Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Mcgill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas)

Jürgen Habermas' pioneering work has provoked intense discussion about the rise of a modern public sphere and civil society. Redekop revises and expands the Habermasian thesis by demonstrating that, rather than being particularly "bourgeois," the eighteenth-century German public was a problematic, amorphous entity that was not based on a single social grouping - a beckoning figure that led Lessing, Abbt, and Herder on unique but comparable quests to give it shape and form. His perspective provides an important new understanding of the work of authors who have often been placed in overly narrow and restrictive categories. Argues that the Enlightenment project was more than the misguided turning towards instrument rationality that some hold it to be. The author examines three north-central German Enlightenment writers and finds in them a genuine communitarian search for the construction of a German public sphere. After placing the writers in the general social, political, and literary contexts of their time, he looks at the different approaches (literary, political, and philosophical) the author applied to their goal. Machine generated contents note: 1 Public Writers and the Problem of Publikum 29 2 United and Yet Divided: Lessing's Constitution of an Enlightened German Public 58 3 Inscribing a Public Sphere of Citizens: Thomas Abbt's Response to the Problem of Publikum 123 4 Language, Literature, and Publikum: Herder's Vision of Organic Enlightenment 168.