Ladies and gentlemen, I can detect the kind of expectant hush, so although it's not quite 5:15 yet.
Let me do my warm up act by introducing the speaker and also saying something about this occasion.
The best one lecture given every year, by the way, for newcomers, there are seats down here.
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
that was founded as an offshoot of the Voltaire Foundation some years ago by Nicholas KROQ.
It's now been absorbed into the torch programme on the Enlightenment torch,
as also will know is the acronym for the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities.
The Oxford counterpart to crash in Cambridge there was some dispute, as with a torch,
was entirely appropriate name because some people associated with the act of torching.
But we thought that the sense of torch light enlightenment was far, far superior.
The Vestibule Decimal Centre, also in this new guise, is reaching out much more than in the past beyond France to the international enlightenment.
And one side of this extension of our mission is we've invited a scholar of the German Enlightenment,
Professor Andrew Willy from Cambridge to give this year's lecture.
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.
From 15, 29 to 18, 19, the book soon afterwards appeared in German.
He's published many first-rate articles,
but one of the most remarkable things about him is that he's one of the rare academics who can hold their nerve
and work for many years on a massive research project without worrying about the demands of excessive ease,
the RDF, which provides plenty material in the form of first rate articles.
Anyway, the book in question is Germany and the Holy Roman Empire 50 493 2006 two volumes total of some fourteen hundred pages,
which appear from up in 2012 as part of the Oxford history of early modern Europe.
There are many books commissioned for Caesar that don't get finished.
This one has been finished. It's available in paperback. And if you wish, you can buy.
The German translation was published two months ago. And apparently the first printing is already sold out.
Has these projects on hand now, one of which is the volume in Europe's very short introduction series on the Holy Roman Empire.
But today he's going to speak to us on the theme of true enlightenment can be both achieved and beneficial.
The German enlightenment and its interpretation to.
Thank you, Richard, for those very kind words of introduction, thank you also to you again,
Richie and Nicholas Cronk and his colleagues for having firstly invited me in for
having made the arrangements for my stay in Cambridge really so smooth and agreeable.
Of Cleveland can at once the concise and true enlightenment can be both achieved and beneficial,
or perhaps to use more colloquial sounding but actually quite appropriate 18th century terminology.
True enlightenment can be achieved and make us happy.
One could be forgiven for thinking that my title was taken from one of those numerous 18th century essays by German writers,
associate with the oft claim that later critics denounced as typically facile thoughts of a superficial and hopelessly idealistic movement.
It is, however, nothing of the kind the statement can be found in the 11th edition of the podcast.
Encyclopaedia, published in 1860 for one of the key handbooks of the German building,
spoke to the equivalent in many ways of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
To find such an affirmation of the Enlightenment and a key German publication of this time is in fact rather surprising.
It's not so much that it's the exception to the rule.
On the contrary, similar statements may be found throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th century.
What is remarkable, however, is that such statements don't fit into the commonly accepted interpretation of the German Enlightenment and its legacy
for the story that emerges for much of the scholarly literature of the 19th century to the present is rather different.
The German Enlightenment is said, died in the 1790s.
What followed was an allegedly an increasingly radical series of reactions to it and rejections of its fundamental principles and values.
Attempts to arrive revive its ideals, for example, in the 1920s for short lived.
Even after 1945, it was often suggested and is still suggested today that those who wish to try once more to
connect with the ideals of the 18th century struggled at least initially against the tide.
Then a Schneiders, for example, considered by many to be the leading German modern German scholar of Enlightenment
Thought argues that the oft claim effectively ended in the 1780s and that thereafter,
as he wrote. The fact that Germany too had been a country of the Enlightenment was forgotten for a very long time.
Frederic Vizer went even further when he wrote in 1992 that the attack on the old
club in the 1790s cast a shadow over Germany's future to not a negligible degree.
The shadow remains. I shall return to this dark narrative in a minute,
but first I'd like to address some key issues that preoccupied Enlightenment scholarship generally in recent years.
Speaking of a German enlightenment and of a specifically German interpretation of the Enlightenment brings to mind
the debate provoked by the arguments developed by Jonathan Israel in a series of three massive volumes so far,
totalling over three thousand pages in print. And in addition, his book On The French Revolution.
Numerous articles, reviews and savage and polemical responses to his critics.
