Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680-1720

By Martin Mulsow and H. C. Erik Midelfort

Online supplement,"Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund": full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website.

Martin Mulsow’s seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books.

Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813938165

Book preview

Originally published in German as Moderne aus dem

Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680–1720,

© 2002 by Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, Germany

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften

International — Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and

Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen

Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society

VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels

(German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

University of Virginia Press

Translation and new material © 2015 by the

Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mulsow, Martin.

[Moderne aus dem Untergrund. English]

Enlightenment underground : radical Germany, 1680–1720 /

Martin Mulsow ; translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort.

pages cm. — (Studies in early modern German history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3815-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3816-5 (ebook)

1. Enlightenment — Germany. 2. Philosophy, Modern—

17th century. 3. Philosophy, Modern — 18th century.

4. Philosophy, German. I. Title.

B2621.M8713 2015

193—dc23          2015013775

Studies in Early Modern German History

H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT, EDITOR

CONTENTS

Translator’s Note

Author’s Preliminary Note and Acknowledgments

Introduction:

Radicalism as a Problem for Research

ONE

The Ambivalence of Scholars:

A Jewish Anti-Christian Manuscript and Its Path

into the German Early Enlightenment

TWO

The Socinian Enlightenment:

Samuel Crell’s European Networks

THREE

Atheism at the Heart of Orthodoxy?

On the Origin and Early Spread of Johann Joachim Müller’s

De tribus impostoribus (1688)

FOUR

Political Theology:

Reason of State, Historical Pyrrhonism,

and the Critique of Religion

FIVE

The Destruction of Christian Platonism:

Souverain’s Le Platonisme dévoilé (1700) and

Gundling’s Plato atheos (1713)

SIX

Gundling versus Budde:

Skeptical versus Conservative Enlightenment

SEVEN

Eclecticism and Indifferentism:

The Hidden Discourse of the Religio Prudentum from

the Ineptus religiosus of 1652 to the Religio Eclectica of 1702

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK, first published in German in 2002, could help transform our understanding of the European Enlightenment. Martin Mulsow presents hitherto unnoticed evidence that in the decades after 1680, certain German intellectuals, jurists, theologians, philologists, and historians were reworking their cultural resources to reach strikingly radical and modern conclusions; they were doing so largely out of sight, working underground, so to speak, rarely announcing their boldest claims openly in print but usually in manuscripts or in coded language only fully understandable among initiates. These intellectuals were, moreover, not merely reading and receiving the radical ideas available in England, France, and the Netherlands (e.g., Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza) but were digesting Jewish, Socinian, and classical philological texts in ways that pointed to deeply unsettling conclusions. Some of them presented jocular or openly atheist conclusions, but many others reworked classical history — for example, to show that just as Roman religion often served the interests of rulers and priests, modern Christianity was similarly political. Some discovered that in attacking the ideas of Plato or Aristotle, they were at least implicitly undermining Christian theology, as well. So Mulsow shows that the German Enlightenment was not just a late, faint, and conservative echo of more decisive thinking elsewhere but a dramatic departure in its own right. He also illuminates the unfamiliar social settings in which students, young faculty members, connoisseurs, and even well-established professors distributed and collected radical works unsuspected beyond an inner circle, works that could burst into public if social conditions changed.

This translation includes almost all of Mulsow’s text (deleting only some historiographic commentary) and all of his source references, but the author’s extensive quotations in the notes (often in Latin) have been severely pruned. These notes will be made available later on a dedicated website. The notes and bibliography have been brought up to date, and a few errors have been corrected. I have striven to make Mulsow’s text speak clearly to readers unfamiliar with the academic jargon and philosophical language appropriate for the book’s original readership. I am deeply grateful to Martin Mulsow himself for his detailed criticisms, which saved me from several misjudgments.

H. C. Erik Midelfort

Charlottesville, Virginia

AUTHOR’S PRELIMINARY NOTE

AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN ITSELF, the claim that modernity first found expression in the realm of the forbidden and the subterranean is not very surprising. Yet at least in Germany, the philosophical culture of hidden, so-called clandestine writings has until recently been ignored by intellectual historians. Our traditional concentration on printed works of philosophy along with a linear history of ideas cannot, however, accurately describe the abrupt innovations that Europe experienced around 1700, the period that Paul Hazard called the Crisis of the European Mind. Understanding this phase requires a careful, interdisciplinary, and detailed analysis that considers widely different sources, ranging from manuscripts and personal correspondence to polemical writings and scholarly treatises, as well as a sensitivity to countervailing movements.

By using the term modernity, however, I am not presenting some new theory of the modern or a new periodization. I am much more concerned with showing how convoluted the paths to modernization, secularization, and enlightenment were if one adds to the traditional story an awareness of the radical underground. The modernity that came from underground was a tentative, experimental, and sometimes even undesired, unintended, or only ironically intended modernity.

This book was originally published in German in 2002. It was the fruit of eight years of research into the early Enlightenment in Germany. My work has been assisted by many friends and colleagues, whom I thank here, although I can name only a few of them. Over the years, Winfried Schröder of Berlin has been a helpful comrade in arms in research into clandestine networks. Friends from the Munich research group on the early modern period, and especially Ralph Häfner of Berlin and Helmut Zedelmaier of Munich, have discussed many central questions with me. In addition, for their inspiration and suggestions I must thank Jan Assmann of Heidelberg; Miguel Benítez of Seville; Peter Burke of Cambridge; Horst Dreitzel of Bielefeld; Mordechai Feingold of Pasadena, California; Anthony Grafton of Princeton, New Jersey; Yosef Kaplan of Jerusalem; J. G. A. Pocock of Baltimore; Ulrich Johannes Schneider of Wolfenbüttel; Anselm Schubert of Munich; and Friedrich Vollhardt of Gießen. Dieter Henrich of Munich helped support my research and has always provided philosophical direction. Winfried Schulze of Munich gave me a second intellectual home among the historians. From Ulrich Beck of Munich I learned how limited it is to think of modernity in linear terms. My wife, Karin Ehler, and my daughters have accompanied me through the whole process of research and writing. Finally, I am especially grateful to the late Richard H. Popkin of Los Angeles. It was his seminar in Leiden in 1990 that introduced me to the topic of libertinism, skepticism, and clandestine literature. Over the next decade and a half, he remained both a friend and a model of how to work as a detective in the history of philosophy.

