Benjamin Franklin and Immanuel Kant in Berlin: Printing House, Press, and the Creation of the Public Sphere

Historically oriented Kant commentators like John Zammito have long maintained that serious Kant scholarship must include attention to the socio-cultural influences on Kant and his contemporaries. While significant historiographical work has been done on Kant and the French Revolution, the impact of the American Revolution on German thinkers—and Benjamin Franklin’s role therein—has been comparatively understudied, with leading scholars suggesting that it had little to no impact on Kant. The following investigation will be therefore oriented by Zammito’s admonition, in this case by way of its focus on key actors in the print and press world of the Berlin Enlightenment. My hope is that by reconstructing the material history of Kant’s access to news regarding the American Revolution, we can use this evidentiary scaffolding as the basis for a more confident reassessment of Kant’s views and his own role in the structural transformation of the late eighteenth-century public sphere.