The language of constitutional government, scientific inquiry, freedom of conscience, religious toleration, and universal rights owes much to eighteenth-century philosophy. More than any other intellectual movement of the modern era, the Enlightenment claimed that reason could discover principles valid not merely for particular nations or religions but for humanity itself. Universalism became one of its defining aspirations. It has also become one of its greatest controversie

Few periods in European intellectual history have produced such an extraordinary concentration of philosophical, literary, and cultural innovation as the German-speaking lands between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within little more than half a century, thinkers including Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel transformed debates about reason, freedom, history, culture,