The Enlightenment in Germany and the Nordic Countries

The German and Nordic Enlightenments, although less well known in the English-speaking world than the French and British versions, were major intellectual movements in their own right. The German Aufklärung produced some of the most ambitious philosophical works of the eighteenth century, the German universities became models of academic reform, and the German engagement with the new philosophy helped lay the foundations of modern literary, scientific, and political thought. The Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland — developed their own distinctive versions of the Enlightenment, often closely connected to the German example. The standard Anglophone textbook, focused on Voltaire, Hume, and Jefferson, has tended to treat the German and Nordic moment as a postscript. That is a mistake. By the 1790s, Germany was the most philosophically exciting country in Europe, and the tradition that Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn built was, in its long-term influence, arguably more important than the British or the French.

This article explores the German and Nordic Enlightenments in detail. It examines the political and cultural context, the major thinkers, the institutional developments, and the long-term influence of these often-overlooked components of the broader Enlightenment.

The German Enlightenment: The Aufklärung

The German Enlightenment, or Aufklärung, was shaped by a number of distinctive features. The political fragmentation of Germany into hundreds of small states, the strength of the German university tradition, the late arrival of the Protestant Reformation, and the long history of Pietism in German-speaking lands all gave the German Enlightenment a character different from the French and British versions. Worth pausing on: the political fragmentation, which would seem like a barrier to intellectual development, was in fact one of the conditions of the German Aufklärung’s success. A culture spread across hundreds of small courts and a couple of dozen universities can experiment in ways that a culture concentrated in a single capital cannot. Weimar, where Anna Amalia presided over the court that supported Goethe and Schiller; Berlin, where Mendelssohn argued with Lessing and Kant’s books were read as soon as they appeared; Halle, where Wolff was expelled in 1723 and recalled in 1740 — the smallness of the German world was, paradoxically, one of its strengths.

The Political Context

The Holy Roman Empire in the eighteenth century was a loose federation of more than three hundred states, ranging from the great powers of Austria and Prussia to the smallest ecclesiastical principalities. The Empire itself was weak; effective power lay with the territorial princes, who ruled their states with varying degrees of absolutism.

The two great German states of the eighteenth century were Austria, ruled by the Habsburgs, and Prussia, ruled by the Hohenzollerns. The two powers competed for dominance in Central Europe, and their rivalry shaped the political life of the entire region. The War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) were the major conflicts of the period, and they had a profound impact on the intellectual life of the German states. The Seven Years’ War, in particular, was the moment at which Frederick the Great’s Prussia — the small Protestant state, surrounded by hostile Catholic powers, with its capital in Berlin — became, almost despite itself, a model of Enlightened absolutism.

The smaller German states — Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, the Palatinate, the ecclesiastical states, the free cities — had their own political and cultural life, often more dynamic and more open to innovation than the great powers. The court of the small principality of Weimar, where Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland all served at one time or another, was the most famous example of a small state that became a major center of cultural life. Anna Amalia’s court in the 1770s and 1780s was, in its way, a German salon — a small space in which some of the most consequential cultural work of the century was carried out.

The University Tradition

The German universities were central to the German Enlightenment. The medieval foundation of the University of Heidelberg (1386), the University of Cologne (1388), and the University of Erfurt (1379) had been supplemented by a long series of new foundations, including the University of Wittenberg (1502), the University of Marburg (1527), the University of Halle (1694), the University of Göttingen (1734), and the University of Berlin (1810).

The German university tradition was more receptive to the new philosophy than the English or French. The German universities were state institutions, and the princes who founded and supported them were often eager to use them to train the administrators, teachers, and ministers that the modernizing state required. The result was a generation of academic teachers who were at the same time serious researchers, productive scholars, and effective teachers. The Seminar, as a research-pedagogical institution, is a German invention of the eighteenth century, and the Habilitation, as the second doctorate required for a professorship, is its complement. The two together are the institutional basis of the modern research university.

The most important new university of the eighteenth century was Halle, founded in 1694 by the Prussian state. Halle became a center of the new philosophy under Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Thomasius was the first German professor to lecture in German rather than Latin, and he was a pioneer of the natural-law tradition in German thought. Wolff was a systematic philosopher whose rationalist works, although little read today, shaped the German academic tradition for a generation. The Wolffian system was, in the early eighteenth century, the philosophical orthodoxy of the German universities, and even Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is, in many respects, a response to Wolff.

