In an age when it has become fashionable to dismiss the Enlightenment as a sinister movement of instrumental rationality, Enlightenment and Community seeks to understand the movement on its own terms, as a diverse, reformist enterprise with strong communitarian elements. By examining the writings of three seminal figures of the German Englightenment in social and intellectual context, the study penetrates to the heart of the issue for many in the Germanies who entertained Enlightenment ideals: the problem of forming and shaping an enlightened "public" out of a diverse, fragmented, and relatively unenlightened society.

The pioneering work of Juergen Habermas has given rise to an intense discussion about the rise of a modern public sphere and civil society. Enlightenment and Community revises and expands the Habermasian thesis by demonstrating that rather than being particularly "bourgeois", the eighteenth-Century German public was in fact a problematic, amorphous entity, a beckoning figure which led writers like Lessing, Abbt, and Herder on unique yet parallel quests to give it shape and form.

The book begins with a wide-ranging introduction which places its subjects into bibliographical and theoretical context. The introduction reviews the literature on the rise of a modern public sphere, placing Habermas into a longer scholarly tradition and comparing the literature on a German public sphere with that on France and England.

The first chapter delineates what the author calls the "problem of Publikum" in the Germanies during the eighteenth century -- the lack of a coherent referent for "the public", that is, the lack of a single metropolis or other organizing principle for "German" social and intelletual life. The author provides evidence that this was in fact a widely-recognized problem shared by German intellectuals, and as such informed their efforts in a variety of ways.

Chapters 2,3, and 4 are extended essays on the works of Lessing, Abbt, and Herder respectively, showing how their works in fact were deeply informed by this problem and that a proper understanding of what they were "doing" as writers depends on recognizing this fact. Each chapter provides extensive readings of the works of its subject, as well as of works by others that were important stimuli for the writer in question, and develops separate but related arguments about the nature of each writer's concerns and their "project" as a whole. The final concluding chapter analyses end-of-century developments and includes comparisons between Kant's notion of a modern public and those of Lessing, Abbt, and Herder, all of whom had engaged in reflection on "the public" and pioneered the use of the term long before Kant wrote his famous essay "What is Enlightenment." The argument between Herder and Kant is seen in part to be about differing conceptions of the nature of an enlightened p! ublic and public culture, the role of the writer within that culture, and the relative importance of the common "volk" in engaging in public discussion and in determining its own destiny.

Throughout the book a variety of topics are treated, from drama to politics to historiography; the question gender and the public sphere; Abbt's powerful influence on Herder; Herder as enlightenment figure and not a member of the so-called "Counter-Enlightenment", and many others.