Since 2002, a number of important studies on the Radical Enlightenment have appeared, though very few are on the German movement. Here one must mention above all the books by Jonathan Israel, with whom I have had cordial exchanges ever since my fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Several reactions to his scholarly ideas can be found in the German collection, edited by Israel and me, published in 2004 as Radikalaufklärung. I have included references to other important works in the notes. In addition, I have published further case studies of the German early Enlightenment in the following books: Die unanständige Gelehrtenrepublik (2007) (forthcoming as Decorum and Disorder: The Republic of Letters, 1550–1750); Freigeister im Gottsched-Kreis (2007); and, most recently, Prekäres Wissen (2012).

Martin Mulsow

Erfurt/Gotha

INTRODUCTION

Radicalism as a Problem for Research

Exceptionally fine books are those that appear with no named author and no place of publication, unless they have their origins in Utopia. . . . In such books you will encounter treasures, for the truth resides in obscurity. — Ineptus religiosus

History consists largely of unintended performances.

— J.G.A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the Métier d’Historien"

THE EARLY Enlightenment in Germany is usually treated as a cautious movement for reform, one that freed thinkers from some traditional strictures by adopting a secular theory of natural law, an antimetaphysical theory of knowledge, and a social ethic that depended on a new psychology but was careful to avoid falling into anti-Christian or extreme positions. On that view, however, the isolated radical writings of the epoch, including those that subjected religion to sharp criticism, are hard to explain. What was the relationship between such works and the dominant moderate Enlightenment? Was there perhaps a coherent network, a clandestine underground in Germany? This book answers these questions by using historical sources to reconstruct the origin and spread of radical writings between 1680 and 1720. My working hypothesis is that a complex interplay of nascent Enlightenment ideas, provocative ruptures with the prevailing orthodoxy, and the unintended consequences stemming from theories intended as orthodox prompted full-fledged radical treatises. In this process, the broadly European scholarly discussion of ideas by liberal scholars came to play a crucial role.

We need to recognize how radical philosophical discourse was actually used. Another of my working hypotheses is that a mixture of joking, suspicion, and serious doubt, sometimes ironic or even borrowing words from an opponent, came to be elaborated and taken seriously, thus appearing as statements fully in favor of much more radical Enlightenment. We must also consider the sociology of such a process of radicalization: these individual provocations against the tolerated consensus stemmed often from the naivety of half-baked students, from the still unencumbered rashness of university graduates who did not yet have careers to protect, or even from the miscalculations of courtier-intellectuals, who foolishly imagined their positions to be secure. It remains doubtful, however, whether we can speak of a comprehensive environment of radical enlighteners. Perhaps we should speak instead of a fragmented movement, with separate networks of individuals, men who certainly appreciated and were encouraged by the radical works of others but who were unable to take up personal contact with one another because of the opaque conditions imposed by anonymous publishing.

Disconnected Research: Clandestine Literature, the Early German Enlightenment, and the History of Scholarship.

The time is ripe for such a research project. The long-hidden underground of the early European Enlightenment has begun to come to light. For about three decades now, intense research has uncovered a so-called clandestine literature, those philosophical underground writings that were read in manuscript copies and distributed illegally.¹ Starting with the efforts of pioneers from the first half of the twentieth century, such as Ira Wade,² who discovered this sunken continent of about two hundred radical writings — works that often survive in numerous copies³ — we now have available a variety of editions and monographs. By themselves, these works have already produced a changed picture of the Enlightenment. For some time the view was widespread that over the course of the eighteenth century, philosophical thought gradually became more radical, until it reached a critical highpoint in the atheism of the Baron d’Holbach. But it has now become clear that these radical ideas were already there, from the decades before 1700. They were just invisible, for they belonged to a mass of unpublished manuscripts that circulated in secret and remained invisible to later scholars.

This underground culture flourished mainly in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, especially in the France of the Old Regime, but also to a lesser extent in other countries of Europe. Because of the preponderance of French treatises and their significance for Voltaire, Diderot, and other philosophes, research into these clandestina has been mainly a French domain.⁴ Ever since Tullio Gregory’s investigations, however, Italian intellectual historians have also been uncovering the hitherto unknown connections between the naturalism of Renaissance philosophy and the libertinism of the seventeenth century and, later, the surge of clandestine literature.⁵ Then there are the British, American, Dutch, and Spanish works.⁶ In Germany, this underground culture was occasionally the object of research in the old German Democratic Republic because of interest in the history of materialism, but this work suffered from that regime’s ideological blinders. It is only in recent times that German scholars have produced modern editions of the clandestine corpus.⁷

This changed view of the radical Enlightenment has brought renewed attention to a book that was first published in 1935: Paul Hazard’s La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715.⁸ Hazard broadened the panorama of the European debates of these years and connected them to the thesis that the decisive push toward modernity had occurred during this period. They had to create a political system without divine sanction, a religion without mystery, a morality without dogma. . . . Science would have to become something more than an intellectual pastime; it would have to develop into a power capable of harnessing the forces of nature to the service of mankind.⁹ Naturally such a thesis, focused narrowly on the decades around 1700, has been justifiably criticized, for often these were long-term developments, whose beginnings can be found earlier in the time of Descartes or in the decades around 1600.¹⁰ Yet two developments have resurrected Hazard’s idea of a decisive concentration of innovations around the year 1700. The first is the spread of seriously radical writings during just this period, works that have been brought to light by research into clandestine communications. The other is the establishment of a nascent public sphere, created by the publication of journals and a dramatic expansion of the book market. Some scholars have seen these changes in communication as crucial for the establishment of the Enlightenment.¹¹

