Abstract

Richard Whatmore advised that an abstract would not be necessary, but I am happy to offer one. If you wish to include one, please set and format the following as appropriate: Eva Piirimä e's Herder and Enlightenment Politics deserves recognition as a landmark study in the scholarship of Johann Gottfried Herder, and of eighteenth-century political thought more broadly. Piirimä e shows us that Herder should be taken very seriously as a political thinker of the eighteenth century. Herder engaged in the central debates of his time and possessed a political programme concerned with the possibility for – and reformist potential of – a distinctive kind of patriotism. The review welcomes Piirimä e's contextualist, historicist approach to Herder's political thought, allowing us to understand Herder “in his own terms”. Piirimä e thereby reveals that the coherence, scope and urgency of Herder's political programme, addressing the particular challenges of his European modernity, has hitherto been underappreciated. Piirimä e suggests that Herder's political objectives provided an important and underappreciated impetus to his cultural thought. Piirimä e also emphasises the significance of Herder's experiences in the distinctive commercial environment of Riga and draws attention to his engagement with the genre of Imperial Reichsgeschichte. These highlight a more modern outlook on history and politics than is often appreciated, particularly in Kantian scholarship, and which must be borne in mind as a qualification to his famous critiques in Another Philosophy of History (1774).