Enlightenment and Community

In an age when it has become fashionable to dismiss the Enlightenment as a sinister movement based on instrumental rationality, Benjamin Redekop delves deeper to understand the movement on its own terms. In Enlightenment and Community he shows that the Enlightenment was a diverse, reformist enterprise with strong communitarian elements. Redekop examines the writings of G.E. Lessing, Thomas Abbt, and J.G. Herder - three seminal figures of the German Enlightenment - in their social and intellectual context, showing that their focus was the same issue that occupied many in Germany who ascribed to Enlightenment ideals: how to shape an enlightened "public" out of a diverse, fragmented, and "unenlightened" society.