Hazard spoke in the 1930s of the rather unfamiliar country . . . a no man’s land that lay on the border between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century.¹² Eighty years later, we cannot describe it that way anymore. Of course, there are still difficulties that make it hard to describe a comprehensive crisis in Germany just by looking at the philosophical underground. These difficulties lie mainly in the separation of three different areas of research: the fairly well-elaborated intellectual history of the German Enlightenment; the nascent research into German clandestine literature; and recent investigations into the European Republic of Letters and its structures of communication.

Until recently, these three areas have been treated in isolation from one another. There are hardly any studies that overcome these divisions to combine their various methods and questions. Yet the necessity of connecting them seems obvious: what would be the point of knowing the published literature of the Enlightenment if one did not also know the range of play for radical writings and a sense of whether more radical works existed or not? What would be the point of knowing the clandestine literature without a sense of the academic debates from which they emerged and against which they contrasted themselves? What would be the point of knowing about European structures of communication without knowing the actual ideas and manuscripts kept secret but carried through the channels of those structures?¹³ The reverse is also true: how can the German Enlightenment and its underground be treated if the influences from Western Europe are not considered?

The history of philosophy needs to pose these questions. But how can we pull these various research agendas together? I suggest doing so by setting forth a specific set of problems. Was there not a continuum that — despite all their differences¹⁴ — extended from Christian Thomasius and his colleagues at the University of Halle all the way to the freethinkers of the underground? I’m also asking whether this continuum was marked by a range of problems that resulted from a common interest in pan-European debates. This is the starting point for my investigation.

The big names of the early German Enlightenment — Pufendorf, Thomasius, Tschirnhaus — will not appear directly in this study;¹⁵ they will only be reflected in their students, colleagues, and less prominent authors. There are two reasons for this. The first is a rather simple result of the current state of scholarship. For some time now, there has been serious scholarly interest not only in Christian Thomasius, but also in Samuel Pufendorf. But the second-rank authors such as Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling have been hardly studied, even though their contribution to the Enlightenment has sometimes been recognized. And the radical Enlighteners of the underground have had no chance to become favored objects of analysis. The second reason for the neglect of these thinkers is more complex and takes me to the heart of the method I’m employing in this work. I have found new insights by uncovering how the ideas of this forgotten world were developed by less well exposed thinkers. They were often young authors and, as such, more willing to pursue the currents of the age than were their more established professors; they were readier to extend and radicalize the thoughts they found as mere seeds in Pufendorf and Thomasius.

Radicalism is the concept that I intend to use to explore the problem of continuity in the so-called left wing of the early Enlightenment. I will be looking for radicalism in various social environments and within certain areas of discourse. But what is meant by the term radicalism? Before that can be clarified, I must emphasize that this whole intended area of study presents difficulties. If I speak of left, radical, or liberal, I’m using the political language of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The difficulty lies in the fact that one cannot rely on self-descriptions here. The concept of freethinker, which came from English, and its French equivalent, ésprit fort, were both used by a few radicals as self-descriptions, but not by most.¹⁷ Such terms are hopelessly inadequate to convey a group that included the liberals who stood at the barely tolerated margins of academia. Yet such intellectuals need to be included so that the possibility of continuity is not eliminated simply by definition. However, contemporary theologians around 1700 commanded a broad arsenal of terms with which to classify heterodox positions, but they usually operated with such exaggerated and pejorative concepts (e.g., atheist, naturalist, indifferentist, libertine) that we cannot expect a more adequate set of descriptions from them, either.

So I’m forced to use broad anachronisms to describe these radicals and their radicalism. The radicalism of these people includes views that were philosophical but also political. Often radicalism in the decades around 1700 involved a broad criticism of religion (Religionskritik). Political critiques were less common because these radicals were often allied with absolute rulers and court jurists against what they saw as the pedantry of the universities and the clerical deceit of the churches.

Another anachronistic description involves talking about the early Enlightenment, but I will stick with the term despite the danger of turning a movement into a whole epoch and despite an inherent teleology aimed at the late eighteenth century. I am interested in both the general range of scholarship (and not just the Enlightenment) and the movements that issued from Lutheran Orthodoxy so that the epoch can depicted in full.¹⁸

Because it is intellectual radicalism above all that interests me, however, it is necessary that I describe mainly those people who had radical theoretical interests. I might have studied political dissidents, literary extremists, and religious fanatics, but in this study they will appear only marginally. It is not, however, obvious that religious radicalism should be systematically excluded, for in the gray area between radical Pietism and chemical-hermetic scholarship a sort of separate culture of radicalism sprang up in Germany, which ranged from Johann Konrad Dippel to Johann Christian Edelmann and beyond, with many contacts and connections to the groups of freethinkers and clandestine authors.¹⁹ This culture, which was the heir to heterodox Paracelsism and Spiritualism from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a whole separate area for research and would burst the bounds of this study if it were considered fully. I will, however, explore such connections whenever Pietism, Spiritualism, and the early Enlightenment appear and try to describe them without pushing them prematurely into prefabricated categories.

Monothematic Approaches to Intellectual History

Down to the present, the early Enlightenment in philosophy has been treated mainly as the history of ideas. A range of studies has looked at topics such as prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, perfectibility, and the fundamental notion of Enlightenment itself.²⁰ The basic ideas have often been treated in general theological and philosophical works on the Enlightenment.

