Matt Erlin

Reluctant Modernism: Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of History

In a well-known passage from the second section of Jerusalem (1784) Moses Mendelssohn takes his old friend Lessing to task for his recent treatise on The Education of the Human Race (1780). His respect for the author notwithstanding, Mendelssohn has little sympathy for Lessing’s view of human progress. Opposing the attempt to force the entire species into a single framework of linear development, Mendelssohn claims that, as a species, humankind has always oscillated between cultivation and barbarism. Borrowing the “ages of man” metaphor that Lessing employed in his own discussion, he writes that at almost any point in human history, man is “child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world.” Against Lessing’s concept of global progress Mendelssohn proposes a model in which each individual follows his own trajectory of self-cultivation, a trajectory that begins before birth, intersects more or less briefly with the plane of historical time, and then continues after death into eternity. Mendelssohn’s resistance to the Geschichtsphilosophie articulated here by Lessing and later appropriated by Kant, Schiller, and Hegel has been subject to a variety of interpretations. Not surprisingly, more recent commentators have stressed the philosopher’s defense of particularity, his opposition to a totalizing theory of history that threatens to grant the individual nothing more than a bit part in the realization of some future state of human perfection. Norbert Hinske, for example, has argued that Mendelssohn’s late writings engage in a conscious confrontation with Kant’s understanding of historical progress.

Book Fetish: Joachim Heinrich Campe and the Commodification of Literature

Consumer culture in eighteenth-century Europe has attracted a great deal of attention in the past decade, so much that consumption studies has itself become something of a growth market for scholars of the period (e.g. Berg and Clifford; Berg and Eager; Brewer and Porter; Smith). Ever since Neil McKendrick presented his controversial thesis regarding a “consumer revolution” in eighteenth-century England, social, cultural, and intellectual historians have sought to explain and interpret the consequences of the remarkable increase in consumer goods produced in that country beginning in the 1760s – from coffee, tea, and tobacco to watches, looking glasses, umbrellas, puppets, and porcelain (McKendrick/Brewer/Plumb, 9). More recently, analyses of French history have challenged conventional wisdom regarding French economic backwardness, uncovering the details of what Michael Kwass has termed “a buying spree of historic proportions” (187). Germany has figured less prominently in these discussions. Its low profile is understandable to the extent that it reflects the relative economic underdevelopment of the area in the eighteenth century, but it is nevertheless unfortunate, because a consideration of the German situation can shed light on a still underilluminated facet of eighteenth-century consumer culture. The expansion of the literary market, especially the market for works of fiction, played a crucial role in the development of the new culture of consumption. While this role has certainly not been ignored by scholars – Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) offers a case in point – it is nevertheless surprising that the representative anthologies and overviews that treat consumer culture do not devote more space to a consideration of one of the period’s most important consumer goods – the book – and one of its most important experiences of consumption – reading. Germany, where access to many consumer goods was more limited than in France and England, offers an especially compelling case study for those interested in books as consumer objects, and it is thus no surprise that some scholars of German culture have turned recently to what could be termed the “virtual” consumption of textual representations. Daniel Purdy in particular has demonstrated the extent to which educated Germans actively participated in an emergent European consumer culture, even though they frequently experienced this culture only vicariously, through novels

Crossing Over: Gendered Reading Formations at the Muncie Public Library, 1891-1902

Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of themost powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg (“aggressive originality”), to Jauss (“horizon of ex-pectations”), to Fish (“interpretive communities”), and Radway (“Reading is notEating”) have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning.