spinoza.

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The key, according to Israel, was Spinoza modernism.

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His rejection of any difference between matter and spirit, which led to a rejection of any kind of hierarchy at all.

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Originally developed in the religious context, this notion was rapidly applied more widely in politics and society as well.

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Over time, it fostered the development of a clear-cut set of convictions or objectives secularist and tolerant without reservation.

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Also egalitarian and democratic. Furthermore, anti-colonial and in favour of sexual emancipation.

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Some critics have described this as a package, but I think from the outset Israel has been clear that he believes these ideas developed

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progressively and that they were not fully formed until the middle decades of the 18th century.

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His emphasis on the core on a core of Enlightenment ideas does not narrow his focus as much as some critics have claimed.

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Rather, it provides him with a distinctive is highly controversial organising tool.

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The Democratic egalitarian Republican impulses that Israel identifies as the core were espoused by what he calls the radical enlightenment.

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From the 16 sixties, however, and into the early 19th century,

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there were two other parallel ideological camps the conservative enlightenment of thinkers such as Locke,

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Voltaire, Montesquieu, on the one hand and the counter enlightenment on the other.

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The former sought accommodation and compromise to harmonise religion with science to reform monarchy.

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The latter obviously sought to expose the alleged fallacies and harmfulness of the Enlightenment, especially the radical enlightenment.

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This view of a movement that spawned two parallel and opposing deformations enables Israel to insist that there was really only one enlightenment.

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He is adamant that there was no such thing as what has been variously described as a cluster of multiple enlightenment,

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a family of parallel enlightenment or a series of parallel national enlightenment or enlightenment in different national contexts.

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Equally, Israel rejects the views of those who argue that the British Enlightenment was the true source of these ideas.

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British society insists on enlightenment thinking which evolved within it,

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moved progressively away from the core values over the 18th century towards what it

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describes as a socially conservative attitude and a strident insistence on limited monarchy,

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aristocracy, racial hierarchy and empire. Israel's narrative takes a different geographical course.

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The radical enlightenment enhanced almost immediately its moderate and critical

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or antagonistic variants began in the low countries and then spread to France,

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which was the main arena within which the radical enlightenment then subsequently developed.

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Ultimately argues this strand of thought caused the revolution or rather its later exponents

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dominated the Democratic and Republican phase of the revolution between 1789 and 1799,

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following the collapse of royal aristocratic and ecclesiastical power and at a time while conservatism,

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moderation and authoritarian populism populism all fragmented and weakened each other.

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Implicit in that last quotation is Israel's view that Robespierre and his colleagues were not exponents really of radical enlightenment,

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but part of what he describes as a populist authoritarian revolution rooted in a simplified culture enlightenment,

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Rousseau ism aiming at dictatorship, distinguished extinguishing dissent and suppressing freedom of the press and expression.

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This is an important point because Israel clearly wishes to present pre-empt

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any argument that there was a relationship between the Enlightenment and 20th

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century totalitarianism for this would conflict with his own central point that

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the core values of the radical enlightenment form the foundation of modern.

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Perhaps we should specify modern Western society today.

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I don't want to dwell on this particular issue, but to move on to ask what all this means in Israel's view for Germany.

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Israel repeatedly emphasises the constrictions of German society and the conservative structures of the Holy Roman Empire.

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He's sceptical, indeed scathing about the claims made for enlightened despotism, particularly in the larger territories such as Austria and Prussia.

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There was more scope, he says, for intellectual freedom and enlightenment reform in smaller territories, but not much.

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In most cases, German thinkers nonetheless feature at every stage in Israel's analysis from the late 17th century to the 1790s over his three volumes,

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which cover so far the period up to 1790. Israel sketches and then allowed an outline of the development of German radical thought before about 1740.

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This includes many lesser known now partly forgotten figures, but thereafter the focus shifts to a marvellous Lessing Kant,

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How to Ghouta and Anshula, as well as people like pulpwood, which thought Adam Vice. helped and others.

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Variously, they contributed to what Israel calls the fracturing German culture and inspired or participated in key debates in the later

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1780s about the legacy of Spinoza and the significance of Kant's critical philosophy and discussion of the revolution,

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then prompted to go to Chilla to develop their doctrine of art as the new religion.