Considering these studies, one must ask whether monographs on such idea groups can pull things together into an adequate portrait of the age. The problem of such monographs is that they cannot really capture their radical dynamics, because these dynamics took off between these various regions of ideas and played off against one another. Thus, in his study of eclecticism Michael Albrecht repeatedly had to leave behind some of his most interesting findings because his procedure of following the history of one concept required him to move on. So, too, Werner Schneiders cannot explain why the professors of Halle, Jena, or Leipzig continued to think up ever new classifications for prejudices because he did not consider the various political, scholarly, or historiographical conversations to which they were reacting.

Research on individual people or on the reception of ideas runs into the same sorts of difficulties. It is true enough that recent studies of Thomasius and Pufendorf have described an important part of the framework within which the early Enlightenment was developed, and yet they remain largely focused on the immediate circle of the great thinkers.²¹ Studies of the reception of Spinoza in Germany have broken new ground on the circulation of clandestine literature, but confined to their own framework, they mainly draw negative conclusions: there was no directly Spinozist movement within the philosophical underground culture of Germany, in contrast to the impression given by the panic-stricken polemics of the Orthodox and the academic histories of philosophy.²²

We have to consider other disciplines if we are to obtain a broader picture of these intellectual contexts. First and foremost, we must take account of German literary research, which has developed a direction of inquiry based on social history that has stimulated many of the most important studies of the early Enlightenment.²³ Weighty legal and political histories of imperial journalism and on early modern political theory²⁴ and histories of historiography have made important discoveries.²⁵ Theological works have tended to see the period unhelpfully as transitional, a term that does not begin to describe the issues actually at stake.²⁶

Unfortunately, for our effort to apply the modern scholarship on networks, German research provides almost no help. Network analyses attempt to reconstruct group connections by looking at the contacts among teachers, friends, patrons, employers, and correspondents and aiming to embed thought within the context of action. For examples of such work, German scholars must look to foreign models. In 1981, Margaret C. Jacob published her book The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans.²⁷ In many respects, that book is comparable to my effort here. Jacob used archival and manuscript holdings to develop a new picture of the radical fringe of the early Enlightenment in England and the Netherlands and to identify the networks and covert debates that shaped it. Her study explicitly concentrated on a cast of interesting, if so called minor, characters.²⁸ Her thesis was that the radical Enlightenment originated in a melting pot that mixed English republicans, exiled Huguenots, and Dutch publishers; their collaboration in the decades following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) stimulated a huge number of underground writings. Let us ignore here her additional (and questionable) thesis that an early form of Freemasonry developed within these groups.²⁹ For our purposes, it is much more interesting to appreciate how Jacob embeds the radical Enlightenment in a political milieu and an intellectual sociology:

The radicals were intellectual dissenters, men and possibly a very few women, often with a refugee background, who could not share the willingness of the major philosophes like Voltaire and d’Alembert, or liberal churchmen like the Newtonians in England, to put their faith in enlightened monarchy. They sought, therefore, through a variety of methods, propaganda as well as intrigue, to establish a republican ideal, if not always a republican reality, worthy of a European-wide imitation.³⁰

According to Jacob, these republicans tried to develop a whole worldview based on pantheist and materialistic-hermetic philosophy, one that was sharply opposed to the theistic world view of the moderate enlighteners of the so-called Newtonian Enlightenment.³¹

What can we learn from Jacob’s book to illuminate the German situation? At first, it appears, not much, for Jacob’s thesis depends on the steady influence on these developments of the English Revolution.³² There was no such influence in Germany. But one can learn from Jacob how the analysis of networks can be connected to intellectual history.

Germany had large Protestant areas in the north, and like Anglican England, it had a strong link to the Lutheran Reformation. In contrast to France, therefore, England and Germany experienced no rough anticlerical opposition. Instead, a series of reform groups aimed at different sorts of Christian renewal, just as had occurred during the Reformation itself. Among the radicals in Germany, the Christian element could shrink down to a rationalist, anti-Trinitarian, and essentially moralistic Christianity, whereas the moderates turned instead to a physicotheology in which natural science played the role of supporting Orthodox Lutheranism.

An Eclectic Epoch and the Conservative Enlightenment

Jacob’s study cannot, of course, be applied directly to the German scene because the splintered networks of the German radical Enlightenment need to be understood within the context of specifically German, moderate discussions. So first, that German context has to be described.

No one has ever really tried to provide such a general account. Among the more recent works on the eclectic nature of early Enlightenment thinking, however, one finds efforts to provide a list of fundamental theses that might characterize an ideal-typical history of the early Enlightenment in Germany. Horst Dreitzel has taken up this challenge, distinguishing six aspects of the age of eclectic philosophy.³³ Those whom Dreitzel describes as eclectics rejected the metaphysical rationalism of Descartes or Spinoza because such schemes reduced the various ways people actually know things and ignored fundamental weaknesses of human perceptions and of the human will. Retaining elements of the Lutheran tradition (with its belief in original sin and human corruption), eclectic reformers adopted instead a program of gradual, piecemeal reform. The goal was therefore to escape from economic, social, bodily, mental, and spiritual misery. Belief in revelation was not completely rejected. Rather, it was granted a specific, limited, but important function within one’s spiritual economy, so that people could allow other realms of natural reason and the pursuit of happiness to exist autonomously.³⁴

Eclectic reformers rejected notions based on ontology (which depended on true knowledge of being) in favor of theories of knowledge and anthropology. For them, the human being was a union of body and spirit so that health, virtue, and happiness depended on the reciprocal actions of the senses, thought, and the human will. Human beings, in their view, were fundamentally sociable; philosophy needed to be practical and therefore could not deny God’s continued action in both nature and history. But the eclectic or conservative Enlightenment in Germany also emphasized freedom, tolerance, and the liberty to philosophize (libertas philosophandi). Another feature of eclecticism was its refusal to grant any one discipline authority over all the others, so the individual scholarly disciplines preserved their autonomy, in contrast to efforts such as Christian Wolff’s to base all of the disciplines on one unified, geometric method. These were features that, taken together, formed the basis of a moderate or conservative early Enlightenment. Its thinkers, including prominently the jurists, theologians, and philosophers of Halle, had sharp disagreements with their Orthodox Lutheran colleagues throughout northern Germany and thus found themselves torn between the forces of conservatism and those of reform.