He's not here. The debate about this body of work has become so important, however,
that I believe no serious discussion of the Enlightenment can now take place without clear reference to it.
The essence of Israel's argument is easily stated.
He suggests that the late 17th and 18th century saw the development of what one might describe as a unitary enlightenment.
It was founded on the radical new interpretation of God and the world by Spinoza.
The key, according to Israel, was Spinoza modernism.
His rejection of any difference between matter and spirit, which led to a rejection of any kind of hierarchy at all.
Originally developed in the religious context, this notion was rapidly applied more widely in politics and society as well.
Over time, it fostered the development of a clear-cut set of convictions or objectives secularist and tolerant without reservation.
Also egalitarian and democratic. Furthermore, anti-colonial and in favour of sexual emancipation.
Some critics have described this as a package, but I think from the outset Israel has been clear that he believes these ideas developed
progressively and that they were not fully formed until the middle decades of the 18th century.
His emphasis on the core on a core of Enlightenment ideas does not narrow his focus as much as some critics have claimed.
Rather, it provides him with a distinctive is highly controversial organising tool.
The Democratic egalitarian Republican impulses that Israel identifies as the core were espoused by what he calls the radical enlightenment.
From the 16 sixties, however, and into the early 19th century,
there were two other parallel ideological camps the conservative enlightenment of thinkers such as Locke,
Voltaire, Montesquieu, on the one hand and the counter enlightenment on the other.
The former sought accommodation and compromise to harmonise religion with science to reform monarchy.
The latter obviously sought to expose the alleged fallacies and harmfulness of the Enlightenment, especially the radical enlightenment.
This view of a movement that spawned two parallel and opposing deformations enables Israel to insist that there was really only one enlightenment.
He is adamant that there was no such thing as what has been variously described as a cluster of multiple enlightenment,
a family of parallel enlightenment or a series of parallel national enlightenment or enlightenment in different national contexts.
Equally, Israel rejects the views of those who argue that the British Enlightenment was the true source of these ideas.
British society insists on enlightenment thinking which evolved within it,
moved progressively away from the core values over the 18th century towards what it
describes as a socially conservative attitude and a strident insistence on limited monarchy,
aristocracy, racial hierarchy and empire. Israel's narrative takes a different geographical course.
The radical enlightenment enhanced almost immediately its moderate and critical
or antagonistic variants began in the low countries and then spread to France,
which was the main arena within which the radical enlightenment then subsequently developed.
Ultimately argues this strand of thought caused the revolution or rather its later exponents
dominated the Democratic and Republican phase of the revolution between 1789 and 1799,
following the collapse of royal aristocratic and ecclesiastical power and at a time while conservatism,
moderation and authoritarian populism populism all fragmented and weakened each other.
Implicit in that last quotation is Israel's view that Robespierre and his colleagues were not exponents really of radical enlightenment,
but part of what he describes as a populist authoritarian revolution rooted in a simplified culture enlightenment,
Rousseau ism aiming at dictatorship, distinguished extinguishing dissent and suppressing freedom of the press and expression.
This is an important point because Israel clearly wishes to present pre-empt
any argument that there was a relationship between the Enlightenment and 20th
century totalitarianism for this would conflict with his own central point that
the core values of the radical enlightenment form the foundation of modern.
Perhaps we should specify modern Western society today.
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.
Israel repeatedly emphasises the constrictions of German society and the conservative structures of the Holy Roman Empire.
He's sceptical, indeed scathing about the claims made for enlightened despotism, particularly in the larger territories such as Austria and Prussia.
There was more scope, he says, for intellectual freedom and enlightenment reform in smaller territories, but not much.
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,
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.
This includes many lesser known now partly forgotten figures, but thereafter the focus shifts to a marvellous Lessing Kant,
How to Ghouta and Anshula, as well as people like pulpwood, which thought Adam Vice. helped and others.
Variously, they contributed to what Israel calls the fracturing German culture and inspired or participated in key debates in the later
1780s about the legacy of Spinoza and the significance of Kant's critical philosophy and discussion of the revolution,
then prompted to go to Chilla to develop their doctrine of art as the new religion.
Of course, we don't exactly know where Israel would take his argument next or how exactly he would conclude his fourth,
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.
Heiner and Marx will no doubt figure, and Hegel, of course, was the last gasp of moderate enlightenment in Germany.
