Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany(Oxford Historical Monographs)

This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of the Edinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlights the linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Review :
`a mature and successful work. Its logical structure and keenes of its perceptions are impressive. Oz-Salzberger's compararive analysis of social settings and civic discourse...is on the whole convincing and knowledgeably conducted. Its significance goes beyond the subject of this book, as it can be seen as a contribution to the compararive study of national... variants of the Enlightment...This work can serve as a model for similar studies - it is philologically precise, historically profound, and sensitive to differences in socio-cultural milieux.' German Historical Institute Bulletin `subtle, well-researched and elegantly written study' Christopher Harvie, University of Tübingen, British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, vol. 19, part 2, Autumn 1996 `students of the period will find here many valuable discussions ranging well beyond the book's stated remit ... In particular the author offers clear and lively accounts of curricular innovations at the university of Göttingen ... this volume deserves the attention of both historians and literary critics, for it constitutes a major contribution not merely to our understanding of the intellectual relationships between Scotland and Germany in the eighteenth century, but also to the larger issue of how well enlightened political theory could travel beyond the context in which it was first devised and deployed ... written in a strikingly graceful and lucid style which itself provides an elegant rebuke to the failures in communication that the book laments' T.J. Hochstrasser, London School of Economics and Political Science