What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain
self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without
language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-
century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and
culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of
language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of
the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under
Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates
within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues
that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of
all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather
than a feature of the so-called "Counter-Enlightenment".
Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated
whether speechless human beings could have developed their
language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually
pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and
gestures to the artificial, articulate