But who else? In fact,
Israel seems already to have written Germany into a version of the German zonder vague thesis the school of Post-1945 Historical thought
that sought to explain the deep roots of national socialism in German history in terms of the absence of a radical or liberal to.
Ed. Germany, these historians argued, was a country without revolution where intellectuals devoted themselves to art rather than
politics for subscribing to a new religion of art was clearly a way of avoiding revolution.
German revolutionaries or perhaps one should say putative revolutionaries,
were thin on the ground and none came anywhere near to achieving anything other than provoking censorship or other forms of government clampdown.
It seems to me in two respects that Israel has produced something that is set out to avoid,
despite his aspiration to write a transnational history of the Enlightenment and to avoid the old national narratives of the history of that movement.
He's come up with something remarkably similar, particularly in the third volume of which is devoted to the Democratic Enlightenment 1750 to 1790.
It's true that this volume also includes sections devoted to all European countries covers North America,
Iberia, America, Batavia, Dutch Asia, India, China and Japan as well.
But the real core of his history is the story of France, culminating in the revolution.
And the second strand of the narrative is clearly Germany, to which over just over 20 percent of the third volume is devoted.
Now, like any good historian, Israel is sensitive to the contingencies of time, place, institutional framework and tradition.
What he demonstrates, I think at every stage, is how such contingencies shaped, facilitated, transformed, impeded,
hindered or defeated the development of enlightenment ideas in various parts of
the world that Israel privileges one particular set of ideals is another matter.
He's still operating, however, with something that he claimed was obsolete,
namely a model of parallel contexts, which we can, I believe, loosely label national.
If we look at the argument of Israel's third volume,
what we have in some ways is simply a new version of the classic tale of two enlightenment a progressive French enlightenment,
albeit now with Dutch roots and the German Enlightenment, albeit now with a radical core, which, however,
shied away from the revolutionary challenge in the 1780s and 1790s and then soon afterwards failed.
Here Israel comes close to the traditional master narrative of the German Enlightenment,
as it was written by German scholars from the late 19th century to the 1960s and as it in many respects,
still characterises the view of leading German scholars.
It's important to note, of course, that Israel's account has a different content, but the structural similarity is very striking.
The old German narrative ran roughly as follows.
It started with with the disparaging remarks that Hagel made about the Berlin
Wall around 18:00 and in his later lectures and the history of philosophy,
the works of mid-19th century scholars such as Karl Biederman and Hermann Hetzner, who championed Enlightenment values were rarely appreciated.
More typical, it was said, were those who from the 1880s onwards echoed Hegel in writing about the oft claim as a superficial,
shallow movement inspired by ideas imported from France.
It was, they concluded, a fundamentally unknown German movement.
Indeed, the greatest achievement of German thought and culture was such a thing that it overcame or transcended the alpha male.
This narrative never truly necessitated certain organisation of the material.
Likeness, for example, was deemed not to belong to the clell at all in any sense.
More curiously, even Kant was also separated out and labelled as the founder of German idealism.
The philosophical movement, which culminated in the work of fish to Schlegel, Hegel and Schelling,
in which allegedly represented an anti-Western anti rational and uniquely German way of understanding the world in literature and historical thinking.
There was a parallel movement. The reaction against enlightenment began. If anything, slightly earlier before the 1880s here Hamon, for example,
and how to were identified as progenitors of what Wilhelm Deltoid identified in his 1867 inaugural lecture,
as did Deutsche the vehicle three generations of innovative German writers and thinkers,
starting with the storm and drunk in the 1770s and reaching a high point with Schiller and the mature Gerta.
If idealism was a philosophical reflection or manifestation of the German spirit, classicism and above all,
romanticism were its literary and artistic expressions by about nineteen hundred thousand.
Once observed, the of Cleveland had become the whipping boy of German Geist Schuster.
Indeed, from around that time, the word of Klong itself was increasingly used to denote an historical epoch rather than an ongoing process.
It was consigned firmly to the past.
The myth of the Deutsche Vivegam became an established orthodoxy,
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.
At the end of the 18th century, the Germans were a couture nazione, but not yet a start.
Not saw this, he said. Both explained the late development of the Germans, but also the ultimate superiority.
Their mindset had developed slowly. But in working through and overcoming the Enlightenment,
the Germans had achieved a greater depth of profundity than the rest of the world put together.
