The Process of Enlightenment Essays by and inspired by Hans Erich Bödeker

The historiographical concept “Enlightenment” has for a long time wavered between the idea of a single unified Enlightenment and the notion of multiple competing enlightenments. This volume revisits this seeming contradiction by asserting that the Enlightenment should be understood as a shared process of communication, seeking ways to accommodate and mediate rival ideologies and orient enlightenment projects towards the betterment of humankind.

Taking the work of the eminent Enlightenment scholar Hans Erich Bödeker as their point of departure, the different chapters seek to explore this perspective through specific case studies of political communication. Readers are offered a selection of Bödeker’s texts never previously translated into English, along with a series of contributions from his former colleagues, students, and collaborators. In doing so the book displays the broad scope of Bödeker’s own work, as well as the multiplicity of themes captured within the framework of the Enlightenment. Genres, modes, and strategies of communication are contrasted with the institutions and cultural practices underpinning them.

In exploring the depth and scope of Bödeker’s work, the volume pays tribute to a German tradition rooted in historical semantics, while at the same time querying its present state and its future.

Ere Nokkala is an Associate Professor of History of Social and Economic Thought at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the PI of ERC Consolidator Grant Project “De-Centring Eighteenth-Century Political Economy: Rethinking Growth, Wealth and Welfare in the Swedish Empire”.

Jonas Gerlings is an intellectual historian of the Enlightenment with an emphasis on the Baltic Sea Region and its global contexts. He is currently a Marie Curie Global Fellow at the University of Göttingen and a recent Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. In 2017 he received his PhD in Intellectual history from the European University Institute for a thesis on Immanuel Kant.