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Of course, we don't exactly know where Israel would take his argument next or how exactly he would conclude his fourth,

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and one would assume final volume is still in progress, but it's difficult to see how he can develop his German strand very far.

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Heiner and Marx will no doubt figure, and Hegel, of course, was the last gasp of moderate enlightenment in Germany.

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But who else? In fact,

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Israel seems already to have written Germany into a version of the German zonder vague thesis the school of Post-1945 Historical thought

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that sought to explain the deep roots of national socialism in German history in terms of the absence of a radical or liberal to.

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Ed. Germany, these historians argued, was a country without revolution where intellectuals devoted themselves to art rather than

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politics for subscribing to a new religion of art was clearly a way of avoiding revolution.

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German revolutionaries or perhaps one should say putative revolutionaries,

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were thin on the ground and none came anywhere near to achieving anything other than provoking censorship or other forms of government clampdown.

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It seems to me in two respects that Israel has produced something that is set out to avoid,

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despite his aspiration to write a transnational history of the Enlightenment and to avoid the old national narratives of the history of that movement.

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He's come up with something remarkably similar, particularly in the third volume of which is devoted to the Democratic Enlightenment 1750 to 1790.

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It's true that this volume also includes sections devoted to all European countries covers North America,

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Iberia, America, Batavia, Dutch Asia, India, China and Japan as well.

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But the real core of his history is the story of France, culminating in the revolution.

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And the second strand of the narrative is clearly Germany, to which over just over 20 percent of the third volume is devoted.

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Now, like any good historian, Israel is sensitive to the contingencies of time, place, institutional framework and tradition.

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What he demonstrates, I think at every stage, is how such contingencies shaped, facilitated, transformed, impeded,

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hindered or defeated the development of enlightenment ideas in various parts of

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the world that Israel privileges one particular set of ideals is another matter.

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He's still operating, however, with something that he claimed was obsolete,

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namely a model of parallel contexts, which we can, I believe, loosely label national.

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If we look at the argument of Israel's third volume,

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what we have in some ways is simply a new version of the classic tale of two enlightenment a progressive French enlightenment,

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albeit now with Dutch roots and the German Enlightenment, albeit now with a radical core, which, however,

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shied away from the revolutionary challenge in the 1780s and 1790s and then soon afterwards failed.

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Here Israel comes close to the traditional master narrative of the German Enlightenment,

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as it was written by German scholars from the late 19th century to the 1960s and as it in many respects,

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still characterises the view of leading German scholars.

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It's important to note, of course, that Israel's account has a different content, but the structural similarity is very striking.

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The old German narrative ran roughly as follows.

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It started with with the disparaging remarks that Hagel made about the Berlin

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Wall around 18:00 and in his later lectures and the history of philosophy,

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the works of mid-19th century scholars such as Karl Biederman and Hermann Hetzner, who championed Enlightenment values were rarely appreciated.

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More typical, it was said, were those who from the 1880s onwards echoed Hegel in writing about the oft claim as a superficial,

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shallow movement inspired by ideas imported from France.

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It was, they concluded, a fundamentally unknown German movement.

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Indeed, the greatest achievement of German thought and culture was such a thing that it overcame or transcended the alpha male.

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This narrative never truly necessitated certain organisation of the material.

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Likeness, for example, was deemed not to belong to the clell at all in any sense.

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More curiously, even Kant was also separated out and labelled as the founder of German idealism.

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The philosophical movement, which culminated in the work of fish to Schlegel, Hegel and Schelling,

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in which allegedly represented an anti-Western anti rational and uniquely German way of understanding the world in literature and historical thinking.

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There was a parallel movement. The reaction against enlightenment began. If anything, slightly earlier before the 1880s here Hamon, for example,

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and how to were identified as progenitors of what Wilhelm Deltoid identified in his 1867 inaugural lecture,

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as did Deutsche the vehicle three generations of innovative German writers and thinkers,

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starting with the storm and drunk in the 1770s and reaching a high point with Schiller and the mature Gerta.

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If idealism was a philosophical reflection or manifestation of the German spirit, classicism and above all,

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romanticism were its literary and artistic expressions by about nineteen hundred thousand.

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Once observed, the of Cleveland had become the whipping boy of German Geist Schuster.

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Indeed, from around that time, the word of Klong itself was increasingly used to denote an historical epoch rather than an ongoing process.

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It was consigned firmly to the past.