This mindset, it was said, triumphed militarily and politically in the so-called wars of liberation against France between 1813 and 1815,
a triumph which demonstrated what great things might be achieved in the future.
Within a few years,
these ideas became the emblematic became emblematic of national solidarity with the German calls in the First World War and the basis
for rejection both of the peace settlement of 1919 and of the Republican system that was allegedly imposed upon Germany by it.
Few establishment intellectuals, notably those who held shares of humanistic history, philosophy, theology at German universities, deviated from them.
There were notable survivals from an older generation like Koch, for example, and others from Hanoch,
whose influential works, largely written before 1914, still reiterated the continuing significance of the all clear.
Yet amongst younger scholars, figures such as Kalapana,
the sociologist Ounce Mannheim or the philosopher Ernst Cachoeira were marginal or marginalised figures.
Honour, for example, was a staunch national liberal patriot who supported the war effort yet strenuously opposed the Turkish nationalism.
But the Pan Germans. He was, however, a pastor and gained his first university position at the age of 50.
Furthermore, his death? In nineteen ninety thirty three, four years after the publication of his great book on the theology of The Clone
effectively meant that his work was only rediscovered in the nineteen sixties.
Mannheim, Hungarian German Jew, had been approved for his habilitation at the University of Leipzig,
but in nineteen thirty three he withdrew his application and left Germany.
Cachoeira great work on the philosophy of the club was completed in nineteen thirty two the following year.
He was dismissed from his Hamburg professorship amongst German writers of the centre and right on the political spectrum.
Things were little different. Thomas Mann here is a notable exception in moving from war crime,
denunciation of the Enlightenment to a new appreciation of its values by the end of the nineteen twenties.
More typical of what was to come was Hunt's Norman Norman Sorry,
who wrote in 1932 that the Alf clone had afflicted the German people like an illness, that it was ultimately responsible for capitalism,
the proletariat for Marxism and the economic worldview for overpopulation and
the politicisation of the masses and for the domination of society by machines.
These phenomena, he claimed, were all profoundly linked to rather mysteriously and like a hoard of apocalyptic
horsemen who wrote they had brought the German people to the brink of catastrophe.
Norman was an early member of the Nazi Party. Others, perhaps not surprising, others were less strident, and one should, of course,
be wary of branding all critics of the Alf clown as proto fascists or proto Nazis as some have been inclined to do.
Yet, disappointingly, all but a few German scholars found their views to be entirely compatible with the spirit of the New Age.
The national socialist regime rapidly integrated the by now mainstream negative perceptions of
the Alf clown into its own worldview and into the guidelines set for schools and universities.
Lessing was admired for his alleged hatred of France, which allowed many Nazis to overlook his rather misguided file semitism.
Winkleman, Kant and Schiller were also praised as cited as praiseworthy anti-French thinkers.
Moses Mendelssohn was despised as one of the originators of the modern Jewish world Jewish intellectual conspiracy How To was reviled,
revered as a hero for having braced himself against the degenerate intellectual character of his time.
The natural corollary to all this was, of course,
the view of German romanticism as the true origin of what was claimed to be the steel romanticism of the present.
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.
These were the cultural foundations that were said and artistic foundations of the new Germany of the 1930s.
Paradoxically, perhaps the of clock was not immediately rehabilitated following the defeat of Nazis,
and its significance was, of course, recognised from the outset in a certain sense in East Germany.
Here, scholars started from Marx and Engels critical insight that the Ofglen was essentially a bourgeois movement and to be criticised accordingly.
Yet it contained within it. They said the elements of the movement that would succeed it and culminate in revolutionary transformation.
Hence, Marxist scholars concentrated above all on exploring the tradition of pre Marxist materialism.
In Germany, the work of people like Gottfrid Steel, akin to Mountford Secret Volga and others,
which laid the foundations for a new interest in the German radical tradition.
It's interesting that Johnson Israel acknowledges the work, for example,
of Munich thought in particular as a major influence on his own work on this theme.
The activities of East German scholars, of course, to some extent inhibited their Western counterparts.
Certainly, all attempts made by then, of course,
to establish a German society for 18th century studies across the Berlin Wall as it were founded both on the
ambivalence of the GDR government and on the reluctance of West German scholars to cross the ideological divide,
or even to engage in research on similar topics to the East German counterparts.
