The German Aufklärung: Leibniz, Thomasius and Wolff

The German Enlightenment, or Aufklärung, developed in a land divided into hundreds of states, many with their own universities and courts. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a polymath who invented calculus independently of Newton, argued that this is the best of all possible worlds and helped found the Berlin society of sciences in 1700. Christian Thomasius scandalized Leipzig in 1687 by lecturing in German rather than Latin, and later at the new University of Halle he campaigned against witch trials and the use of torture.

Christian Wolff turned Leibniz's ideas into systematic German textbooks that dominated universities. In 1723 King Frederick William I of Prussia, persuaded by pious critics that Wolff's philosophy encouraged fatalism, expelled him from Halle within 48 hours on pain of hanging. Frederick II recalled him in 1740. The German Enlightenment was often more academic and more respectful of religion than the French, working through universities and civil servants.