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The myth of the Deutsche Vivegam became an established orthodoxy,

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and it was given further force by Freud was my next notion at the end of the 19th that at the end of the 18th century, sorry minor CXOs.

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At the end of the 18th century, the Germans were a couture nazione, but not yet a start.

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Not saw this, he said. Both explained the late development of the Germans, but also the ultimate superiority.

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Their mindset had developed slowly. But in working through and overcoming the Enlightenment,

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the Germans had achieved a greater depth of profundity than the rest of the world put together.

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This mindset, it was said, triumphed militarily and politically in the so-called wars of liberation against France between 1813 and 1815,

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a triumph which demonstrated what great things might be achieved in the future.

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Within a few years,

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these ideas became the emblematic became emblematic of national solidarity with the German calls in the First World War and the basis

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for rejection both of the peace settlement of 1919 and of the Republican system that was allegedly imposed upon Germany by it.

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Few establishment intellectuals, notably those who held shares of humanistic history, philosophy, theology at German universities, deviated from them.

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There were notable survivals from an older generation like Koch, for example, and others from Hanoch,

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whose influential works, largely written before 1914, still reiterated the continuing significance of the all clear.

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Yet amongst younger scholars, figures such as Kalapana,

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the sociologist Ounce Mannheim or the philosopher Ernst Cachoeira were marginal or marginalised figures.

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Honour, for example, was a staunch national liberal patriot who supported the war effort yet strenuously opposed the Turkish nationalism.

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But the Pan Germans. He was, however, a pastor and gained his first university position at the age of 50.

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Furthermore, his death? In nineteen ninety thirty three, four years after the publication of his great book on the theology of The Clone

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effectively meant that his work was only rediscovered in the nineteen sixties.

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Mannheim, Hungarian German Jew, had been approved for his habilitation at the University of Leipzig,

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but in nineteen thirty three he withdrew his application and left Germany.

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Cachoeira great work on the philosophy of the club was completed in nineteen thirty two the following year.

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He was dismissed from his Hamburg professorship amongst German writers of the centre and right on the political spectrum.

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Things were little different. Thomas Mann here is a notable exception in moving from war crime,

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denunciation of the Enlightenment to a new appreciation of its values by the end of the nineteen twenties.

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More typical of what was to come was Hunt's Norman Norman Sorry,

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who wrote in 1932 that the Alf clone had afflicted the German people like an illness, that it was ultimately responsible for capitalism,

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the proletariat for Marxism and the economic worldview for overpopulation and

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the politicisation of the masses and for the domination of society by machines.

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These phenomena, he claimed, were all profoundly linked to rather mysteriously and like a hoard of apocalyptic

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horsemen who wrote they had brought the German people to the brink of catastrophe.

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Norman was an early member of the Nazi Party. Others, perhaps not surprising, others were less strident, and one should, of course,

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be wary of branding all critics of the Alf clown as proto fascists or proto Nazis as some have been inclined to do.

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Yet, disappointingly, all but a few German scholars found their views to be entirely compatible with the spirit of the New Age.

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The national socialist regime rapidly integrated the by now mainstream negative perceptions of

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the Alf clown into its own worldview and into the guidelines set for schools and universities.

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Lessing was admired for his alleged hatred of France, which allowed many Nazis to overlook his rather misguided file semitism.

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Winkleman, Kant and Schiller were also praised as cited as praiseworthy anti-French thinkers.

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Moses Mendelssohn was despised as one of the originators of the modern Jewish world Jewish intellectual conspiracy How To was reviled,

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revered as a hero for having braced himself against the degenerate intellectual character of his time.

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The natural corollary to all this was, of course,

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the view of German romanticism as the true origin of what was claimed to be the steel romanticism of the present.

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The writings of Mauritz aunt and Kleist and Gert False perhaps an unlikely trio, but nonetheless, these were the trio that were set as examples.

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These were the cultural foundations that were said and artistic foundations of the new Germany of the 1930s.

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Paradoxically, perhaps the of clock was not immediately rehabilitated following the defeat of Nazis,

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and its significance was, of course, recognised from the outset in a certain sense in East Germany.

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Here, scholars started from Marx and Engels critical insight that the Ofglen was essentially a bourgeois movement and to be criticised accordingly.

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Yet it contained within it. They said the elements of the movement that would succeed it and culminate in revolutionary transformation.

