Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbot, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He
is the author of Competition in Religious Life, Religion vs. Television:
Competitors in Cultural Context, and Inauthentic Culture and Its
Philosophical Critics.

This sophisticated study in the history of ideas explores the emergence
and development in the German Enlightenment of the idea of the public
sphere and the related conception of the public writer. The author,
Benjamin W. Redekop, focuses on three major figures of the German
Enlightenment: Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Thomas Abbot, and Johann
Gottfried Herder. He examines their theorizing about the nature and
potential role of the public; their conception of their own role as
writers in relation to the judgment, interests, and capacities of the
public; and their contributions to molding the German public, with its
distinctive social and political problems in accordance with the
high-minded cultural project of the Enlightenment. Among the topics that
Redekop addresses are the historical impact of the emergence of a print
culture, the difficulties of public writers in attending to their own
interests, and the recurrent tension in Enlightenment thought between
communitarian and individualist ideals.

Redekop considers various influences on Lessing, Abbot, and Herder,
including the French thinkers Bayle and Rousseau, the English
moral-sense philosophers Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and other major
figures of the German Enlightenment such as Kant and Mendelssohn. He
also notes the importance of classical models that Enlightenment
thinkers were endeavoring to reconstitute and adapt. He has little to
say, however, about relevant contributions of Renaissance and
17th-century thinkers. Redekop builds on insights of Jьrgen Habermas
and periodically refers to other recent social and cultural theorists,
but his primary emphasis is on historical rather than philosophical
issues. His book would likely be more stimulating for many readers if he
had related his subject matter more directly to contemporary ideas and
concerns regarding the public forum. But Redekop does not himself aspire
in this monograph to be a public writer in the tradition of the
intellectual giants whose ideas he communicates to us here; and it is no
insignificant achievement to have provided students of modern European
history and literature with a fresh and sympathetic perspective on some
Enlightenment visionaries who have been virtually demonized in recent
years by post-modernist ideologues.