Two other factors were also important.
Firstly, there was a certainly a renewed preoccupation in West Germany with the tradition of Western humanism and the of clown featured in that,
along with the Renaissance. So there is a revival of interest.
But that early exploration of the roots of a better German way, often undertaken by decidedly Christian writers,
was still by and large caught up in the old German way of thinking about the West as a land in which Germany,
and especially the manifestations of German idealism and romanticism, occupied a special role.
The influential Catholic writer, for example, Hindmarch Reinhold Schneider, still after 1945,
blamed the Enlightenment values such as toleration for the loss of faith and Christian orientation.
Schneider, who by 1948 had become known as the conscience of the nation,
believed that Lessing and his successors had undermined Christianity by simply regarding Jesus as a teacher rather than as a saviour.
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.
Schneider's influence on Catholic Germany was immense,
and it's perhaps not surprising that research into the Catholic of Cologne didn't really begin until the nineteen eighties.
One could make a similar case for Protestants also shared an ambivalence about the Ofglen, at least at first, and only in the later.
Nineteen sixties began to preoccupy themselves again with a re-evaluation of the theology of the 18th century.
Secondly, any optimistic view of the Ofglen after 1945 now also faced major obstacles in the form of
powerful critiques of the Enlightenment from both the left and from liberal conservatives.
The challenge of the left is better known.
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.
Their Western counterparts, however, were confronted in 1947 by the deeply pessimistic critique of Adorno and Horkheimer.
The insistence of dialectic of claim that reason necessarily turned turned into its opposite seemed to deny any way forward at all.
Far from overcoming myths, they argue of million slave society to a new and even more pernicious mythology.
Borrowing from Max Faber when Marx failed them, Donovan Horkheimer explained the disaster of Western society in their own lifetimes in terms of
the paradoxical history of rationality which rested on Weber's distinction between instrumental,
rationality and value rationality. So was instrumental reason becomes ever more efficient.
So the reason that embodies or conveys values stifled, repressed and ultimately destroyed enlightenment,
in other words, had been responsible for totalitarianism and hence for the disasters of the 20th century.
Though they never spelled them out, the implications for German history were clear.
The oft claim had led to extreme rationalisation. This would then been accompanied by the emergence of a new.
Irrational ism first manifested in idealism and romanticism.
The tragic denouement the destructive nadir of Deutsche Ageist was the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
If, as it seems, Adorno and Horkheimer really did plan to write a rattling off plan out the way a rehabilitation of the Enlightenment,
they never certainly got round to it. And there is no work that I'm aware of by either of them,
which indicates any basis on which they might have written that because I think they were never really able to work out how,
in fact, reason might overcome its allegedly innate destructive tendencies.
And that left the rather unhelpful implication that since there was no possible future for the Enlightenment,
there was really no reason to study it, except for forensic interest more or less.
Simultaneously, the Enlightenment also came under attack from the liberal, conservative perspective.
Thinkers such as Karl Popper and Arvind Tolman developed the notion that the
bourgeois world was born with deep flaws that ultimately caused its destruction.
The young Reinhardt because Alex, influential work critic on the keys were published in 1959,
argued that the Enlightenment had developed fateful, utopian ideals.
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
disasters of the 20th century and of the continuing problems of a world polarised between Soviet communism and a post Enlightenment USA.
Of course, Germany was not the only country where debates about long term effects of the Enlightenment were conducted.
But I think nowhere did they have a greater impact on intellectuals than in Germany, particularly on the fragile,
uncertain and politically demoralised liberal left and those Germany of the nineteen fifties non-system and the Holocaust,
where, after all, specifically German problems. While the Cold War was also experienced more acutely in US divided Germany living in the shadows.
So it seemed to the Soviet Union and transfixed through the nineteen fifties by the fear of another World War.
No other people, it seemed, was so marked by the failure of the Enlightenment than the Germans.
It's not surprising that research into the AfD failed to prosper in that kind of context.
The old master narrative prevailed for a time of a sterile rationalist movement that German
intellectuals had begun to reject in the seventeen seventies with the Stalin drunk.
This only really began to change during the course of the nineteen sixties.
Politically, one might link the change to the gradual revival of the fortunes of the Democratic Left in Germany.
