Enlightenment and Community. Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public. By Benjamin W. Redekop. Montreal & Kingston: McGill- Queen's University Press, 2000. Pp. 263. $65.

This book details the contributions made by Lessing, Abbt, and Herder to the discourse or problem of the public in eighteenth-century Germany. Redekop surveys their specific texts that address the issue of the public, contextualizing those within their other writings. While he does not attempt to make a strong, specific argument about the emergence or theorization of the public sphere, Redekop fills in the picture of the three writers' ideas on the topic in a way that addresses some of the concerns recent scholars have had with the model of the public sphere proposed by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The book's strength lies in its perceptive synthesis of great amounts of pertinent information from the primary texts and of previous scholars' arguments, as Redekop offers a richness of detail and context, and thus the book constitutes a significant contribution to our knowledge of eighteenth-century thinking on the topic of the public sphere.

John P. Heins
The George Washington University