Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009) 71-98 89

Carhart, Michael C., The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany.

Harvard Historical Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), xii + 360 pp., $49.95, ISBN 0 674 02617 9.

In the last few decades, the plural character of the Enlightenment has
become a scholarly commonplace. Beginning with studies on the national
colorings of Enlightenment in the 1980s and moving from there to social,
ideological, and localized studies of Enlightenment movements, contem-
porary scholarship now affords a rich and complicated perspective on
intellectual developments in the eighteenth century. Whatever coherence
‘Enlightenment’ may have as an overarching concept must now be won
from careful engagement with the particular movements, individuals, and
groups that scholars have brought recently into focus.
Michael Carhart has succeeded admirably in recovering the intellectual
agenda of one important group of (mostly) German figures associated with
the ‘Göttingen School’ of the late eighteenth-century. Carhart uses the
term loosely. Though Göttingen and its university feature prominently in
the narrative, Carhart is also deeply interested in parallel developments in
French and English contexts. Indeed, one of the chief merits of the book is
the insightful and erudite way that Carhart reaches beyond the boundaries
of the ‘school’ in order to illuminate its central features and set it in wider
European context. In doing so, he offers a compelling account of what one
reviewer featured on the book jacket (John Zammito) has called “yet
another rival enlightenment.”
At the heart of this movement was an approach to the human sciences
that Carhart calls “collective particularism.” Carhart traces the implemen-
tation of a scholarly program across several disciplines, including theology,
law, and anthropology. Various figures inhabit Carhart’s story, including
well-known figures like Herder and Heyne and lesser-known “dusty-dry
pedants” like J. D. Michaelis and J. G. Eichhorn. It is a story with two
trajectories: a longer, more tentative one connecting Göttingen to the
modern social sciences (see Carhart’s concluding chapter) and another,
more limited one that isolates and examines the rise of a new approach to
the humanities in and around Göttingen. As Carhart tells it, the approach
of the Göttingen School took up precisely where the abstractions and spec-
ulative systems of the philosophes ran aground. Carhart’s pedants addressed
moral, philosophical, and political questions by turning their attention
to “the collective development of the human mind” in particular societies
(7) and to understanding society in terms of the “unique genius of a given
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/157006509X436932
90 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009) 71-98

nation or locality.” (6) In short, they became students of “culture.” In a

skillful and well-documented Begriffsgeschichte, Carhart concludes that the
“idea of cultura animi is as old as Rome. But the idea of culture is only as
old as the Enlightenment.” (26)
To illustrate this move toward “collective particularism,” Carhart offers
case studies of figures whose scholarly lives illustrate a common pattern:
“Each chapter in this book depicts a rejection of universal principles and a
turn toward particularism in the study of real, historical, and unique
nations.” (22) In chapter one, “Orienatlism and Reform,” Carhart pairs
two scholars, the orientalist J. D. Michaelis and the jurist Johann Jakob
Moser. In their respective studies of Mosaic and German public law, both
scholars illustrated the close relation between laws and their particular cul-
tural settings, lending support to the idea that reform must come to societ-
ies gradually and from the bottom up. Chapter two probes “culture and
the origin of language.” Carhart begins with a fascinating discussion of
Enlightenment research on feral children, connecting it to a shift in the
study of language. Herder, Karl Franz von Irwing, and J. C. Adelung illus-
trate the dramatic effect of the concept of culture on efforts to penetrate
the mystery of language. In chapters three through five, Carhart examines
the searches for the historical Plato (chapter three), Homer (chapter four),
and Moses (chapter five). Classical and biblical studies played an essential
role in fostering the “historical particularism” for which Göttingen became
known. Here Carhart does an excellent job of presenting the homologous
character of these historical searches, using close examination of Heyne,
Winckelmann, Eichhorn and like-minded others (Wood and Goguet) to
illustrate how a critical, inductive, and particularistic mode of inquiry
allowed scholars to manage the cultural authority of the Western tradition,
to retain it without being stifled by it. The work of Christoph Meiners
features prominently in chapters six, seven, and eight. Meiners is, in many
ways, the central figure in the book. With vivid detail and erudite discus-
sion, Carhart uses Meiners’s work on ancient history and “anthropology”
(the scientific use of travel reports in the study of human societies) to
round out his narrative. According to Carhart, Meiners ultimately came to
believe that, “owing to the overwhelming forces of society and environ-
ment, there was no such thing as human nature. There was only human
culture.” (12)
One of the book’s most important contributions, then, is the establish-
ment of a connection between the study of culture as a new phenomenon
and the irenic, gradualist, and reform-oriented political sensibility so
 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009) 71-98 91

