Leibnitz and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Leibniz und die europäische Ordnungskrise, Hamburg, 1948)

Unlike the names of Leibnitz´ friends and patrons, his own name is not recorded in the political history of Germany or of Europe; his political missions never brought him into thè lime-light of events. A diplomatic veil lies over his religious and patriotic work. He founded no school and had, during his lifetime, no disciples. There is, in fine, something anonymous and impersonal in all his activities. This anonymity is partly explained by his failure (in itself significant of a fundamental trait of his reflection) to collect more than a very few of his writings into larger works ; of these, only the Theodicy was published in his life-time. A number of small but important treatises appeared in various learned journals of the time. Whole books, essays and drafts remained buried in his desk or (in the case of his political memoranda) in secret archives. Compared with other thinkers of his age he did not set much store by his literary pursuits. His participation in the controversy of his age was direct and immediate. His writings are always occasioned by and concerned with the problem in hand. The work which was not published during his life consists of a great mass of hardly legible drafts (he was short-sighted), which were put away in his large secret cabinet and remain largely unpublished to the present day. If need had been, his relationships with Free-Masonry impulsed even more such a kind of behavior. Ever since 1765 collected editions of his writings have been appearing. Not until the nineteenth century, however, did scholars begin systematically to collect his unpublished works; Pertz in 1843, Klopp in 1864 and the Berlin Academy in 1923 all set about the gigantic task of publishing complete editions, yet all have failed. Here too (as in so many other respects) one is tempted to connect the many failures to finish the task with its universality. Leibnitz’s longstanding plans for the founding of a learned Society were at last realized with the help of his enthusiastic and faithful disciple Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg (later Queen of Prussia); in 1700 the Berlin Academy was founded and Leibnitz elected its first President. Yet the political tension between Hanover and Berlin made him suspect at both courts. Similar plans for academies in Dresden, St. Petersburg (following Leibnitz’s meeting with Peter the Great in Carlsbad in 1712), and in Vienna all failed, and with the death of the Queen in 1705 Leibnitz lost all influence in Berlin. In 1714 Georg Ludwig became King of England; Leibnitz was banished to Hanover, where he assiduously laboured on his history of the Guelphs ; he was promised that upon completing it he would be given a post in London. At the time of his death on November 14th 1716 he had brought the story down to the year 1005, and it has remained unfinished to the present day. The name of Leibnitz is closely connected with the conception of Europe as a cultural and political unity, a conception which no longer exists at the present time. To give an account of Leibnitz’s ideas on this issue may therefore be useful in an attempt to determine the causes of the decline. But such an account can be meaningful only if it also discerns the dangers to our own existence inherent in Leibnitz’s cultural and philosophical synthesis, and if it succeeds in tracing back his description of European self-consciousness to the real crisis of his age. The philosophical self-assertion inherent in Leibnitz’s work and the ambitious claims to power of his sovereign intellect must be discerned as the ultimate sources of his imperious will to erect a philosophical system. Hence our task will be to determine where Leibnitz’s responsible awareness of his philosophical commitment ends, and where the direct assertion of his philosophical self-consciousness (expressed in a system with absolute claims) begins. And its amplification to South-American and Iberoamerican ideas in science and philosophical anthropology is an often neglected issue; for academic sources about this issue, see Libgen ID 1201494, a 160-pp. book in Spanish; ID 1530460, a 484-pp. book is Spanish, and ID 1485841, a 13-pp. neurobiology-only article, as well as (in the same series) Diferencias entre neurociencias anglófonas y neurobiología iberoamericana: del desencuentro a la comprensión (2018), not yet in either LibGen or related repositories -------------------------- The original work in German from which this translation has been made was first published in 1948 by the Hansischer Gildenverlag {Joachim Heitmann and Company), Hamburg, under the title Leibniz und die europäische Ordnungskrise. For the purpose of the present translation the original work has been revised in many respects by the Author in collaboration with the Translator. This translation was first published in Glasgow, U. K., in 1952 for Bowes and Bowes, Publishers Limited, Cambridge.