Together, these characteristics compose the ideal type of the moderate early Enlightenment. But we still need to ask which points began to be radicalized, which theses therefore underwent rejection, and which theses were made more extreme.

Dreitzel describes a German Enlightenment that preserved a whole series of traditional elements. To that extent, one can call it moderate or Enlightened-conservative. This sort of Enlightenment was conservative precisely to preserve its character as enlightened: too much freedom was regarded as endangering the accomplishments that had already been achieved. Thus, the philosophy called eclectic held up an image of the dangers that had emerged over the course of the seventeenth century. A central slogan of these conservatives attacked equally the dangers of (1) enthusiasm — a fanaticism that was hostile to reason; (2) Spinozism — which did away with the difference between Creator and creation; and (3) libertinism. Arnold Wesenfeld, for example, like many others, praised the moderate, rational, and appropriate liberty of a philosophy of nature found in eclecticism, as opposed to philosophic libertinism that accepted no boundaries or rules: too much freedom promoted skepticism rather than preserving healthy reason; Epicureanism abolished natural morality; and naturalism did not respect the difference between faith and reason.³⁵

In this book, we will repeatedly have to concern ourselves with the question of whether these boundaries, as viewed by freethinkers, represented an illogical and half-hearted Enlightenment or whether they actually had their own, specific justification. In each case, however, we will find that moderate Enlighteners drew an often strikingly clear boundary between themselves and the radical fringe.³⁶

There was, however, no consensus concerning the dangers or potential opportunities — as I will show in Chapter 6 — nor was there any agreement about the strictness of these boundaries in individual cases. For example, Gundling defended freedom of thinking both logically and in a wide-ranging fashion, but he sharply distanced himself from Spinozist tendencies. Clearly, the conservatism of some reformers was due to their own Enlightened intentions: they rejected radical solutions not because they stood solidly with tradition, but because they did not want to undermine their own reforming projects. Thus, the conservative Enlightenment should not be confused with the essential conservatism that is found in Lutheran Orthodoxy. Instead, it was a variant of the early Enlightenment itself, a variant with its own distinct awareness of where to stop in order to avoid jeopardizing its own project.³⁷

Later chapters will examine the conditions and motivations of radical theorists, who were moved to erase the limits erected by moderate Enlighteners. Radicals found that they could sometimes even deploy eclecticism itself, usually the ruling disposition of the Enlightened conservative reform movement, against its usual moderating and compromising function. This happened if the constraints on eclectic choices were denied even for philosophy, in contrast to merely restraining theology. It could also happen when freethinkers like Lau produced a radical eclecticism based on a set of heathen presuppositions.³⁸

J. G. A. Pocock has observed that both England and Germany cultivated a form of conservative Enlightenment that, instead of opposing Christianity, was content to cooperate with it. It was not radically anti-Christian but moderate — so much so that for England of the eighteenth century, scholars (until recently) felt that the French notion of the Enlightenment could not be applied.³⁹ But to make comparisons with the rest of Europe, Pocock did not want to forfeit the concept of Enlightenment, so he adopted Jacob’s notion of a Newtonian Enlightenment. He did, however, add points that went beyond Jacob’s scientific-sociological-political focus on the meaning of the English Revolution.⁴⁰ These additions were mostly those concerned with politeness, commerce, and the middle way between rationalism (viewed as the fanaticism of reason) and irrationalism (seen as superstition).⁴¹

This broader understanding gives us a basis for comparing the Enlightenment in England with the Enlightened conservatism found in the eclectic philosophy of Germany. Learning directly from English developments, Johann Christoph Sturm of Altdorf emphasized as early as 1686 the importance of sociability within the scientific community as a specific strength of eclectic scholarship.⁴² In Germany, the fight against fanaticism and superstition had formed its own tradition ever since the struggles of the sixteenth century against the left wing of the Reformation. Even if the orientation of English society toward trade and commerce found its parallel only in the ambience of a few of Germany’s larger cities, we can now see more clearly than before the commonalities between England and Germany in their emphasis on virtue and on an ethics of sociability based on natural law.⁴³

Using this model, we can compare the networks of radicals in Germany to what Jacob has seen as the tense relations between radical and conservative wings of the early Enlightenment. But, of course, we must not overlook important differences that also separate the German from the English situation. In both cases, however, moderates drew boundaries and tried to preserve a via media⁴⁴ of naturalness,⁴⁵ while radicals transgressed these boundaries. Were they just naive or unaware of the implications of their acts? Or were they free to act because they had no responsibilities, young men who did not yet have to worry about their careers? Or did these radicals violate boundaries because they really believed that a consistent idea of freedom could be defended rationally?

The Language of Learning

These questions enable us to transcend the disciplinary and monothematic restraints on Enlightenment research, but they also set up a starting point for the study of networks connecting specific people and their manuscripts. To pose these questions, however, we need to consider one peculiarity. Right from the start we need to decode contemporary debates by looking for the fundamental problems they contain. The debates of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century were usually carried on in a historical and scholarly language and by exploring specific historical topics. Thus, these thinkers might discuss Plato or the Stoics when they meant the problem of Spinozism; as ancient historians, they wrote about the Roman enabling law (the lex regia) — the law that established the power of Roman kings or emperors — when they really wanted to discuss popular sovereignty in their own day; physicians debated the meaning of biblical passages when they actually wished to question the substantiality of the soul. Indeed, one of the major challenges in studying the early Enlightenment is decoding these various conversations.