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Hence, Marxist scholars concentrated above all on exploring the tradition of pre Marxist materialism.

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In Germany, the work of people like Gottfrid Steel, akin to Mountford Secret Volga and others,

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which laid the foundations for a new interest in the German radical tradition.

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It's interesting that Johnson Israel acknowledges the work, for example,

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of Munich thought in particular as a major influence on his own work on this theme.

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The activities of East German scholars, of course, to some extent inhibited their Western counterparts.

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Certainly, all attempts made by then, of course,

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to establish a German society for 18th century studies across the Berlin Wall as it were founded both on the

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ambivalence of the GDR government and on the reluctance of West German scholars to cross the ideological divide,

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or even to engage in research on similar topics to the East German counterparts.

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Two other factors were also important.

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Firstly, there was a certainly a renewed preoccupation in West Germany with the tradition of Western humanism and the of clown featured in that,

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along with the Renaissance. So there is a revival of interest.

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But that early exploration of the roots of a better German way, often undertaken by decidedly Christian writers,

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was still by and large caught up in the old German way of thinking about the West as a land in which Germany,

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and especially the manifestations of German idealism and romanticism, occupied a special role.

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The influential Catholic writer, for example, Hindmarch Reinhold Schneider, still after 1945,

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blamed the Enlightenment values such as toleration for the loss of faith and Christian orientation.

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Schneider, who by 1948 had become known as the conscience of the nation,

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believed that Lessing and his successors had undermined Christianity by simply regarding Jesus as a teacher rather than as a saviour.

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The return of the German spirit for which Schneider hoped to pave the way was thus predicated on a rejection of the key principles of the off clell.

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Schneider's influence on Catholic Germany was immense,

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and it's perhaps not surprising that research into the Catholic of Cologne didn't really begin until the nineteen eighties.

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One could make a similar case for Protestants also shared an ambivalence about the Ofglen, at least at first, and only in the later.

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Nineteen sixties began to preoccupy themselves again with a re-evaluation of the theology of the 18th century.

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Secondly, any optimistic view of the Ofglen after 1945 now also faced major obstacles in the form of

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powerful critiques of the Enlightenment from both the left and from liberal conservatives.

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The challenge of the left is better known.

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East Germans who criticised the outcome did so in order to liberate it from its chains and thus fulfil itself by the dictates of the proletariat.

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Their Western counterparts, however, were confronted in 1947 by the deeply pessimistic critique of Adorno and Horkheimer.

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The insistence of dialectic of claim that reason necessarily turned turned into its opposite seemed to deny any way forward at all.

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Far from overcoming myths, they argue of million slave society to a new and even more pernicious mythology.

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Borrowing from Max Faber when Marx failed them, Donovan Horkheimer explained the disaster of Western society in their own lifetimes in terms of

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the paradoxical history of rationality which rested on Weber's distinction between instrumental,

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rationality and value rationality. So was instrumental reason becomes ever more efficient.

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So the reason that embodies or conveys values stifled, repressed and ultimately destroyed enlightenment,

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in other words, had been responsible for totalitarianism and hence for the disasters of the 20th century.

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Though they never spelled them out, the implications for German history were clear.

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The oft claim had led to extreme rationalisation. This would then been accompanied by the emergence of a new.

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Irrational ism first manifested in idealism and romanticism.

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The tragic denouement the destructive nadir of Deutsche Ageist was the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

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If, as it seems, Adorno and Horkheimer really did plan to write a rattling off plan out the way a rehabilitation of the Enlightenment,

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they never certainly got round to it. And there is no work that I'm aware of by either of them,

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which indicates any basis on which they might have written that because I think they were never really able to work out how,

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in fact, reason might overcome its allegedly innate destructive tendencies.

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And that left the rather unhelpful implication that since there was no possible future for the Enlightenment,

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there was really no reason to study it, except for forensic interest more or less.

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Simultaneously, the Enlightenment also came under attack from the liberal, conservative perspective.

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Thinkers such as Karl Popper and Arvind Tolman developed the notion that the

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bourgeois world was born with deep flaws that ultimately caused its destruction.

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The young Reinhardt because Alex, influential work critic on the keys were published in 1959,

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argued that the Enlightenment had developed fateful, utopian ideals.

