Kritische Gesamtausgabe

This volume presents 46 reviews and four wide-ranging literature surveys from 1894 to 1900. These early writings already demonstrate the broad sweep of the theologian Troeltsch's critical horizon. Apart from reviewing new publications on dogma, contemporary ethical models and writings in the philosophy of religion, he also discussed studies on the history of religion, culture and ideas since the 17th century, together with texts on the philosophy of history. These writings, too, reflect his underlying methodological stance that the diagnosis of the present always aims to (re)form the present.

Volume 3 presents all the articles that Troeltsch wrote for lexicons. For some articles, marginal notes and corrections from Troeltsch’s hard copies are included, while for others, early prepublication drafts have been critically annotated. The nine articles in English-language lexicons can be understood with the help of a dedicated subject index. Editorial reports and notes provide information on the genesis of the articles.

Between 1901 and 1914, Ernst Troeltsch wrote 150 reviews of new publications in theology, philosophy, the social sciences, and cultural history. Many of these critiques were published in obscure places, and their existence was hitherto unknown. Not only do they offer fasinating insights into Troeltsch’s train of thought, they also open up new perspectives on the debates that Heidelberg intellectual groups engaged in about the cultural meaning of religion and Christianity.

Troeltsch reviewed texts by James, Simmel, and Rickert, wrote a major obituary note about his friend Georg Jellinek, avidly participated in the methodological debates of German historians, and developed in his reviews the integrative concept of theology as the cultural science of Christianity.

The critical edition of the complete works of the theologian and philosopher of religion Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) is inaugurated by this edition of a classic text. In the work "Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte" the theological and philosophical debate about the absolute validity of Christianity is joined with the question of value judgments in modernity, a question that has greatly agitated the cultural sciences since the beginning of the twentieth century. The work on absoluteness, the first and second editions of which are published here for the first time together with handwritten additions by Ernst Troeltsch, gives significant testimony to a constructive historicism that is aimed at establishing universally valid norms in the cultural comparison of religions, while acknowledging the individual forms of historical life. At the end of the twentieth century, the posing of the problem as developed by Troeltsch is of new global relevance in the debates of theology, the study of religion, history, and sociology.

This volume of the critical complete edition of Ernst Troelsch’s works provides an edition of texts that the philosopher of culture and Protestant theologian published in the years 1903–1912. The texts included represent the enormous spectrum of Troeltsch’s theological and cultural philosophical œuvre at the beginning of the 20th century. In an intensive examination of traditional and contemporary philosophy of religion, religious studies and ethics, Troeltsch searches for a new understanding of what religion really is.

From 1906 onwards the Teubner Verlag in Leipzig published the first volumes of an ambitious encyclopedia "Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ihre Entwicklung und ihre Ziele" under the general editorship of the cultural philosopher Paul Hinneberg. The work presents a systematic account of contemporary culture. Leading scholars of the age were recruited to work on the project.

Ernst Troeltsch was charged with the section on Protestant Christianity and the Modern Age; the first edition of this appeared in 1906, with an extended second edition in 1909, which was republished unrevised in 1922.

In the present volume, Troeltsch's study is published as a separate book for the first time. In this study, Troeltsch reconstructs the historical development of Protestantism from the Reformation to the present. He distinguishes an old Protestant epoch, which is more medieval in its orientation, and a new Protestantism, which he sees as belonging more to the enlightened modern age. Troeltsch elucidates the difference between the two epochs by emphasising in particular the changes in Protestant cultural relations, and thus in Protestantism's cultural significance.

A critical edition of the text of the famous lecture on the significance of Protestantism for the genesis of the modern world (1906/1911), together with further texts on the cultural significance of Lutheranism and Calvinism from the same period.

Ernst Troeltsch characterized the Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and Groups as his “favorite book.” Soon after the publication of the first volume of his Collected Works, he began to annotate his personal copy with corrections, additions, and entirely new passages. These extensive supplements, written with a second edition in mind, are now made accessible in a three-volume critical edition with incisive commentary.

This volume collects, for the first time, all of the reviews and critiques published between 1915 and 1923 by the renowned cultural philosopher and Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch. The book offers a fascinating glimpse into the "workshop" of the leading Protestant intellectual of classic modernity. His preoccupation with works of social ethics, philosophy of religion and, above all, works of philosophy of culture and history reflects the striving of the Berlin cultural philosopher for the ideal of historical cultural studies.

In a series of 56 “letters” written between February 1919 and November 1922, Ernst Troeltsch commented extensively on the events of the day. He critically observed revolution, civil war, and the new order in Germany emerging from the terms of world politics and the Versailles peace treaty. Troeltsch was committed to offering the middle class a worldly perspective that would breathe life into the democracy of the Weimar Republic.

