The prime objective of this work is to reinstate a marginalised intellectual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern Germany. Although the civil philosophy of Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius is not unknown in the modern humanities academy, sympathetic treatment of their work is largely confined to the history of political philosophy, jurisprudence, and theology. To the extent that they feature in intellectual history and the history of philosophymore broadly, however, they appear as superseded figures, destined to be absorbed by the great oscillations between rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism which would reach their culminating reconciliation in the epochal philosophy of Immanuel Kant. We shall see that this reigning dialectical historiography is itself the offshoot of a second, rival intellectual movement, centred in the culture of university metaphysics. In order to recover early modern civil philosophy, therefore, it has proved necessary to criticise and reject a dialectical historiography designed to erase its historical existence and political significance. In place of this reconciliatory history, this book offers an account of two independent intellectual cultures – the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil and metaphysical philosophy – which remain unreconciled today.

Retrieving civil philosophy from the all-assimilating, all-unifying mill of dialectical philosophical history is no straightforward task. For, by drawing its impetus from the arranged mutual deficiencies of opposed viewpoints, this historiography gives shape not just to history but also to the historian.