Certainly, one of the key inspirations for such research was Juergen Harbourmaster took to a vandal coat, which of 1962,
which challenged the gloomy view which had been put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer and held
out the possibility of redemption through of clairvoyance rather than through its rejection.
The public sphere, half of us argued, was a project that Cantor sketched out in his writings.
It had been subverted by the development of capitalism in the 19th century, leading to the disaster of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
After the catastrophe and rid now of the nationalist ideology of German exceptionalism,
Harbourmaster suggested a new generation of critical thinkers who fully embraced Western values might now be able to translate the ideal into reality.
Mass was, in fact, but one of several who are preaching the same message at around this time.
Others that might be mentioned with Ludwig van der Kooser, for example, looking forward to a third of class,
as we call it, or Willie Earl Miller, who wrote in 1969 of the unbefitting to the incomplete or unfulfilled of Clell.
That might, however, now in the present, be resumed and perhaps even completed.
This sense of a new dawn explains much of the excitement and growing confidence
of a rapidly developing boom of Clelland research in the nineteen sixties.
Many of those involved in that early stage of the revival of African research thought of themselves as the vanguard of a
new of helping to lay the foundations for a truly free society in the later 20th century through the nineteen sixties,
their endeavours were typically accompanied by a critical examination of the history of their own subject to uncover what
they saw as the genesis of this German ideology and the ways in which the views of their predecessors had been skewed by it.
This kind of academic. Golan Heights, Pavelka working through the past or confronting a tainted academic tradition was thought to
be the precondition for a new and more positive approach to the ideas of the 18th century,
and what indeed emerged gradually was in fact an entirely novel view of the of Clell Germany.
The focus of scholarly interest moved back to what were assumed to be the French and British origins
of the afternoon and to the middle decades of the 18th century when it achieved its greatest impact.
Lessing was now regarded as a more significant figure than Gerta.
There was a new emphasis on the social history of ideas of literature and a new interest in the science,
the anthropology and the scientific ideas of the of Clement generally.
The aim was to explore the creation of the public sphere with its journals and newspapers, its clubs and associations,
and at the same time, there was a determination to illuminate the variety of ideas and attitudes that the Ofglen generated,
especially the existence in Germany of a radical tradition, whether it was a materialist tendencies,
an early 18th century or German Jacobins towards the end of the 18th century.
In this respect, I think Jonathan is is quite right to emphasise the rediscovery of German radicalism,
much of it inspired by Spinoza as a notable scholarly achievement of the last 50 years.
And this, I think view has been impressively reinforced by the work of Martin Musil on intellectual history and most recently by Kevin Hilliard.
Fine study of free thinkers liberty in some form in German literature between 1750 and 800.
However, I think this also raises an important question. How significant was the radical tradition in practise?
How many of the individuals whose work has been rediscovered were outsiders, misfits or marginal figures?
The early Spinoza, for example, Tilda Ludwig Lourd, Daniel Gerlach, Victor, were unimportant in their own day.
California was part of the founder of the Deutsche Onion was little more than a con man,
and his Deutsche Onion was really a kind of Ponzi scheme rather than a serious, enlightened society.
And in fact, the whole thing collapsed when the fraud was recognised.
The German Jacobins were a small minority who made no real difference, and none of them came anywhere near achieving their ambitions.
How much of the free thinking in literary and philosophical circles rarely translated into wider attitudes?
The attention paid to radicalism, I believe, underlines really a rather different point.
The mainstream in Germany inclined in a more moderate direction.
And if there was a central text that caught the mood of the afterglow in Germany, it was your hand off him.
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.
In Eighteen hundred and forty thoughts on the destiny of man or the determination of man,
spalding's objective was to defend the reputation of Shaftesbury against accusations of theirs.
His assertion that original sin did not preclude man from perfecting himself.
Appalled Orthodox Lutherans who accused him of plagiarism. But his emphasis on the moral core of religion delighted more progressive Lutherans.
And before long, his concept was transferred from its original theological context to the broader discourse on moral philosophy and to the note and
the notion of boosting the notion of determination or destiny was transferred from the individual Christians to mankind as a whole.
Spalding's stimming led in many directions and proved to be as congenial to those who remained loyal to some
form of established Protestantism as to those who distanced themselves from any form of organised religion.
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.
Mendelssohn and Howdo were amongst many who adjusted their own ideas to take account of spalding's ideas.