Therefore, this book argues that, along with tying research on clandestine literature to traditional work on the German Enlightenment, we need to consider a whole area of European historical and philological learning. It is clear that at least by the late seventeenth century, German scholars were thinking in a fully European context, without any concern for national borders. Of course, various national traditions and special shadings survived, but fundamentally these debates were international.⁴⁶ These codes furnished scholars with the knowledge required to carry on a dispute in the form of history. Such debates had their roots in the sixteenth century, spreading from jurisprudence and philology to touch all other fields of scholarship;⁴⁷ this gave scholars a way to distance themselves partially from the present and yielded the advantage of touching on the origins of various phenomena⁴⁸ and downplaying modern issues by emphasizing predecessors.⁴⁹ In general, this historicizing attitude shows how thoroughly the early modern period was rooted in and oriented to the past.

Research into the early modern tendency to historicize everything, from jurisprudence to philosophy and from theology to philology, needs to survey a landscape that our mapmakers have not yet fully described. Recently, the European Republic of Letters has been examined not only within a framework of communications history,⁵⁰ but also, increasingly, in terms of its everyday practices and its internal conflicts.⁵¹ This new way of looking does yield a substantially improved view because it is much easier to decode learned discourses if one knows the channels of communication, the patronage networks, and the career profiles, as well as the personal lines of conflict, of such protagonists than when all we have are the printed results of these factors. Yet this sort of communications history cannot spare us the work of carefully reconstructing the actual contents of the debates.⁵²

Plurality: Theories of Middling Reach

If we want to give full recognition to the complexity of the German early Enlightenment, we will have to study individuals rather than try for a comprehensive portrait, which runs the risk of premature generalizations and high-flown grand narratives. In place of broad generalizations, it seems more sensible to start by considering various distinctions. First there are those of place. Brandenburg, with its Calvinist ruling house, Huguenot exile elite, and Lutheran commoners, presents a very different profile from that of a city republic like Hamburg, with its commercially oriented citizenry and powerful Lutheran Orthodox church. Wittenberg, with its Lutheran Orthodox body of professors, was different from Halle, with its university founded on a program of reform.⁵³

Next there are the distinctions regarding kinds of sources and modes of philosophical discourse. In a handwritten personal note or in a letter one could express oneself differently than in a printed published work. In personal communications the psychological force of unconscious or conscious self-censorship might relax, and there might be little or no concern about any broader public reaction. A clandestine work occupied a space somewhere between privacy and publication: with many such works, only a limited distribution among the initiated was intended or imagined. But within this genre, alterations and expansions of the text by a copyist were extremely common. Within the broad body of clandestina, however, there are other distinctions to be drawn. Winfried Schröder speaks of the popular philosophy of many underground texts,⁵⁴ which criticized religion and were intended to pass beneath the notice of the censors so they might have an effect on readers. For that reason, they were not always philosophically rigorous. Other clandestina did operate at a high academic level. For example, anti-Christian clandestine works by Jews were often written by learned authors, who certainly could not chance exposing their arguments to full public scrutiny. Such texts served to clarify the self-understanding of Jewish minorities in Venice, Amsterdam, or Altona.⁵⁵ Other clandestine works, such as Theophrastus redivivus,⁵⁶ and the Symbolum sapientiae,⁵⁷ presented complex philosophic theories at a challenging level. They had such thoroughly anti-Christian implications that their authors could never have published them openly.

Other kinds of sources were incomplete projects that were never continued and had no chance of being published — they were aborted texts, manuscripts that were just abandoned.⁵⁸ Another sort of source was the annotated author’s copy in which a writer added comments that he never published.⁵⁹ The notes that are usually found at the beginning or end of a clandestine manuscript also belong to the texts we must consider if we seek to explore the environment of the radical Enlightenment.

Even among printed works, many distinctions must be made. Some of these works were sharp polemics, a common genre for academics.⁶⁰ They could even be written by controversialists against scholars who were their good friends in private life. Then there were harsh pasquinades — aggressive lampoons and denunciations that often used ridicule to hit below the belt. At the other end of the spectrum are examples of the amica collatio, a controversy carried out according to all of the forms of respect and politeness. In the course of the eighteenth century, increasing numbers of impartial investigations, as well as pronouncements that employed the extremely formal language of science or scholarship, totally ignored current debates. But radical conclusions could be inserted even into such works, as one sees in the example of Spinoza.

To take into account the distinctions one finds in the social environments, sources, and themes under discussion, one also needs to examine the theories used as a yardstick for this material: they, too, need to be differentiated and used carefully. I do not think I should aim to construct some grand theory, like those of Niklas Luhmann and Michel Foucault, for the problems considered here, and so I present no grand thesis. Instead, I draw on a series of what I call medium-range theories and test them to see where they can help to make sense of a confusing blizzard of separate research conclusions. One of these medium-range theories is that Jewish anti-Christian manuscripts played an important role in the genesis of modern atheism. It was an unintended consequence perhaps that these texts had an explosive impact on various freethinkers; they poured fuel on the deist criticism of all revealed religions.⁶¹ Such theories concerning the origins of atheism or Enlightenment have too often been developed in specific contexts — for example, with a view to the scene in France or the Netherlands. So it remains to be seen whether they can be applied in some limited or perhaps modified form to the situation in Germany around 1700. Alan Charles Kors, for example, has argued that in France, the atheism of the eighteenth century emerged as the unintended result of the reciprocal self-destruction of the debate between two orthodoxies: the Cartesian and the Aristotelian.⁶² Each side tried to show that the opposing position led to atheism; some readers could therefore conclude that neither orthodoxy provided any support for faith and that atheism was unavoidable. One can indeed observe that, in certain cases in Germany, not atheism but a radical skepticism had a similar origin. Some observers found that blunting the conflict between Cartesians and Aristotelians brought on by the rise of eclectic philosophy merely led to their becoming their own orthodoxy, a new group of true believers.⁶³

