Description

When reason met revolution—and changed everything

Berlin, 1783. Moses Mendelssohn crafts an argument that will challenge both church and state: neither may coerce belief.

May 1789. Friedrich Schiller lectures on art's civilizing power. Two months later, the Bastille falls.

These texts capture the moment Enlightenment ideals met revolutionary reality. They believed ideas could change the world. They were right—and catastrophically wrong.

Complete new translations of six pivotal texts:

Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783) — Judaism's challenge to state power Immanuel Kant's What is Enlightenment? (1784) — The movement's manifesto Christoph Martin Wieland's Secret of the Order of Cosmopolitans (1788) — Enlightenment through irony Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1788) — The optimistic vision Friedrich Schiller's What is Universal History? (1789) — Art as civilization's engine Wieland's Dialogue on the Legitimacy of the Use that the French Nation is Currently Making of its Enlightenment and Strength (1789) — Theory meets reality

What you'll discover:

How do you balance intellectual freedom with political order? (Kant's brilliant but troubling answer) Can secret societies work for the common good? (Wieland's mysterious Cosmopolitan Order) What happens when high-minded theories meet revolutionary chaos? (Real-time reactions to the French Revolution) Why did the most educated societies in history produce the most organized brutality?

Why these texts matter now: Their framework of constitutional government, religious tolerance, and international law still shapes our world. But their faith that reason could transform human nature faced century after century of organized brutality, leading philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer to ask whether enlightenment itself contained the seeds of barbarism.

For students, scholars, and anyone who believes ideas have consequences. These aren't museum pieces—they're live arguments about democracy, tolerance, progress, and human nature that we're still having today.

Translated and introduced with scholarly rigor but written for readers who want to understand how we got here—and where we might be heading.