The Englishman John Locke (1632 – 1704) is widely regarded as a founding figure of the European Enlightenment, whose writings were central to key debates in eighteenth-century thought, including discussions about the origins of human knowledge, religious toleration, and the foundations of political society. The impact of his thought extended far beyond his native Britain to the European Continent, where his writings circulated widely, in the original English and in translation, soon after their first appearance in print. However, research on Locke’s Continental reception has been limited mainly to eighteenth-century France. This is the case even though it is known that Locke was read widely in the German lands from the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Locke’s Epistola de tolerantia (1689), for example, was translated into German in 1710. Many of the most prominent German Aufklärer drew attention directly to Locke’s works. The famous philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) not only read the English original of the Essay, but also wrote a major treatise, the Nouveaux Essais, in response to it. Ardent admirers of Locke’s Essay can be found among the so-called ‘popular philosophers’ (Popularphilosophen) at the University of Göttingen. These are mainly Johann Heinrich Feder (1740-1821), whose lecture De sensu interno (1768) stimulated further Locke studies at the University of Göttingen, and Christoph Meiners (1745-1810), a student of Feder who became familiar with philosophical thinking by reading Locke. The first German translation of Locke’s main work (published 1757 by Johann Heinrich Poley who had started working on it in 1734) led to a broader dissemination of Locke’s thought in Germany, even more extensive than that in the first half of the century. Immanuel Kant, for example, referred to material which can only be found in Poley’s translation.
And yet, it has often been argued that Locke’s ideas were slow to have an effect in the German lands. Locke was once described as a sort of subterranean force in German philosophy in the first half of the eighteenth century, as the impact of British thinkers was supposedly blunted by the dominance of a Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophical school, which was entrenched in curricula at German universities. Later, it is said, Locke’s ideas became part of a synthesis with Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism, which emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The result of this belated reception was a hybrid Anglo-German philosophy, which was eventually challenged and superseded by Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. Thus, by about 1780, Locke’s philosophy was widely present in German philosophy and intellectual life more generally.
This project moves beyond and significantly revise these interpretations of the impact of Lockean texts and arguments in German intellectual culture. More specifically, it will question essentialised views of Locke’s thought, of ‘British empiricism’, and ‘German rationalism’. Instead, it will explore the different selective uses and interpretations of Locke’s writings by a wide range of German thinkers. In doing so, the project reveals the philosophical, religious, and broader cultural concerns that informed the German engagement with Locke’s ideas. Thereby the project also aims to change general perceptions of the German Enlightenment, and its relation to European thought and culture in the eighteenth century.
