Rudolf Vierhaus's work is much more than a political history of Germany from the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Seven Years' War. His study reconstructs the historical elements that marked this age. He examines economic developments, the social system, and cultural life, even as he continues to pay close attention to Germany's political organizations, its wars, and political conflicts. German history is set both within the diverse pattern of its regional life and the larger European context, in order to restore a full analytical complexity to the age of absolutism.

Justus Moser was a pivotal figure in the age of the German Enlightenment. Administrator, journalist, historian, man of letters, Moser is renowned as one of Germany's finest prose stylists and as one of its most articulate political writers. Known through his political writings for his commitment to conservative reform, he is often called the Edmund Burke of Germany and the father of German conservatism. He is also celebrated for his pioneering Osnabruck History, the first modern social and economic history and a forerunner to Ranke, Marx, and the German historical revolution of the nineteenth...