Dale van Kley proposes a different thesis, using the example of Pierre Nicole to show that an extreme version of Jansenism saw the world as ruled by selfishness and private interest and had only to lose the theological assumption of divine grace to produce a worldview just like that of Mandeville, but with an opposite spin.⁶⁴ We will discover similar secularizing reversals in the course of this book.⁶⁵

All of these notions need to be tested with the materials found on the radical fringe. It will be necessary to apply them not globally but cautiously. This is actually a requirement of all research on clandestine writings and on radical fringe groups. We have to proceed on a small scale, tracing the lines of the networks and using as our tool only controlled doses of theory. Only in this way can we approach an understanding of what the early Enlightenment really was.

Contingency, Irony, and Unintended Consequences: On the Pragmatics of Philosophical Discourse

What was the early Enlightenment really like? What actually happened when its ideas formed and were distributed? These will probably seem like naive questions, seeming to come from a historicism that is nothing more than a useless or utopian attempt to reconstruct a past epoch. But is the question actually so naive? In view of the research deficits I’ve noted in this field, is it not necessary to try harder to get closer to historical reality? The more deeply research penetrates into the lower and less public textual layers, into the world of the clandestine — the personal letters, secret messages, and aborted projects — the more necessary it is to identify the identities and personal intentions of authors. Only after we have identified an author can we then ask more precisely about his background and motives. And only when we know the motives can we understand what an author intended. The more we understand the Enlightenment as a process of communication,⁶⁶ the more we must take the meanings and intentions of such actors into account.

In view of this situation, intellectual historians must decide whether we can trust the tradition of history as doxography, the inherited account of the canonical philosophers and their ideas. Considering our situation, however, how can we write a doxography if we know neither the status nor the origin of works we intend to interpret? It seems risky even to assume that such texts were always fully serious. The eminently philosophical problem of whether to take any utterance as dependent on the identity of the author conflicts with the assumed personas of freethinking authors, who as private individuals were quite different from philosophers. In one place, they might seem to be Christian, but in another, pagan.⁶⁷ Moreover, the fact that many radical treatises originated in a culture of joking and student protests makes it all the more difficult to tell what sort of discourse one is reading.

We must therefore try to use surviving clues to establish the intentions and the original illocutionary meaning of speech acts. Many years ago, Quentin Skinner argued for the reconstruction of authorial intentions.⁶⁸ His argument has at least as much force in considering research on clandestina as it does in his own area of the history of political thought. The historian of philosophy confronts the dilemma either of continuing as usual with a history of ideas that cannot take account of hidden layers of the Enlightenment or, instead, of studying the Enlightenment by including its radical undercurrents but then having to forfeit the stability and autonomy of ideas. In the long run, one cannot avoid the second option. Note that the very idea of intentionality is implicit in the distinction between original intentions and unintended consequences, but unintended consequences, as the different claims of Kors and Van Kley make clear, were an essential factor in the process of modernization.⁶⁹ In many of the individual studies that follow in this book, I show that highly contingent circumstances contributed to the final meaning of the various sorts of discourse found in clandestine literature.

As compensation for the loss of stable statements, however, we are rewarded with the expansion of our source materials. If we want to reconstruct intentions, we can now consult reports of authors’ and readers’ actions; study a work’s dedications, epigraphs (motti), and other paratexts;⁷⁰ and attempt to embed networks in their implicit language games. We will have to pay attention to shifts in meaning that result from changes in context from one social setting to another. The history of the reception of ideas, therefore, becomes a history of continuous change and a new creation of meaning.

Synergies: Disciplines, Debates, European Perceptions

Paying attention to changes in context, however, provides only a partial solution to the problem of radicalization. The European Enlightenment was not just a result of misapprehensions, even if in its origins it did rest on many misunderstandings. When Kors claims that atheist ideas in France actually emerged from passionate religious disputes, he formulates a remarkably sharp thesis, but it should not be blown up into a universal explanation. There were also simple transfers and receptions of radical ideas, as the history of ideas has traditionally described.⁷¹ We have to bring together moments of regular transfer of ideas with the effects of misunderstandings rather than play them off against each other. If we do so, new questions arise immediately that have hardly ever been posed. How was disgust at the exaggerations of Christian natural science transmuted into clandestine opposition literature?⁷² Did scholarly reading of Jewish and Islamic texts push discussions of skepticism and relativity to turn against Christianity?⁷³ Could refutations actually produce the opposite of what they intended, allowing us to speak of a negative transfer of ideas? Perhaps positive transfers were more often extended by clandestine works? Perhaps this was a reciprocal process?⁷⁴

It quickly becomes clear that such questions cannot proceed under the banner of a narrow understanding of philosophy as taught at the universities. Philosophy courses did undergo reform during the early Enlightenment, but they show that the details of logic, epistemology, and ethics, despite the self-promoting rhetoric about reform, were part of the long-standing work of definitional clarification that had been under way throughout the seventeenth century.⁷⁵ It seems more exciting to untangle or expose the implicit philosophy involved in the great debates of jurists, theologians, philologists, historians, and natural scientists. This implicit philosophy is regularly visible when a perspective peculiar to one discipline got imported into another. For example, in the scientific debates regarding the concept of nature, the language could shift suddenly and emerge as an attack on idolatry and superstition.⁷⁶ This sort of contamination shows that fundamental problems concerning the relation of man and nature had become crucial. Similarly, when the status of human beings under the law of nature collided with problems in the exegesis of Genesis, it becomes obvious that fundamental issues of anthropology and of the human will and reason were under discussion.⁷⁷ Take another example: if a Spinozist appeared to be deep in the interpretation of the early Church Fathers, we can see that he was transforming his ontological claims into history. Whenever the problem of freedom was up for discussion, it was common for scholars to bundle together the theological topic of Pelagianism, the social theory concerning freedom of opinions, and the medical contention that the soul was determined by its body.