crucial to the Göttingen program. As a new university created by the

Hanoverian Electorate at the dawn of Aufklärung, Göttingen was hailed in
its day as a new Athens and a center of Enlightenment. The founders
attracted prominent scholars from a variety of disciplines in a bid to make
the new school a leading university, one devoted specifically to “educating
the future nobility of Europe.” (6) One of their key moves was to mute the
(Lutheran) confessional character of the school and to cultivate critical
analysis of received tradition—yet without embracing revolutionary
thought or sharp political ideologies. Carhart shows that in the humani-
ties, the analysis of culture (whether directed specifically toward myth, pol-
ity, or language) corresponded closely to this program.
There is a great deal to like in this important book. Like his subjects,
Carhart revels in “particulars, details, and complexity.” (22) He does a
masterful job of presenting the personages, debates, and aspirations that
animated the new study of culture; his exposition is lucid and compelling.
His range is also impressive, extending to less well-known but telling epi-
sodes such as the discovery of feral children in France, reports of cannibal-
ism in New Zealand, and scholarly expeditions to Yemen and Syria. All of
this, though interesting in its own right, serves a particular purpose, to
reinforce Carhart’s finely tuned historical argument.
Nevertheless, one area where Carhart’s analysis stands in need of revi-
sion is its treatment of religion. ‘Enlightenment and religion’ has received
a good deal off attention within the last several years, with important books
and essays, for example, by Thomas Ahnert, Martin Gierl, and Jonathan
Sheehan. Carhart, for the most part, does not engage this work. When he
does address religion, he seems flat-footed. This is the case partly because
he is so deft elsewhere: on language, legal theory, myth, comparative his-
tory, and many other topics. In general, Carhart does not seem attuned to
the programmatic character of theological scholarship in the period, to
what H. P. Reill, for example, described as a “rescue” of religion through a
“transformation of its meaning and function.” (The German Enlightenment
and the Rise of Historicism, p. 6)—a transformation, moreover, amply doc-
umented in Sheehan’s The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton; 2005). Instead,
Carhart applies to biblical criticism the same pattern used elsewhere in the
book: Göttingen scholars shift focus from “the universal to the particular.”
(22) In chapter eight, the German Pietists of the early eighteenth century
and, to a degree, Bishop Lowth stand in for a kind of “universalistic” mode
of biblical interpretation preoccupied with praxis and poetics. Carhart sug-
gests that these gave way to the particularistic, non-theological Higher
92 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009) 71-98

Criticism of Eichhorn (and others). The pattern, however, distorts. Ger-

man scholarship of the mid-twentieth century has shown, for example,
important continuities between the Pietist ‘Halle School’ of philological-
historical interpretation in the early eighteenth century and the Higher
Criticism which followed it. Lowth, for his part, deserves greater recogni-
tion for shifting biblical interpretation away from neoclassical canons and
timeless standards of beauty and order in the direction of historical par-
ticularity. Though he believed there must be meter in Hebrew poetry, he
could not figure out how to scan it. Meter, as a result, played no role in his
actual exegesis. Lowth’s real contribution—the identification of parallel-
ism (cf. 177)—opened the way for Michaelis from his position in the
philosophical faculty (cf. 8) to recover a distinctively Hebraic form of poetry.
Though Eichhorn’s studies on myth, Pentateuchal sources, and the history
of the biblical text did perhaps yield more “knowledge of man” than of
God (291), his work must be understood in terms of a larger enterprise: to
navigate between confessional Lutheranism and “free thought” by deliver-
ing a rationally purified Bible in the service of an emerging cultural Prot-
estantism. This was not traditional Christianity, but neither was it
indifference to religion (cf. 291). Finally, in a modest but nevertheless sig-
nificant oversight, Carhart pays no attention to an important aspect of the
reshaping of biblical studies in this period: the role of anti-Semitism in
Michaelis’s orientalism (see, for example, Jonathan Hess’s 2002 book, Ger-
mans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity).
In spite of these criticisms, the book stands as a fascinating and impor-
tant contribution to the field. As an ambitious, new entry in the explora-
tion of cultural enlightenments, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment
Germany deserves serious attention—and a good deal of praise. Careful
readers will be richly rewarded.

Michael C. Legaspi
Creighton University