What united all of these individuals and tendencies and the tendencies they represented was a commitment to gradualism,
to a process that might reach its conclusion in generations, even centuries to come.
In concrete terms, this almost invariably translated into an aversion to revolution,
into a desire to work with and through the interesting institutions of government.
In 1789 and after, predictably, most German writers were at pains to explain that Germany did not need.
A revolution to achieve the liberation that the French people were currently seeking through their uprising.
The French needed to act in this way because their government was corrupt and oppressive and cannot famously
noted in a famously noted in 1798 that despite all the horrors that unfolded in Paris over the previous years,
it was on the one hand, only human that indeed proof of human that humans have a moral sensibility that one should have
been excited by the revolution and to have been an enthusiastic observer of its progress progress.
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.
In Jonathan Israel scheme of things, of course, this all counts as moderate or conservative enlightenment, not enlightenment at all.
And he would not be the first to criticise the all clear for their lack of courage and radicalism.
Indeed, this very much reflects the attitudes of German of scholarship since the 1960s.
The impression often has been given of rather isolated,
impotent figures living in an oppressive environment where original critical thought was more often than not repressed by tyrannical princes.
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.
But that did not, in fact, yet exist.
It seemed self-evident to many scholars that it could not have been realised within the Holy Roman Empire and its territories.
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,
is, however, rather misleading. It's easy, of course, to cite examples that seem to reinforce the idea.
There's no doubt, for example,
that Lessing fell fall foul of the Duke upon strike or that drew cult icon averted Birkin incarcerated poor Christian Daniel
Schubert without trial for ten years on the and aspect took that for daring to lampoon his tyrannical style of government.
But these were the exceptions. Many more have to be careful about censorship.
But of course, that was true of other parts of Europe as well. No country was free of censorship in the 18th century.
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.
It's also further reinforced the idea that there was a distinctive German national
variant of the Enlightenment and the following points I think would be central in that.
Firstly, much writing about the Holy Roman Empire has been too influenced by the view that its demise was inevitable
and by often cited 19th and early 20th century Christians with the supposedly decrepit and mediaeval right.
This, however, ignores the developments in the 18th century of an enlightened theory of the Holy Roman Empire by the 1760s.
For example, Johann Stephanie Cutter, the leading legal theorist of his day,
was propounded the notion that the lie was a polity composed of numerous particular states,
which, however together again, former state, a kind of idea of federation,
a kind of unique two tier system of government which so fascinated many outside observers that even someone like Benjamin Franklin, for example,
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.
Peter's ideas became widely accepted, and there even reflected in comments made by some radical, enlightened critics.
For example, Johann Caspar respeC, who in the 1780s published a series of letters supposedly written by a Frenchman about the
current state of Germany and as a great surprise to find here that in one of the early letters,
he praises the Holy Roman Empire as a system comprising many free states which have combined themselves into a certain system characterised by order,
wisdom and caution. The empire only seemed odd.
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,
the best thing about it, he said, was its built in safeguard against imperial tyranny.
The principle of its in part is the division of the Reichstag into two corpora.
In matters concerning religion, with the provision that no decision could be made, that both did not agree with this pick noted.
Also with approval the tendency of the King of Prussia to exploit this principle
in relation to non-religious matters because he saw this as a further safeguard.
Against imperial tyranny on this, we should remember,
was a man who mercilessly criticised everything that he encountered in Germany and much that he'd never actually seen himself,
he got a lot of it out of newspapers that he saw as irrational institutions of merciless, for example,
in denouncing monasteries as completely useless or territories which were not yet governed, according to enlightened principles.
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.
Secondly, an important theme in the extensive body of writing about the Empire was devoted to the rights of subjects.
German freedom was variously defined, but the catalogue of fundamental rights almost always included the following religious
liberty security of property the right to move freely from one territory to another.
The right to appeal to the imperial courts if one's legal rights were infringed by one's ruler.
Obviously, this didn't work so well in larger territories such as Prussia,
which tried very hard to prevent the subjects from using the imperial courts.
But these larger territories? This is again often overlooked,
had been obliged to institute higher appeal courts of their own that served the same purpose from the late 17th century onwards.
It became conventional for writers to emphasise again and again that the Germans were
not slaves and that the freedom enjoyed by princes also pertained to the subjects.
And in particular, the rights of German subjects were invariably extensively compared favourably to those of the
French who really were slaves at the mercy of the tyrannical and absolute king of France.
