The Persona of the Wolffian Philosopher in Early Eighteenth-Century Germany

This article contributes to the scholarly discussion of identity formation and persona by focusing on the expulsion of the German philosopher Christian Wolff from Prussia in 1723, and on the wave of printed propaganda that surrounded the event. In these writings the Wolffian philosopher was depicted as a diligent practitioner in the service of the Prussian state and as a sage in the Socratic tradition. In this interpretation the tension between socio-political reality and claims on sagehood is used to complicate the scholarly analysis of what it meant to be and live as a philosopher in the early modern period.