What Is Universal History?

"The only true immortality is the one in which the deed endures, even after the name is forgotten." First delivered as his inaugural lecture in Jena and published just months after the outbreak of the French Revolution, Friedrich Schiller's What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History? is one of the boldest and most visionary calls to intellectual action in European thought. Appearing in November 1789, it responds to a moment of global upheaval with a philosophical manifesto for freedom, Bildung, and the moral progress of humanity. With soaring prose and prophetic clarity, Schiller draws a sharp line between the "bread-scholar" who studies only for utility, and the "philosophical mind" that seeks unity, inner development, and universal truth. In an age increasingly defined by fragmentation and ideology, Schiller's words strike with renewed urgency, offering a framework for self-education, civic responsibility, and global humanism. This is the first modern English edition of Schiller's world-historical vision—meticulously translated and annotated by Jean Delaube, and embedded in the revolutionary moment of 1789. It opens a window onto the intellectual atmosphere of late Enlightenment Germany, where philosophy, politics, and history were engaged in a dramatic rethinking of the human condition. A lost classic of world philosophy—restored for the twenty-first century.