Thirdly, rights and everything that went with them were also no guaranteed, not only by the courts,
but by the press and by what was referred to as the new authority of publicity it by the Enlightenment public sphere,
which excoriated and pilloried tyrants and praised wise rulers.
Fourthly, these principles did not remain in the world theory or in world of print.
They were actively practised in the institutions of the Empire.
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.
For example, between 1765 and 1790, just under half of the 10000 cases involving some just just under,
there was some 10000 cases which were sent to the folks who fought in Vienna, involving roughly 8000 people of modest social origin.
So it didn't just have to be an aristocrat or a wealthy person to appeal to these higher courts.
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.
Increasingly, these institutions were populated by officials who favoured the new thinking on the same,
I think can be said of the regional associations of territories or Kaiser,
which in middle and southern Germany in particular developed extensive administrations
and which increasingly formulated and implemented economic and social policy,
often in collaboration with each other. Fifthly, far from being on the last legs,
these institutions were flourishing in the late 18th century and there was no lack of discussion about the future.
A recurring theme was the suggestion that the Reichstag might be transformed into an upper house to complement a new House of Commons.
Others wanted to extend the functions of the Kaiser or to make them more truly representative of the people as well.
Above all, thinking about these matters was more often than not historical. Rooted in the historical experience that is of the Germans,
the milestones of their modern history it was said again and again were the reforms of the period around 1500.
The struggle against Habsburg tyranny that culminated in the thirty years war and the Peace of Westphalia,
which had reaffirmed the composite polity and the fundamental rights that it guaranteed its inhabitants.
This history, it was said, showed a steady progression.
It was thus in the 18th century a reasonable history, a history from which it was reasonable to make assumptions about the future.
The future, of course, was destroyed, the empire came to an end, not because it was decayed or decrepit,
but because it suffered the relentless onslaught of French armies from 1792.
And because Napoleon was determined that it should cease.
But both the discussion and the memory of the institutions of the Empire informed German political debate into the 20th century.
These issues also have important implications, I think, for our understanding of the cartel and indeed for the subsequent history of Germany.
For all the talk about a departure from the old Zonder, the narratives of German history,
the Zonda which in fact remains in place in almost every modern account,
the old empire was programmed to fail,
and its failure forms the dismal backdrop to the disaster that enfolded in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In other words, the the old narrative of early modern history in Germany is still very much there and still shapes in a sense,
or is set to shape the way in which Germany developed, first of all, in a late or retarded way.
And secondly, in a ultimately disastrous way understanding.
However, the imperial context of the of Clell helps us to think do two things.
Firstly, it puts the dominant views of that movement into perspective.
It's gradualism is rejection of revolutionary solutions, its sense of being the product of a uniquely German state framework and national history.
Secondly, it provides a new perspective on the post enlightenment in Germany, or perhaps one might even say the continuing enlightenment.
There were, of course, critics of the of Clell, as indeed there have been throughout the 18th century.
But in future, perhaps we should pay more attention to other things as well.
And one might think of the following short list The focus of Clear, which persisted through the middle decades of the 19th century,
propagated not at the high level of philosophers in the succession of Hegel,
but by local reformers, by teachers, by clergy who were propagating these ideals of the late 18th century well into the 1850s and 1860s.
The political debates about representative and judicial institutions that I've mentioned already,
the debates about law and citizens rights and the safeguarding of civil society.
The continuing concern in Germany about religious freedom and liberty of conscience.
The significance of German secularism was the fourth confession into the 19th century,
perhaps the heirs of German religious radicalism and free thinking.
An enormous amount of attention has been devoted by historians to the emergence of the radical right in late 19th century Germany.
Yet the solid middle also persisted. The key legacies of the claim the rest of the state, the rule of law, liberties, toleration.
It's true that they were undermined in the short term by Nazis and in particular circumstances created by war,
defeat incomplete and contested regime change and the economic chaos of the 1920s.
Yet the continuity of of clashing ideals into the second half of the 20th century is striking and should,
I think, play a major part in any future narrative of German history?
From the later Middle Ages to the present, this narrative would involve both a new approach to the of offlo and to the way
the history of its reception has been written since the late 19th century.
It is, I think, a story that is more complex and infinitely more fascinating than the one Jonathan Israel has told.
Thank you very much.