Speaker

Andrea Wulf

Andrea Wulf

Andrea Wulf is a German-born, London-based narrative historian who writes intellectual history as biography — reconstructing where ideas came from by reconstructing the lives and circles that produced them. She is best known for The Invention of Nature, on Alexander von Humboldt, and Magnificent Rebels, on the Jena Romantics.

Wulf’s chief concern is the ‘long eighteenth century’, from the late 1600s to the early 1800s — the period she argues forged much of the modern self-understanding, from free will and the sovereign individual to the idea of nature as a single interconnected system. Her most recent books form a trilogy written in reverse chronological order: The Invention of Nature (Humboldt), Magnificent Rebels (the Jena set of the 1790s), and The Traveller (Georg Forster). She began with Humboldt and worked backwards through his mentors and milieu, since the earliest figure, Forster, only came into view through the later ones.

Core positions

Wulf resists the tidy separation of ideas from the people who held them: a poem or a philosophy, she argues, is shaped by the life its author lived and by the community — family, friends, nation — they belonged to. She reads the Jena circle’s Romanticism as a development of the Enlightenment rather than a rejection of it, and treats its two great bequests — the self-authoring individual (via Fichte) and nature as a living web (via Humboldt) — as foundations of modernity we now take for granted. A recurring theme is moral choice against the grain of one’s age: she holds up Forster’s belief in the equality of peoples, at a time when Kant and Hume did not share it, as evidence that open-mindedness ‘was a choice even back then’.

In the wiki