Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment

A discussion of Jim Reed's book Jim Reed (Taylor Professor of
German, University of Oxford) discusses his book Light in Germany:
Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment with Joachim Whaley (Professor
of German History and Thought, University of Cambridge) and Kevin
Hilliard (Lecturer in German, University of Oxford). The event is
chaired by Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of German,
University of Oxford) About the book: Germany’s political and
cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed
the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone
by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears
the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes
of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a
coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual
history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s
Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements,
conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their
development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the
late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran
through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science,
and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and
how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for
oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from
literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic
ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of
the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular
democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent
dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.