Besides geographical boundlessness, the claim to totality that characterizes universal histories comprises a temporal horizon, which reaches from the Creation to the end of the world predestined to Christians. The article examines the role of religious approaches on the one hand and secular points of view on the other in the transformation of eschatology into the idea of an open future shapeable by humans. The analysis focusses first on works by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). While the above-mentioned transformation is usually (...) interpreted as a process of secularization, this article reveals a reliance on religious hopes for the afterlife, also and especially where progressistic expectations for the development of the individual as well as of humanity were articulated. A second step leads back into the early eighteenth century. A frontispiece of 1717 already expressed the idea of an “open future” conceived secularly as a “space of time” to be shaped by human beings according to their own interests and guided by the experiences of the past. The article closes with a discussion of the reasons for the return of religious ways of thinking in the late Enlightenment, which becomes particularly apparent in universal- historical expectations of the future. (shrink)

At first glance, freedom and coercion, or constraint, appear to be clearcut oppositions. However, in many contexts we find that the two are closely interwoven. Freedom and coercion then rather resemble a continuum: Without notice, elements of freedom resurface as forces of - or preconditions for - constraint and vice versa. Thus, sometimes the two mutually reinforce each other, while at other times they tend to undermine the other. This volume comprehensively explores the complex relationship between the elements and powers (...) of freedom and coercion in various contexts and from various perspectives. It is structured in four systematic sections: I Politics and economy, II. Institutions and personal life, III. Physiological aspects, IV. Aesthetic contexts. Der Band durchleuchtet das keineswegs einfach oppositive Verhältnis von Freiheit und Zwang, wie es sich seit der Formierung der Moderne in der Aufklärung entwickelt hat - politisch, philosophisch, anthropologisch, ästhetisch. Freiheit und Zwang stellen nur auf den ersten Blick binäre Gegensätze dar. Das eine kann graduell und oft unmerklich in das andere übergehen, und beide sind ohne das jeweils andere nicht denkbar. Häufig stehen Freiheit und Zwang in einem - negativen oder positiven - dialektischen Verhältnis zueinander, in dem sie sich gegenseitig bedingen und steigern oder aber unterminieren. Oder sind Freiheit und Zwang in der Moderne sogar zunehmend ununterscheidbar geworden? Der Band verleiht diesem schillernden Vexierbild in vier Abteilungen Ordnung und Struktur: I. Politik und Ökonomie, II. Institutionen und Lebensführung, III. Physiologische Dimensionen, IV. Ästhetische Verhandlungen. (shrink)

What is the basis for the enormous success of Historicism? In my paper I attempt to answer this question by deploying the concept of the cultural pattern. A 'cultural pattern' may be defined as the connection of concepts and practices which have gained a relative perpetuity through cultural habitualization. Cultural patterns include a combination of interpretative schemes according to which the world can be categorized, structured and interpreted with individual or social practices which either develop out of, or follow these (...) schemes. Because they combine concepts and practices in a significant manner they gain a contour which enables the creation of communicative addressability, practical appropriation and discursive analysis and hence the creation of a long-term exemplary status. A cultural pattern according to this definition has a relative stability and an observable effect over a long period of time, but which is simultaneously liable to permanent actualization and adaption. Historicism has been considered to be a basic thought-pattern of modernity since Troeltsch, Meinecke and Koselleck; defining Historicism as a cultural pattern can help to explain its long-term effectiveness and its continuing productivity to the present day. (shrink)

Hire Leser-oderim Theater: die Znschauer - zum Laehen zu bringen ist cines der wichtigsten, allerdings wenig anerkannten Ziele der Literatur. So baufig Lachen remer Ubermut oder ein verlachendes Spotten ist, so sehr Kann man aber auch lachend sehr wie bereits Lessings Minna von Barnhelm wusste. Den unterschiedlichen Typen und Sprachformen des Laehens geht der vorliegend Band an Beispielen der deutschen and earopaischen Literatur naeh, von der antiken Komodie bis zum neuesten Detektivroman.

The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship on early modern theories of plagiarism, the examination focuses on how learned communicative practice treated plagiarism. Contrary to the norm established in the discourse (...) on plagiarism, the plagiariser and his work were not excluded from the respublica literaria. Instead, the case became part of academic memory, and was itself frequently reported in a plagiaristic manner. In closing, a comparative glance at the juridically‐based treatment of a current case of plagiarism (a politician's dissertation of 2009) is taken. The paper argues that the contradiction between the theoretical norm and the actual eighteenth‐century management of plagiarism resulted from the familiarity of unmarked „copying“ in pre‐modern scholarly practice. The paper shows that early modern learned culture, although characterised by Steven Shapin as a „moral economy,“ neither felt compelled to impose its crucial ethical norm in a case of open non‐conformance, nor did it consistently observe this norm for routine processes. (shrink)

Die Zeit um 1700 wird gerne mit dem Epochen-Begriff der Frühaufklärung belegt. Ihre Diskurse und Tendenzen werden dadurch, häufig unter der Hand, mitunter aber auch explizit teleologisierend, auf die Positionen des späteren 18. Jahrhunderts ausgerichtet. Statt die um 1700 zu beobachtenden Öffnungen als Auftakt zu einer großen, weltbildlichen wie sozialen, Öffnung der Aufklärung durch Vernunft und Kritik zu betrachten, fragt der vorliegende Band nach Öffnungen, auf die wieder neue Schließungen folgten. Welche Gründe hatte die neuartige Offenheit, die die Kultur um (...) 1700 zu einem großen Experimentierfeld machte, und welche Folgen hatte sie? Welche neuen Handlungsspielräume und Rollen in der Öffentlichkeit entstanden damals? Manche der neuen Leitideen – wie die Pflicht zur vernünftigen Begründung allen Denkens und Handelns – können geradezu als Antwort auf die Unsicherheit verstanden werden, die jene Öffnung mit sich brachte. Die relative Offenheit der Zeit um 1700 provozierte, so die These, auch Versuche der neuerlichen Schließung. Der Band wirft neues Licht auf die Frühphase der Aufklärung, um diese insgesamt besser verstehen zu können. (shrink)