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He suggested that the subordination of politics to the pursuit of these ideals in the late 18th century afterwards was the real cause for the

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disasters of the 20th century and of the continuing problems of a world polarised between Soviet communism and a post Enlightenment USA.

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Of course, Germany was not the only country where debates about long term effects of the Enlightenment were conducted.

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But I think nowhere did they have a greater impact on intellectuals than in Germany, particularly on the fragile,

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uncertain and politically demoralised liberal left and those Germany of the nineteen fifties non-system and the Holocaust,

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where, after all, specifically German problems. While the Cold War was also experienced more acutely in US divided Germany living in the shadows.

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So it seemed to the Soviet Union and transfixed through the nineteen fifties by the fear of another World War.

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No other people, it seemed, was so marked by the failure of the Enlightenment than the Germans.

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It's not surprising that research into the AfD failed to prosper in that kind of context.

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The old master narrative prevailed for a time of a sterile rationalist movement that German

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intellectuals had begun to reject in the seventeen seventies with the Stalin drunk.

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This only really began to change during the course of the nineteen sixties.

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Politically, one might link the change to the gradual revival of the fortunes of the Democratic Left in Germany.

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Certainly, one of the key inspirations for such research was Juergen Harbourmaster took to a vandal coat, which of 1962,

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which challenged the gloomy view which had been put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer and held

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out the possibility of redemption through of clairvoyance rather than through its rejection.

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The public sphere, half of us argued, was a project that Cantor sketched out in his writings.

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It had been subverted by the development of capitalism in the 19th century, leading to the disaster of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

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After the catastrophe and rid now of the nationalist ideology of German exceptionalism,

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Harbourmaster suggested a new generation of critical thinkers who fully embraced Western values might now be able to translate the ideal into reality.

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Mass was, in fact, but one of several who are preaching the same message at around this time.

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Others that might be mentioned with Ludwig van der Kooser, for example, looking forward to a third of class,

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as we call it, or Willie Earl Miller, who wrote in 1969 of the unbefitting to the incomplete or unfulfilled of Clell.

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That might, however, now in the present, be resumed and perhaps even completed.

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This sense of a new dawn explains much of the excitement and growing confidence

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of a rapidly developing boom of Clelland research in the nineteen sixties.

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Many of those involved in that early stage of the revival of African research thought of themselves as the vanguard of a

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new of helping to lay the foundations for a truly free society in the later 20th century through the nineteen sixties,

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their endeavours were typically accompanied by a critical examination of the history of their own subject to uncover what

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they saw as the genesis of this German ideology and the ways in which the views of their predecessors had been skewed by it.

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This kind of academic. Golan Heights, Pavelka working through the past or confronting a tainted academic tradition was thought to

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be the precondition for a new and more positive approach to the ideas of the 18th century,

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and what indeed emerged gradually was in fact an entirely novel view of the of Clell Germany.

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The focus of scholarly interest moved back to what were assumed to be the French and British origins

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of the afternoon and to the middle decades of the 18th century when it achieved its greatest impact.

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Lessing was now regarded as a more significant figure than Gerta.

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There was a new emphasis on the social history of ideas of literature and a new interest in the science,

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the anthropology and the scientific ideas of the of Clement generally.

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The aim was to explore the creation of the public sphere with its journals and newspapers, its clubs and associations,

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and at the same time, there was a determination to illuminate the variety of ideas and attitudes that the Ofglen generated,

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especially the existence in Germany of a radical tradition, whether it was a materialist tendencies,

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an early 18th century or German Jacobins towards the end of the 18th century.

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In this respect, I think Jonathan is is quite right to emphasise the rediscovery of German radicalism,

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much of it inspired by Spinoza as a notable scholarly achievement of the last 50 years.

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And this, I think view has been impressively reinforced by the work of Martin Musil on intellectual history and most recently by Kevin Hilliard.

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Fine study of free thinkers liberty in some form in German literature between 1750 and 800.

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However, I think this also raises an important question. How significant was the radical tradition in practise?

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How many of the individuals whose work has been rediscovered were outsiders, misfits or marginal figures?

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The early Spinoza, for example, Tilda Ludwig Lourd, Daniel Gerlach, Victor, were unimportant in their own day.

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California was part of the founder of the Deutsche Onion was little more than a con man,

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and his Deutsche Onion was really a kind of Ponzi scheme rather than a serious, enlightened society.

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And in fact, the whole thing collapsed when the fraud was recognised.

