It was an age of momentous change in which many were seeking a new way of ordering the world. Steffen Martus shows us just how strongly 18th century Germany was shaped by the Enlightenment. This expansive panorama reaches from the reordering of the political map in 1700, through the devastation of the Lisbon Earthquake, to the days in which France stood on the cusp of revolution. It was an epoch that more closely resembles our own than we tend to realise. Ironically, it was a key figure of the Enlightenment, Frederick the Great, who began the Seven Years’ War, which was to go down in history as the first genuinely global conflict. Yet Enlightenment thinkers also realised that far from being sovereign beings, humans themselves are often powerless. Steffen Martus’s book opens up captivating new perspectives on the Enlightenment. It paints vivid portraits of thinkers like Lessing and Kant who explored the possibilities and limits of reason.
