The Politics of the Enlightenment: G.E. Lessing and the Question of Tolerance

Hannes Kerber is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Boston College, where his research and teaching focus on 18th-century political thought. Before joining Boston College, he served as Academic Program Director at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung and lectured in philosophy and religious studies at the University of Munich. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in 2022–2023 and a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia in 2024. His first book, Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums (Wallstein Verlag, 2nd ed., 2025), received the inaugural Chodowiecki Prize from the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in Halle-Wittenberg. He is co-editor of Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Euthyphro”: The 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings (2023), Die Praktiken der Provokation: Lessings Schreib- und Streitstrategien (2024), Lessing's Legacy (2025), and Leo Strauss: La dottrina essoterica (2025).