Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion

In 1782, Johann Christoph Adelung coined the namecultural historyfor a phenomenon recently put into practice by Johann Gottfried Herder. In theTreatise on the Origin of Language(1772) and again two years later inThis Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity, Herder embeds “culture” in a list of characteristics that define a particular people in a particular age and that vary over time: “arts, science, culture and language” (italics in the original).¹ Culture as a concept, in other words, was largely concomitant with its historicization. It would be anachronistic, however, either to think of