Göttingen, founded in 1734 by the Elector of Hanover (who was also King George II of Britain), became the leading German university in the second half of the eighteenth century. Göttingen was a center of historical scholarship (under Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig von Schlözer), of classical philology (under Christian Gottlob Heyne), and of natural law and political science (under Gottfried Achenwall). The fact that Göttingen was a Hanoverian foundation — the Georg-August-Universität, named for George II of Britain — is itself a fact about the cultural cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment: the leading German university of the late eighteenth century was, in form, a British foundation.

The Major Figures of the German Enlightenment

The German Enlightenment produced a remarkable body of work by thinkers of the first rank. The following are the most important.

Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the most influential academic philosopher of the early German Enlightenment. His Vernünftige Gedanken (Reasonable Thoughts), a series of systematic treatises on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and natural law, dominated the German university curriculum for half a century. Wolff was expelled from Halle in 1723 on charges of atheism, but he was recalled in 1740 by Frederick the Great, who had become king of Prussia and who welcomed the philosopher as a symbol of his new, enlightened regime. The expulsion and the recall is, in many respects, the most characteristic story of the German Enlightenment: a professor expelled for atheism by a conservative government, recalled by a reformist government, and the whole episode used as a symbol of the transition from a confessional to a secular state.

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was the leading Jewish philosopher of the German Enlightenment. His Philosophical Writings (1755) and Morning Hours (1785) made important contributions to the theory of knowledge and to the philosophy of aesthetics. His defense of the rational foundations of Judaism in Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (1783) was a major contribution to the debate about religious freedom and Jewish emancipation in the modern world. The Jerusalem is, in fact, one of the most important works of political philosophy of the eighteenth century: Mendelssohn argued, against the dominant Christian political theology of the period, that the church has no authority to use coercion in matters of religious belief, and that the proper relationship between church and state is one of strict separation. The book anticipates, in many respects, the American First Amendment.

Mendelssohn was a central figure in the Berlin Enlightenment. He was a friend of Lessing, who immortalized him in the play Nathan the Wise (1779) as a model of religious tolerance — the famous Ring Parable in act 3, scene 7, in which a father leaves three identical rings to his three sons, no one of which can prove his to be the true one, is one of the great set pieces of Enlightenment literature. He was a defender of the rights of Jews, a contributor to the German literary scene, and a model of the way in which a member of a religious minority could participate in the cultural life of an Enlightenment state. Mendelssohn’s situation — at the center of the German intellectual world and excluded from many of its institutional privileges — captures, perhaps better than any other case, both the achievement and the limits of the German Enlightenment.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was the most important German writer of the eighteenth century. He was a dramatist, critic, philosopher, and theologian. His plays — Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Emilia Galotti (1772), and Nathan the Wise (1779) — established the modern German drama. His critical works — the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769) and the Laokoon (1766) — established the modern theory of aesthetics. His theological writings — the Ernst und Falk dialogues on Freemasonry and the Nathan der Weise — defended religious tolerance and the natural equality of human beings.

Lessing was the great popularizer of the German Enlightenment. He made the new ideas accessible to a wide German public, and he helped to create the cultural space in which the great philosophical works of the German tradition — Kant’s Critiques, the works of Herder, the early writings of Goethe — could be produced and received. The most important thing Lessing did, in retrospect, was to defend a conception of intellectual freedom that the German universities, in their Wolffian scholasticism, had largely lost. His slogan, in the Ernst und Falk dialogues, was the right of every man to seek truth in his own way. The slogan sounds bland; in the German university context of the 1770s, it was a manifesto.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the towering figure of the German Enlightenment, and one of the greatest philosophers in the history of the world. He spent his entire life in Königsberg, in East Prussia, and he developed his philosophy in the course of three great Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790). The Königsberg neighbors, who set their clocks by Kant’s afternoon walk, did not, in most cases, understand what the man was doing. That is, perhaps, the right relationship for a philosopher to have with his neighbors.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason examined the limits of human knowledge and distinguished between the phenomena of experience and the unknowable things-in-themselves. The Critique of Practical Reason established a foundation for morality in the idea of the categorical imperative. The Critique of Judgment examined aesthetic and teleological judgment and helped lay the foundations of modern aesthetics. The three Critiques taken together constitute, in many respects, the most ambitious philosophical project of the modern period, and Kant is, for many philosophers working in the Continental tradition, the figure against whom everything else has to be measured.

