ABSTRACT
The later enlightenment in Germany – a period from roughly the end of the Seven Years War to the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 – was characterized by two chief continuities with its earlier phases, discussed in Chapter Fifteen: it had no single geographical locus and was consequently a dispersed and diffuse movement; and it had no single one or even a few individuals whose views and reputations were so universally impressive as to set a single stamp on the entire movement, which therefore continued to be remarkably eclectic and syncretic with regard to both the sources and the applications of its ideas. But it is also different from its early years in two major respects: first, by reason of the extraordinarily rapid diffusion of new and progressive ideas from their original home in the universities, academies, learned journals and the studies of individual scholars to a wider and rapidly increasing public composed of all educated elites and to a limited extent of all the genuinely literate, including sections of the petty bourgeoisie; and second, by virtue of the growth of a more direct and specific criticism of existing society – a criticism largely absent in an earlier literature which was either so broadly theoretical as to be politically innocuous, or which tended to identify bad conditions and to propose remedies for them, but without penetrating to the root causes of those conditions. To a certain extent, the latter change may also be described as a shift from a criticism of moral attitudes alone to one which also included institutions and the practices unavoidably linked to them.