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The German Jacobins were a small minority who made no real difference, and none of them came anywhere near achieving their ambitions.

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How much of the free thinking in literary and philosophical circles rarely translated into wider attitudes?

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The attention paid to radicalism, I believe, underlines really a rather different point.

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The mainstream in Germany inclined in a more moderate direction.

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And if there was a central text that caught the mood of the afterglow in Germany, it was your hand off him.

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Spalding's but you would demand this mention of six 48, which went through over 40 editions by the time of the author's death.

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In Eighteen hundred and forty thoughts on the destiny of man or the determination of man,

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spalding's objective was to defend the reputation of Shaftesbury against accusations of theirs.

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His assertion that original sin did not preclude man from perfecting himself.

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Appalled Orthodox Lutherans who accused him of plagiarism. But his emphasis on the moral core of religion delighted more progressive Lutherans.

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And before long, his concept was transferred from its original theological context to the broader discourse on moral philosophy and to the note and

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the notion of boosting the notion of determination or destiny was transferred from the individual Christians to mankind as a whole.

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Spalding's stimming led in many directions and proved to be as congenial to those who remained loyal to some

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form of established Protestantism as to those who distanced themselves from any form of organised religion.

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Towards the end of his life, for example, Spalding even became an admirer of current and revised his text to take account of Kent's teachings.

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Mendelssohn and Howdo were amongst many who adjusted their own ideas to take account of spalding's ideas.

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What united all of these individuals and tendencies and the tendencies they represented was a commitment to gradualism,

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to a process that might reach its conclusion in generations, even centuries to come.

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In concrete terms, this almost invariably translated into an aversion to revolution,

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into a desire to work with and through the interesting institutions of government.

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In 1789 and after, predictably, most German writers were at pains to explain that Germany did not need.

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A revolution to achieve the liberation that the French people were currently seeking through their uprising.

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The French needed to act in this way because their government was corrupt and oppressive and cannot famously

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noted in a famously noted in 1798 that despite all the horrors that unfolded in Paris over the previous years,

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it was on the one hand, only human that indeed proof of human that humans have a moral sensibility that one should have

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been excited by the revolution and to have been an enthusiastic observer of its progress progress.

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But that didn't mean to say that one should have wanted to have the same process in Germany because it simply wasn't necessary.

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In Jonathan Israel scheme of things, of course, this all counts as moderate or conservative enlightenment, not enlightenment at all.

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And he would not be the first to criticise the all clear for their lack of courage and radicalism.

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Indeed, this very much reflects the attitudes of German of scholarship since the 1960s.

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The impression often has been given of rather isolated,

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impotent figures living in an oppressive environment where original critical thought was more often than not repressed by tyrannical princes.

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The New Society of the All of which the off-colour dreamed was a society of the future that late 18th century thinkers constructed imaginatively.

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But that did not, in fact, yet exist.

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It seemed self-evident to many scholars that it could not have been realised within the Holy Roman Empire and its territories.

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This image of a rather disembodied of claim that somehow aspired to create something new but which tragically remained at the mercy of the old world,

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is, however, rather misleading. It's easy, of course, to cite examples that seem to reinforce the idea.

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There's no doubt, for example,

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that Lessing fell fall foul of the Duke upon strike or that drew cult icon averted Birkin incarcerated poor Christian Daniel

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Schubert without trial for ten years on the and aspect took that for daring to lampoon his tyrannical style of government.

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But these were the exceptions. Many more have to be careful about censorship.

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But of course, that was true of other parts of Europe as well. No country was free of censorship in the 18th century.

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New work, however, on the Holy Roman Empire over the last few decades has, I think, done a great deal to put the of Clell into new perspective.

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It's also further reinforced the idea that there was a distinctive German national

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variant of the Enlightenment and the following points I think would be central in that.

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Firstly, much writing about the Holy Roman Empire has been too influenced by the view that its demise was inevitable

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and by often cited 19th and early 20th century Christians with the supposedly decrepit and mediaeval right.

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This, however, ignores the developments in the 18th century of an enlightened theory of the Holy Roman Empire by the 1760s.