Kant’s short essays — What Is Enlightenment? (1784), Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784), and Perpetual Peace (1795) — are among the most influential works of modern political thought. His definition of the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity” — the famous Sapere aude — became the canonical statement of Enlightenment ideals. Perpetual Peace is, in fact, one of the founding documents of modern internationalism; the United Nations Charter and the project of European integration are, in their institutional lineage, descendants of Kant’s argument.

Kant had an enormous influence on later philosophy. The German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all developed their systems in response to Kant’s critical philosophy. The British idealists, the American pragmatists, and the various schools of twentieth-century Continental philosophy all engaged seriously with the Kantian inheritance. The fact that the German Idealists are usually presented as a “revolt” against Kant is, in fact, somewhat misleading; they are also the most serious internal critics of Kant, and they are, in many respects, the ones who carried the Kantian project forward.

The Berlin and Weimar Salons

The German Enlightenment, like the French, was supported by a network of institutions that included the universities, the academies, the courts, and the salons. The Berlin salon of Henriette Herz and Rahel Varnhagen was an important meeting place for the Jewish and Christian intellectuals of the German Enlightenment. The Weimar court, under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia, was the home of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland, and it became the unofficial capital of German literary life.

The German salons, like the French, were important venues for the discussion of new ideas and for the integration of different social groups into the cultural life of the Enlightenment. They were also important for the role they played in the emancipation of women, many of whom — including Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Schlegel, and Bettina von Arnim — became major intellectual figures in their own right. Rahel Varnhagen’s letters and her salon are, in fact, among the most important sources for understanding the Berlin Enlightenment; her Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (1834) is one of the great documents of the period.

The Nordic Enlightenment

The Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland — developed their own distinctive versions of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The Nordic Enlightenments were, in many respects, extensions of the German model, but they had their own particular character, shaped by the political circumstances, the religious traditions, and the cultural peculiarities of the region.

The Swedish Enlightenment

The Swedish Enlightenment was shaped by the political circumstances of the Swedish kingdom, which in the eighteenth century included Finland (then part of Sweden) and the German-speaking territories of Pomerania. The Age of Liberty (1718–1772) was a period of parliamentary government and political reform, and it was also a period of significant cultural achievement. The Swedish riksdag of the Age of Liberty is, in fact, one of the more remarkable constitutional experiments of the eighteenth century: a parliamentary government, dominated by the two competing parties of the Hats and the Caps, in a kingdom that had previously been an absolute monarchy. The Hats were the pro-French, war-hawk party; the Caps were the pro-Russian, peace party. The politics were often bitter; the cultural achievement, in spite of the politics, was real.

The leading figure of the Swedish Enlightenment was Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the great botanist who developed the modern system of biological classification. Linnaeus was also an important figure in the Swedish educational system and a contributor to the economic and administrative reform of the Swedish state. His work was closely connected to the broader Enlightenment project of organizing knowledge systematically and making it useful for the improvement of human life. The Systema Naturae (1735) is, in fact, one of the founding documents of modern biology; the Species Plantarum (1753) is the other; together they are the institutional basis of modern biological nomenclature.

Other important figures of the Swedish Enlightenment include Anders Celsius (1701–1744), the astronomer who developed the centigrade temperature scale, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the scientist and religious visionary (whose late visionary writings, beginning in the 1740s, are among the strangest documents of the eighteenth century), and Carl Gustaf Tessin (1695–1770), the statesman and patron of the arts who helped shape the cultural policy of the Swedish kingdom.

The Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment

The kingdom of Denmark-Norway, ruled from Copenhagen, developed its own version of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The leading figure was Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), the playwright, historian, and philosopher often called “the Molière of the North.” Holberg’s comedies and his historical works helped to establish a modern literary and historical culture in Denmark-Norway. Holberg is, in fact, an interesting case: he was a Norwegian, raised in Bergen, educated in Copenhagen, who spent years traveling in Europe and who eventually settled as a professor in Copenhagen. The Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment was, in many respects, Holberg’s Enlightenment.

The great institutional achievement of the Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment was the reform of the University of Copenhagen, the establishment of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the modernization of the Danish-Norwegian educational system. The school of jurisprudence at the University of Copenhagen, especially under the leadership of Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778–1860), produced a generation of lawyers and statesmen who would shape the political life of the nineteenth century.

The Danish-Norwegian Enlightenment was also notable for the development of a distinctly Scandinavian form of pietism, the religious movement of Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), which combined the spiritual intensity of the German Pietist tradition with the practical concerns of the Scandinavian peasantry. Hauge’s movement was persecuted by the Danish-Norwegian authorities, but it eventually became an important force in Scandinavian religious and political life. The Hauge case is, in many respects, a Scandinavian version of the Methodist case: a popular religious movement that is, in its first generation, persecuted by the state, and that becomes, in the next generation, an accepted part of the religious landscape.

The Finnish Enlightenment

Finland, then part of the Swedish kingdom, developed its own version of the Enlightenment at the University of Turku (Åbo). The most important figure was Anders Chydenius (1729–1803), a Finnish priest and member of the Swedish parliament, who was one of the most important economic thinkers of the eighteenth century. Chydenius’s work, anticipating Adam Smith and the classical economists, argued for free trade, free migration, and the abolition of mercantilist restrictions. He was also a defender of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities.

Chydenius is sometimes called the “forgotten Adam Smith” because of the priority of his work on free trade. His work on free trade and free migration anticipated the arguments of Adam Smith and the classical economists, and he was also a defender of religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. His influence on the development of Finnish national consciousness has also been significant. The 1765 memorandum The National Gain (Den nationnale vinsten), in which Chydenius laid out the case for free trade, is the founding document of Finnish economic liberalism, and the parallel priority with Smith’s own work is one of the more interesting facts in the history of eighteenth-century political economy.

The Legacy of the German and Nordic Enlightenment

The German and Nordic Enlightenments left a permanent mark on the modern world. The German university tradition, which developed in the eighteenth century, became the model for the modern research university, and it is the ancestor of the great research universities of contemporary Europe and America. The German tradition of systematic philosophy, established by Wolff, Kant, and the German Idealists, is still a major presence in contemporary philosophy. The German and Scandinavian traditions of natural law, of social science, of historical writing, and of aesthetic theory all had an important influence on the broader development of modern thought.

The German Enlightenment was also the immediate source of two of the most influential intellectual movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: German Idealism and Romanticism. The German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, developed their systems in critical engagement with Kant. The German Romantics, including Herder, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Hölderlin, were also in dialogue with the Enlightenment, but they emphasized the importance of history, language, culture, and feeling against what they saw as the cold abstraction of Enlightenment rationalism. The Romantics were not, in fact, opponents of the Enlightenment; they were the heirs of the Enlightenment who had, in the process of inheriting it, complicated it. The Romantics’ critique of abstract universalism was, in many respects, an internal critique — the kind of critique that the Enlightenment’s own best practitioners would have recognized as legitimate.

The tension between Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism has been a central feature of modern German and European intellectual life. The two movements were, in many respects, complementary: the Romantics drew on many of the achievements of the Enlightenment, and the most sophisticated of the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Kant, were well aware of the limits of purely rationalist approaches to the human condition.

The contemporary world is still working out the implications of this tension. The political institutions of modern Europe, the legal systems of the European states, the educational institutions of the modern world, and the philosophical traditions of contemporary thought draw on the central arguments of the German and Nordic Enlightenments. The engagement with the achievements and the limits of these movements is a central task of contemporary intellectual life, and it is also, in many respects, an unending one. The fact that the German and Nordic Enlightenments are still being worked out — that the modern research university is still the institutional settlement of the eighteenth century, and that the Kantian question about the limits of reason is still the central question of modern philosophy — is the most useful sign of the inheritance.