ABSTRACT
William Frederick was familiar with the guiding principle of Enlightenment from his sympathetic reading of Christian Wolff's Vernunftigen Gedanken von gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen. The plundering of Saxony had a justification of sorts in Frederick's desire to limit the extent to which the material resources of his own state were committed to the war. The historians of the German General Staff maintained that Frederick explored the Oblique Order in a serious way only after the Second Silesian War, and that he did not give it full effect until the battles of 1757. Frederick's self-sufficiency, according to the Duc de Nivernais, was in part the product of ignorance: It was not Frederick but the Duke of Bevern who was responsible for the attempt to do battle with the Swedish flotillas on the Baltic estuaries and lagoons in the Seven Years War. Frederick was neither particularly effective as a despot, nor enlightened in all his actions.