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For example, Johann Stephanie Cutter, the leading legal theorist of his day,

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was propounded the notion that the lie was a polity composed of numerous particular states,

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which, however together again, former state, a kind of idea of federation,

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a kind of unique two tier system of government which so fascinated many outside observers that even someone like Benjamin Franklin, for example,

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thinking about the future of the American colonies, went to visit Peter in 1766 and took extensive notes on Peter's ideas about the Holy Roman Empire.

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Peter's ideas became widely accepted, and there even reflected in comments made by some radical, enlightened critics.

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For example, Johann Caspar respeC, who in the 1780s published a series of letters supposedly written by a Frenchman about the

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current state of Germany and as a great surprise to find here that in one of the early letters,

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he praises the Holy Roman Empire as a system comprising many free states which have combined themselves into a certain system characterised by order,

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wisdom and caution. The empire only seemed odd.

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Please, Speck wrote. If I made the mistake of regarding it as a unitary state, which was to misunderstand the very nature of the system,

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the best thing about it, he said, was its built in safeguard against imperial tyranny.

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The principle of its in part is the division of the Reichstag into two corpora.

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In matters concerning religion, with the provision that no decision could be made, that both did not agree with this pick noted.

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Also with approval the tendency of the King of Prussia to exploit this principle

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in relation to non-religious matters because he saw this as a further safeguard.

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Against imperial tyranny on this, we should remember,

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was a man who mercilessly criticised everything that he encountered in Germany and much that he'd never actually seen himself,

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he got a lot of it out of newspapers that he saw as irrational institutions of merciless, for example,

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in denouncing monasteries as completely useless or territories which were not yet governed, according to enlightened principles.

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Here is a radical enlightenment critique approving of the Holy Roman Empire in the language of the new Enlightenment theory of the Holy Roman Empire.

389
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Secondly, an important theme in the extensive body of writing about the Empire was devoted to the rights of subjects.

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German freedom was variously defined, but the catalogue of fundamental rights almost always included the following religious

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liberty security of property the right to move freely from one territory to another.

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The right to appeal to the imperial courts if one's legal rights were infringed by one's ruler.

393
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Obviously, this didn't work so well in larger territories such as Prussia,

394
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which tried very hard to prevent the subjects from using the imperial courts.

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But these larger territories? This is again often overlooked,

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had been obliged to institute higher appeal courts of their own that served the same purpose from the late 17th century onwards.

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It became conventional for writers to emphasise again and again that the Germans were

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not slaves and that the freedom enjoyed by princes also pertained to the subjects.

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And in particular, the rights of German subjects were invariably extensively compared favourably to those of the

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French who really were slaves at the mercy of the tyrannical and absolute king of France.

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Thirdly, rights and everything that went with them were also no guaranteed, not only by the courts,

402
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but by the press and by what was referred to as the new authority of publicity it by the Enlightenment public sphere,

403
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which excoriated and pilloried tyrants and praised wise rulers.

404
00:46:10,370 --> 00:46:15,500
Fourthly, these principles did not remain in the world theory or in world of print.

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They were actively practised in the institutions of the Empire.

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They all, for example, reflected in the daily practise of the imperial courts, to which many thousands of subjects of the empire, in fact, did appeal.

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For example, between 1765 and 1790, just under half of the 10000 cases involving some just just under,

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there was some 10000 cases which were sent to the folks who fought in Vienna, involving roughly 8000 people of modest social origin.

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So it didn't just have to be an aristocrat or a wealthy person to appeal to these higher courts.

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And in the same period, some 7000 individuals of modest social origin were involved in cases that the other Court of Appeal placed in that slot.

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Increasingly, these institutions were populated by officials who favoured the new thinking on the same,

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I think can be said of the regional associations of territories or Kaiser,

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00:47:17,510 --> 00:47:21,890
which in middle and southern Germany in particular developed extensive administrations

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and which increasingly formulated and implemented economic and social policy,

415
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often in collaboration with each other. Fifthly, far from being on the last legs,

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these institutions were flourishing in the late 18th century and there was no lack of discussion about the future.

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A recurring theme was the suggestion that the Reichstag might be transformed into an upper house to complement a new House of Commons.

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Others wanted to extend the functions of the Kaiser or to make them more truly representative of the people as well.

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Above all, thinking about these matters was more often than not historical. Rooted in the historical experience that is of the Germans,

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the milestones of their modern history it was said again and again were the reforms of the period around 1500.

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The struggle against Habsburg tyranny that culminated in the thirty years war and the Peace of Westphalia,

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which had reaffirmed the composite polity and the fundamental rights that it guaranteed its inhabitants.

