Over the past four decades, Isaiah Berlin's neat divide between the Enlightenment and its critics, the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, has been criticized from different sides. Some historians challenged Berlin's chronology of this opposition, pushing it both backward and forward in time; others raised serious doubts about the ideological homogeneity within either movement; and yet other scholars showed the many convergences between the two supposedly opposing camps. Avi Lifschitz's book on the language debates in the Berlin Academy in the 1750s combines all these modes of critique (and then some) to undermine further the analytical distinction between a homogeneous Enlightenment and its supposed homogeneous opposite. Indeed, this extremely erudite, well-written, and often brilliant book put the final nail in any uncritical deployment of Berlin's famous binary.

The time, place, and subject matter of Lifschitz's account combine to form a powerful response to Berlin's understanding of the Enlightenment and its critics. By concentrating on the 1750s, Lifschitz dates the German Aufklärung's preoccupation with language earlier than the still common starting point of the 1770s. Isaiah Berlin's enlightenment was primarily French, while in Lifschitz's account it forms a cross-European web of which the city of Berlin is an important node. And above all, Isaiah Berlin's Enlightenment was characterized by its belief in reason and its universal attainability. He assigned arguments about the particularities of different languages and their effects on human cognition to the camp of the Counter-Enlightenment. Lifschitz could not disagree more. “What we shall encounter as the prominent view of language and civilization in the mid-eighteenth century,” he writes in his introduction (p. 7), “was much closer to the frame of mind Berlin attributed to the Counter-Enlightenment [than to the Enlightenment].”

The book's seven chapters move elegantly from the overall role of language in enlightened thought, through the particularity of the Berlin debates of the 1750s, back to general questions about language and the Enlightenment. Lifschitz begins with a general description of the early modern reception of Epicurus's and Lucretius's naturalistic explanations for the emergence of language. The main leitmotif in this reception, Lifschitz brilliantly claims, was the tension between nature and artifice: between man's natural ability to speak and the artifice of any particular communicative symbolic system. The second chapter looks at the problem of language from a synchronic perspective, locating an important axis of enlightened discussions about language in the question of the reciprocal effects between language, cognition, and social institutions.

The next three chapters introduce the concrete stage, main actors, and finally the plot of the Berlin debates of the 1750s. The third chapter shows how long before the essay competition of 1759, various Berlin Aufklärer, influenced especially by Rousseau's Second Discourse, discussed the role of language in human cognition. Indeed, the Berlin Academy's essay competition is inconceivable without this background. Chapter four then introduces the laureate of the Berlin competition, Johann David Michaelis, and traces the evolution of his thought about language before the late 1750s. The next chapter concentrates on Michaelis's prizewinning essay itself.

After a brief interlude, devoted to a particular debate in the late 1750s and early 1760s about a stylistic guide to French, Lifschitz returns to the main thread of his argument by recasting the second Berlin essay competition on language in 1771 as a continuation of the earlier enlightened debate on language and human cognition. Following recent scholarship on Herder's relationship to the Enlightenment, Lifschitz convincingly shows that the famous Riga-born philosopher—the winner of the 1771 competition—is best understood as a central thinker of the Enlightenment rather than as one of its primary critics, as Isaiah Berlin famously argued. Lifschitz, who set out to undermine Berlin's binary opposition between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, thus returns full circle to his starting point.

Lifschitz is at his best when he describes the overall contours of the debate about the role of language in enlightened thought. It is especially in the early and final chapters of his book that this young author's extraordinary erudition, his mastery of the secondary literature in several languages, and his elegant style are most evident. The brilliance of the early chapters comes at a price, though. So successful is Lifschitz in describing and analyzing the general aspects of enlightened discourse about language that by the time he reaches the actual Berlin debates of the 1750s he has little to add, conceptually, to his narrative. The Berlin debates—indeed, the Berlin Academy's role as “an important node” (p. 10) of enlightened discourse—is consequently paradoxically undermined. Chapter six, the book's one attempt to provide a sociocultural background for the debates, is the least convincing part of this otherwise excellent book. It tells more than it shows and would leave social, cultural, and certainly political historians highly unsatisfied. These are certainly not the primary audience of this book. Still, surely one can devote a few lines to the physical place of the academy in Berlin, to the composition of its members, or to the concrete relationships among the academy's royal benefactor, his military campaigns, and the language debates (the latter, as the author acknowledges on several occasions but never really develops, took place in the middle of the Seven Years' War). In this one respect, Lifschitz's account follows in the footsteps, rather than diverges from, Isaiah Berlin's account of the Enlightenment.

Such minor criticisms detract nothing from the significance of this excellent book. Avi Lifschitz's account of the Berlin debates on language in the mid-eighteenth century is a very important contribution to the study of the German Aufklärung and indeed the Enlightenment more generally. It is sophisticated yet graceful, erudite yet accessible, and it helps solve many a problem in the interpretation of enlightened philosophy while at the same time raising many more issues for further research and discussion.