Enlightenment and Community

Front Cover
McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2000 - 263 pages
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.
 

Contents

Public Writers and the Problem of Publikum
29
United and Yet Divided Lessings Constitution of an Enlightened German Public
58
Inscribing a Public Sphere of Citizens Thomas Abbt s Response to the Problem of Publikum
123
Language Literature and Publikum Herders Vision of Organic Enlightenment
168
Conclusion
221
Bibliography
241
Index
259
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