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This history, it was said, showed a steady progression.

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It was thus in the 18th century a reasonable history, a history from which it was reasonable to make assumptions about the future.

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The future, of course, was destroyed, the empire came to an end, not because it was decayed or decrepit,

426
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but because it suffered the relentless onslaught of French armies from 1792.

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And because Napoleon was determined that it should cease.

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But both the discussion and the memory of the institutions of the Empire informed German political debate into the 20th century.

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These issues also have important implications, I think, for our understanding of the cartel and indeed for the subsequent history of Germany.

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For all the talk about a departure from the old Zonder, the narratives of German history,

431
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the Zonda which in fact remains in place in almost every modern account,

432
00:49:21,170 --> 00:49:24,320
the old empire was programmed to fail,

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00:49:24,320 --> 00:49:31,410
and its failure forms the dismal backdrop to the disaster that enfolded in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.

434
00:49:31,410 --> 00:49:39,380
In other words, the the old narrative of early modern history in Germany is still very much there and still shapes in a sense,

435
00:49:39,380 --> 00:49:45,530
or is set to shape the way in which Germany developed, first of all, in a late or retarded way.

436
00:49:45,530 --> 00:49:51,440
And secondly, in a ultimately disastrous way understanding.

437
00:49:51,440 --> 00:49:57,440
However, the imperial context of the of Clell helps us to think do two things.

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00:49:57,440 --> 00:50:01,790
Firstly, it puts the dominant views of that movement into perspective.

439
00:50:01,790 --> 00:50:12,950
It's gradualism is rejection of revolutionary solutions, its sense of being the product of a uniquely German state framework and national history.

440
00:50:12,950 --> 00:50:21,500
Secondly, it provides a new perspective on the post enlightenment in Germany, or perhaps one might even say the continuing enlightenment.

441
00:50:21,500 --> 00:50:27,770
There were, of course, critics of the of Clell, as indeed there have been throughout the 18th century.

442
00:50:27,770 --> 00:50:31,970
But in future, perhaps we should pay more attention to other things as well.

443
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And one might think of the following short list The focus of Clear, which persisted through the middle decades of the 19th century,

444
00:50:39,800 --> 00:50:44,750
propagated not at the high level of philosophers in the succession of Hegel,

445
00:50:44,750 --> 00:50:55,010
but by local reformers, by teachers, by clergy who were propagating these ideals of the late 18th century well into the 1850s and 1860s.

446
00:50:55,010 --> 00:51:00,410
The political debates about representative and judicial institutions that I've mentioned already,

447
00:51:00,410 --> 00:51:06,080
the debates about law and citizens rights and the safeguarding of civil society.

448
00:51:06,080 --> 00:51:11,330
The continuing concern in Germany about religious freedom and liberty of conscience.

449
00:51:11,330 --> 00:51:16,550
The significance of German secularism was the fourth confession into the 19th century,

450
00:51:16,550 --> 00:51:21,650
perhaps the heirs of German religious radicalism and free thinking.

451
00:51:21,650 --> 00:51:29,930
An enormous amount of attention has been devoted by historians to the emergence of the radical right in late 19th century Germany.

452
00:51:29,930 --> 00:51:39,110
Yet the solid middle also persisted. The key legacies of the claim the rest of the state, the rule of law, liberties, toleration.

453
00:51:39,110 --> 00:51:45,500
It's true that they were undermined in the short term by Nazis and in particular circumstances created by war,

454
00:51:45,500 --> 00:51:52,640
defeat incomplete and contested regime change and the economic chaos of the 1920s.

455
00:51:52,640 --> 00:51:59,330
Yet the continuity of of clashing ideals into the second half of the 20th century is striking and should,

456
00:51:59,330 --> 00:52:03,650
I think, play a major part in any future narrative of German history?

457
00:52:03,650 --> 00:52:11,180
From the later Middle Ages to the present, this narrative would involve both a new approach to the of offlo and to the way

458
00:52:11,180 --> 00:52:16,070
the history of its reception has been written since the late 19th century.

459
00:52:16,070 --> 00:52:23,780
It is, I think, a story that is more complex and infinitely more fascinating than the one Jonathan Israel has told.

460
00:52:23,780 --> 00:52:28,545
Thank you very much.