Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 260 pp. $24.95.

Of the three currently most influential cultures of Western Europe—the French, the British, and the German—it is the German culture that has always proven the hardest to define. In philosophical terms, there is sufficient thumbnail truth to conceiving of rationalism as the modern French contribution to Western thought and of empiricism as the British one. In political terms, absolutism and centralism can be said to either reign in France or instigate its revolutions whereas on the British Isles revolutions have been staved off since 1688 by means of a limited monarchy sharing power with Parliament. In aesthetic matters, French taste runs toward clarity and elegance, British taste toward naturalness and freedom. But Germany? Its philosophical legacy is huge but diffuse; it is a form of mysticism known as Idealism. Its aesthetics is bound up with that mysticism and involves an emphasis not on shared values but on solitariness and manifestations of the sublime. Its politics is a string of failed attempts at national unification so that the concept of a national politics simply didn’t apply to the German states for most of their history.