  Like his junior contemporary Goethe (1749–1832), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was blessed with a long life, at least as measured by the standards of the time, and had the good fortune of witnessing in its course events that radically altered the cultural and political face of Western  Europe.[1]  Jacobi saw the Enlightenment (die Aufklärung) take hold in the German lands, and reach maturity in a peculiarly German cultural form. He saw it as it nurtured ideas of subjectivity and nature, and an interest in history, that were the precursors of later Romanticism. He saw it also as it was violently, even brutally, disrupted in the last decade of the eighteenth century by the events surrounding the French Revolution; and, finally, as it gave way to the new order of the nineteenth century. Despite long bouts of illness, Jacobi was deeply involved in these world shaking events, and actively contributed to them. He may not have had the political and military engagement of a Goethe, who could combine vast literary activities with weighty state responsibilities, but he was certainly an influential cultural and political commentator. Jacobi contributed enormously, throughout his active life, to the shaping of educated German public opinion.