Politically and intellectually, Ernst Troeltsch had a significant role to play in the early years of the Weimar Republic. This volume presents 35 texts which document both Troeltsch's concern as a publicist with the new political, ecclesiastical and cultural order and his political role as a holder of parliamentary office for the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei). In their breadth and comprehensiveness, the texts in this volume of the complete critical edition of Troeltsch's works demonstrate for the first time how Troeltsch linked politics and philosophy to ground the systemic political change in Germany within the context of European cultural history. Here, Troeltsch's intellectual signposts are open to a new reading in the extreme controversies about the legitimacy of a democratic political order in German society.

Troeltsch’s great last book, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Historicism and Its Problems), was written in a complicated process from 1915 to 1922 and is considered the key text in the historical and philosophical discourse of the 1920s. Making use of well over a thousand works relating to that discussion, Berlin's celebrated cultural philosopher examined the traumatic experience of World War I. He sought to advance his concept of a “European cultural synthesis” as a foundation for the ethical potential of European integration and German reconciliation with western democracy.
In addition to documenting the developmental stages of the text, this first critical edition also details the rich background of thought that Troeltsch drew on.

Ernst Troeltsch received an invitation to deliver lectures on his life’s work in London, Edinburgh, and Oxford in March 1923 as one of the first German scholars to visit Britain after the First World War; however he died shortly before he could make the trip. The texts of the five lectures, published posthumously, carry Troeltsch’s idea of a European cultural synthesis, following from his studies on Historicism and its problems (KGA 16). As part of the complete critical edition, this volume presents the original German lectures together with their English translations for the first time. The publication of the English book version in the year of Troeltsch’s death provided the motivation for the German edition, in which the texts are reproduced in a different order (and slightly abridged in one passage). The history of the German and English dual publication gives an insight into the difficulties of German-British cultural transfer in the period following the First World War.

The first volume of letters in the Troeltsch Complete Critical Edition includes the letters written by the young Ernst Troeltsch between 1884 and 1894, along with several letters addressed to him. These 102 letters, most of them previously unknown, provide fascinating insights into the process of Troeltsch's theological education and his spiritual turmoil as he searched for a truly independent intellectual position amidst the competing worldviews swirling around him in the German Empire. These letters reveal the great importance of the debates that took place in the Uttenruthia Student Association and Troeltsch’s unpleasant experiences during his military service.

Almost 300 letters, postcards, and telegrams from and to Troeltsch reveal the extraordinary productivity of the young Heidelberg Professor of Systematic Theology along with his great determination to develop his own theory of the “modern world.” In addition, the letters provide fascinating glimpses into Heidelberg's Protestant and reformed Jewish academic milieu around 1900.

This third volume of letters in the Troeltsch CCE includes the renowned Heidelberg professor’s correspondence from 1905 to 1915. The letters focus on Troeltsch’s work on the Social Doctrine of Christian Churches and Groups (1912), the broadly-based network of liberal intellectuals before the First World War, the beginnings of war propaganda, and Troeltsch’s move to a professorship specifically established for him at the University of Berlin.

This volume includes letters from and to Ernst Troeltsch that were part of his correspondence from the time he began teaching philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin. There are 179 letters and cards sent by him and 45 sent to him that shed new light on his engagement with academic policy and his often shifting assessments of the military situation, the fight for internal political reform, and his philosophical work.

Volume 22 is the fifth and final volume of letters from and to Ernst Troeltsch in the Critical Complete Edition. It documents the academic’s and intellectual’s extensive correspondence in the immediate post-war years until his early death in February 1923.

In 1909, Troletsch was elected to represent his university in the first Chamber of the Ständeversammlung of the Grand Duchy of Baden as successor to the philosopher Windelband. He now definitively belonged to the functionary elite of the empire’s most liberal federal state. In Parliament, Troeltsch became aware of class society, shaped by the marginalization of social democracy and aggressive cultural struggles between Protestants and Catholics.

This volume presents unpublished texts by the young Troeltsch – from birthday greetings the ten-year old wrote for his father to the prize-wining text "Hermann Lotze’s Theory of the Conscience," and the papers for his first state theological exams and the selection exam for the Bavarian church. An introduction describes his family socialization, his school days at Augsburg’s St. Anna Gymnasium, and the contexts in which he wrote his exam papers.

Volume 26 presents three versions of the "Doctrine of Faith" lectures that Troeltsch held every two years as the Heidelberg Ordinarius for systematic theology. Alongside the lecture of 1911 (edited by Gertrud von le Fort in 1925), the volume also includes dictation notes for a lecture held in winter semester 1908/09 (transmitted in a transcript by Karl Barth). A lecture transcript from winter 1906/07 and summer 1908 is by an unknown student.