[An encyclopedia for the empire]

In the preface to the universal encyclopedia Die Kultur der Gegenwart (The Culture of the Present), the editor-in-chief Paul Hinneberg places his project--not openly but nevertheless unequivocally--in the tradition of the French Encyclopédie that Diderot and d'Alembert had organized from 1751 until 1765. The attempt to accomplish anew such a large-scale project and, in this way, to win the German Empire the kind of intellectual leadership which the Encyclopédie, in historical retrospect, had achieved for the epoch of Enlightenment, required to convince the leading scholars, scientists, and technicians of the nation to participate in the endeavor and to assemble their contributions under a common systematic agenda through which this universal encyclopedia would distinguish itself from all dictionaries and disciplinary encyclopedias. While the Encyclopédie followed to a large extent an empiricist philosophy, Hinneberg trusted in the integrative function of the concept of culture and the ability of his contributors to elucidate the history of their respective disciplines and to connect them with neighboring fields of culture. The present contributions argues that although, from a philosophical point of view, the historicist tack taken by Hinneberg makes the concept of culture quite blurry, it nevertheless provides enough cohesive structure such that the work, even though unfinished as a consequence of war and inflation, represents a faithful picture of its epoch that Hinneberg understands as an epoch of transition.