Martin Mulsow has emerged in the past decade as one of Germany's preeminent chroniclers of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. However, aside from the occasional contribution to an edited collection, much of his work has remained inaccessible to readers without a command of the original German. With this translation of Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680–1720 (F. Meiner, 2002), H. C. Erik Midelfort has taken a first step toward introducing Mulsow's considerable opus to an Anglophone readership.
In this book, Mulsow eschews the methodology adopted by many works of intellectual history, whereby individual texts are subsumed into a larger, and too often stultifying, framework. Instead, he proffers seven micro-histories that explore the “splintered networks” that characterize the early German Enlightenment (8). These case studies facilitate Mulsow's granular and sociologically oriented approach toward the texts he considers, which collectively demonstrate how the German Enlightenment haphazardly emerged from both transnational and hyper-local exchanges of often clandestine material. The book's first chapter is a bibliographic detective tale in which Mulsow seeks the identity of a figure known solely as “Judaeus Lusitanus.” Through archival research in Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv, Mulsow discovers that this anti-Christian polemicist, who frustrated numerous thinkers in the early eighteenth century, is the Sephardic Jew Moses Raphael d'Aguilar. Through this case study, Mulsow is able to elucidate how Jewish anti-Christian texts provided a crucial impetus toward the radicalization of heterodox thinkers.
In the second chapter, Mulsow considers a theologian originally from Poland, Samuel Crell, in an effort to clarify the complex interplay of Jewish, Socinian, and Arminian thinking that determined how radical texts from Holland and England resonated with German intellectuals. The next chapter returns to the detective genre as Mulsow searches for the constellation of figures and circumstances that led to the composition in 1688 of what was at the time considered to be the most deplorable manuscript in the world: De tribus impostoribus, the book of the three impostors. Mulsow's investigation leads to the conclusion that “one of the most influential atheist texts of the early modern period was composed right in the center of Lutheran Orthodoxy,” that is in Hamburg (79). This chapter, which builds off previous work by Winfried Schröder, demonstrates the importance of the precise “mixture of banter and barter” that Mulsow identifies as crucial to the non-intentional process by which the Enlightenment emerged (98).
The fourth chapter is much more wide-ranging, as Mulsow investigates the development of political theology in the early modern period. Mulsow's aim is to show that the “twists and turns in this historical process produced what would later be called the Enlightenment” (113). This macroscopic view could easily clash with the book's implicit effort to reject reductive recourses to overarching theories, but Mulsow is mostly able to avoid this predicament by concentrating more narrowly on figures such as Daniel Georg Morhof and Johann Friedrich Kayser.
Mulsow then considers the critique of Christian Platonism through an analysis of works such as Matthieu Souverain's Le Platonisme dévoilé, which was anonymously published in Amsterdam in 1700, in spite of the title page's claim that the book can be traced to the fictitious publisher Pierre Marteau in Cologne. Souverain's book proved to be greatly influential upon both Georg Wachter and Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling as they sought to show that the idea of a philosophia perennis enunciated by Christian Platonism was “the source of dogmatic corruption within Christianity” (204).
The book's penultimate chapter addresses the veiled disagreements between Gundling and Johann Franz Budde. Mulsow views the tensions between these two philosophers as emblematic of the conflict between a liberal and conservative Enlightenment that is a crucial source of the friction that propelled the intellectual movement forward during the eighteenth century. Furthermore, Mulsow argues that these two schools of thought collided in such a way as to enable the rise of “philosophical history writing—the beginning of the truly modern reflection of philosophy on its own history” (234).
The final chapter addresses orthodox fears of the spread of eclecticism and indifferentism, which they saw as threats to their intellectual habitus. Mulsow's terse conclusion dispenses with any attempt to summarize or integrate the variegated material he addresses in the book's seven chapters. Instead, he provides ten tentative conclusions that illustrate how philosophical ideas often develop through a mixture of intentional effort and happenstance.
Fortunately for the reader of this translation, there are relatively few passages where Midelfort's attempt to remain faithful to the German original has led to English sentences that are slightly clunky. It is to be regretted, however, that the English translation has jettisoned a substantial chunk of the scholarly apparatus that made the German original so valuable. Although the notes not included in the printed book are to be made available online, this solution to an avoidable problem is quite clumsy in practice.
