The Process of Enlightenment: Essays by and inspired by Hans Erich Bödeker, edited by Ere Nokkala and Jonas Gerlings, has recently been published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series. This is the first English book on the work of the renowned German Enlightenment scholar, Hans Erich Bödeker. Along with the translation of some of his key texts, the book presents a series of chapters from his former colleagues, students, and collaborators. In this blog post, the editors introduce this new publication and discuss what led to the idea of a Festschrift on Hans Erich Bödeker.
The circumstances that led to this book may, at the time, have felt like a chance encounter, but in the review mirror it seems like it was almost inevitable.
In 2015 Ere (Nokkala) and I (Jonas Gerlings) were sharing an office at the Lichtenberg Kolleg – the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Studies. We both came from the same University, European University Institute Firenze, we shared the same supervisor, Martin van Gelderen, who had been appointed the director of the Institute, and we both shared the same external supervisor, Hans Erich Bödeker. Still, Ere had already completed his thesis in Florence, when I started as a PhD and although I had heard of him, I had never met him before I came to the Lichtenberg Kolleg working on my own thesis. That Martin placed us in the same office probably had little to do with lack of space or other logistical problems but rather a sense that we, as one might say, would hit it off.
Needless to say, as scholars of the German Enlightenment, we did, and often our discussions were not limited to the coffee breaks but also developed spontaneously from a small clarificatory question during work. Often our talks would turn to Hans, something he had said, a remark, or a passage in one of his text that one of us had read and the other knew from a discussion over wine at the Apex-Restaurant. It didn’t take long for us to agree on two things. First that Hans was an excellent teacher with knowledge of the Enlightenment that spanned many disciplines and provided a multitude of perspectives. He was able to point to new perspectives and open up new horizons, but also to show how to move forward in uncharted territory. Second, that few people really seemed to have a clear sense of the scope of his work. In Germany he was associated with the work of the Max Planck Institute, its director Rudolph Vierhaus, and his colleagues such as Martin Gierl. In England Hans seemed to be best known for his collaborations with István Hont and his work in history of political thought. He was, as John Robertson later wrote, one of the “leading German intellectual historians” [1] of the Enlightenment. In the Nordic countries he was associated with historical semantics and Reinhard Koselleck’s work on Conceptual History. In France, however, he was regarded a cultural historian, working on history of science, history of the book, and history of reading, together with people like Daniel Roche and Roger Chartier. And so new aspects of his work kept on appearing as we talked. He had worked on the cultural history of music, the theory of biography, and on cultures of travel and so on and so on.
To this day none of us can remember who came up with the idea of making a Festschrift, a series of honorary essays, for Hans. We both felt the need for a book that would show his wide influence as well as make some of his widely known texts available to an Anglophone audience. The idea must have emerged organically as the most natural thing from our conversations, and since we were at the Lichtenberg Kolleg the conditions where perfect for organizing a conference. Despite his talent for teaching, the number of Hans’ former students where limited. He had been employed at the Max Planck Institute for History, Göttingen, an institution primarily dedicated to research; however, during his tenure he had served as visiting Professor at various universities, such as Georg-Mason-University (1987), UCLA (1992), Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales (1992, 2002) and the European University Institute, Firenze (1999/2000, 2003). It was our luck that Hans accepted to supervise PhDs after having returned to Göttingen.
Following the conference Enlightenment Man – Workshop in Honour of Hans Erich Bödeker held in 2017 at the Lichtenberg Kolleg, one thing was clear to us; due to the wide scope of Hans’ interests and collaborations it would be challenging to give a comprehensive and coherent presentation of Hans’ work. It was Avi Lifschitz, who had been a fellow at the Lichtenberg Kolleg who suggested that we should take a closer look at Hans’s idea of Enlightenment as process. Hans had always argued for a unified argument, however, his studies had often been meticulously focused on a single aspect of the Enlightenment. In our conversations with him one dictum had been recurring: “The Enlightenment can be understood as a set of shared questions, to which different groups of people gave different answers at different places.” These different answers would constitute different often rivalling, sometimes, complementary enlightenment projects, however, together, they were part of a wider process, made possible from the emergence of various institutions, and the cultivation of new practices. As such a comprehensive study of the Enlightenment should not be understood as a singular “true” or “original” enlightenment project, but rather in the emerging public space that brought these enlightenment projects in connection with one another. In this regard a central aspect of the Enlightenment would be to understand it as a “process of communication” as one of the key texts by Hans in the volume is called. This process of communication is a continuous negotiation of conflict, partly made possible by conceptualised ideals such as tolerance and freedom of speech, partly made possible by the cultivation of social and scholarly practices such as sociability and criticism. It is in this nexus between historical semantics and cultural history that the book finds its coherence.
When the book was presented at the Enlightenment Workshop at Magdalen College, Oxford on 16 October 2024 Hans demonstrated this Enlightenment ideal of entering into debate with a packed audience. As a spectator it would be hard not to notice Hans’ engagement with the issue as well as the audience. The captivating part is not just that he is a good at engaging in discussions, although he certainly is, it is also that you can feel that he genuinely loves it.
[1] John Robertson, ’István Hont (1947-2013)’, Intellectual history archive (2013), p. 3.
Jonas Gerlings
The Process of Enlightenment: Essays by and inspired by Hans Erich Bödeker is part of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, published in collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford.
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