The moral of such stories is that we have to look for philosophical discourse where we might not at first suspect it. We will find it not only within the limits of the academic disciplines but also in the way knowledge from one area was perceived or applied in different areas.⁷⁸ It is here, in overlapping fields of discourse, that we find the potential for dislocations, innovations, and challenges of just the sort that radicals addressed. How could an alert intellectual around 1700 — to say nothing of a genuine freethinker — remain hunched over a textbook outlining rules for thinking when dramatic shock waves were emanating from biblical criticism, secular notions of natural law, and recent revelations from alien cultures? It was more likely that such an intellectual would test his inherited philosophical weapons — for example, the theory of prejudice, the understanding of emotions, the psychology of perception — on the debates of that time and modify or even toss them out.

It is also crucial to recognize that these German responses took place within the pan-European discussions of the early Enlightenment, discussions that revealed not only the connections among problems of theology, jurisprudence, and philosophy but also the impact of ideas from England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The decades around 1700 were characterized by a growing public sphere that depended on journals, periodicals, and private correspondence. The number of learned journals exploded, and book reviews such as the Journal des Savants, the Acta Eruditorum, the Nouvelles de la république des lettres, and the Bibliothèque universelle were now shaping learned opinion. The very idea of a Republic of Letters points to the contemporary ideal of a community of scholars who ignored national and social boundaries; this imaginary institution did support a measure of freedom of social behavior among members.⁷⁹ Within this community of scholars, ideas of various provenance and from different contexts were swiftly brought to notice. Readers could simultaneously learn about revised textual or archeological datings from English biblical scholars and new Dutch notions of logic. Medical findings from Paris might be published along with manuscript discoveries from Wittenberg. When placed together, they could produce completely unexpected conclusions. One result might strengthen another one, or it might suggest something totally different. In this way, such mixtures of elements could become explosive.⁸⁰

Philosophical Microhistories

How should one integrate the analysis of discourse with unintended consequences and the effects of synergies and co-presence? Could any description of the genealogy of ideas or of discursive processes achieve what this project demands? Discourse analysis usually proceeds in a depersonalized and anonymous fashion, while the history of ideas studies the influence of texts on other texts. But here we have to deal with discrete historical people because looking for changes in context and for the primary purpose of a text makes it vital that we get as close as we can to the intentions of our protagonists.

This is not easy, because radical utterances usually forced authors to conceal their identities. Many of the texts analyzed in the coming chapters appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms, and in some cases, the author is still unknown. That makes it more than merely difficult to speak of their original contexts. Because these authors remain concealed in darkness, and because they often remained unknown and only on the fringes of public discussions, we usually know so little about them that we cannot say much about their friends, where they were educated, what they had been reading, who their patrons were, or why they became radicalized. But this is just what we have to find out if we are to understand how their writings were intended and under what circumstances they arose.

Fundamentally, these synergistic effects, which I think explain why many were radicalized, remain obscure for the historian because the immediate contexts of radical writings are mostly unknown. It becomes necessary, therefore, to follow a strategy of identifying the authors and investigating their personal circumstances. These writings need to be attributed to an author, if possible, and the context surrounding the origins of the text needs to be reconstructed. Only when we know who the author was can we examine the social network in which he moved.

Even if we acknowledge the advantages of a discourse analysis like that of Foucault, it is clear that research on the freethinkers needs to proceed along rather different lines. A discourse analysis would be too coarse and undifferentiated in its procedures because it could not take personal differences within the discourses into account.

But does this sort of personalizing reconstruction not get us stuck merely recounting individual events? There is a risk in treating marginal details as substantial even if they were actually unimportant. We clearly run such a risk in research on clandestine writings. To avoid this pitfall, it is useful to recall the discussions twenty years ago that swirled around the difference between a history of structures and a history of subjective experience. Large-scale structural history constantly threatens to assume a functionalism that soars beyond individuals, whose intentions, decisions, and subjective perceptions no longer play any active role. Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu have criticized this as one of the serious shortcomings of functionalism.⁸¹ Yet it is obvious that separate events and merely personal experiences cannot become part of any larger theory unless they can be effectively compared with others. The only solution is to proceed by mediating between people and structures, examining what sociologists call habitus, or patterns of reproduction, and structurations. Without using these terms explicitly, my approach will take account of them. I will be looking for the content and the structure of radicalism with a view to understanding the processes that inclined certain individuals to radicalization. What were the effects of specific strategies and what were the implications for the predispositions (the habitus) of a specific philosophic milieu? I will try to detect the effects of an ambivalent habitus among certain scholars and the results of a private culture of ridicule and joking among unruly people, as Norbert Schindler has called them.⁸² I agree with Giddens when he says, Discursive capabilities do not just take the form of propositional statements; ‘discourse’ has to be interpreted to include modes of expression which are often treated as uninteresting in sociological research — such as humour, sarcasm and irony. These elements derive their meaning not so much from the content of what is said as from the style, mode of expression, and context.⁸³ Such forms of expression contribute to an unintended and often paradoxical reproduction of social structure. Giddens uses the example of the lads in