{"product_id":"scandal-in-knigsberg-christopher-clark-9798217060948","title":"A Scandal in Königsberg","description":"\u003cb\u003eNamed a Best Book of the Year by \u003ci\u003eThe Times (London)\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAs told by one of our greatest historians, the story of the scandal that took down two Lutheran preachers in the heart of nineteenth-century Prussia--a chamber piece of cultish esotericism, pseudoscience, and political resistance that conjures up Europe at the end of the age of reason and presages our current age of misinformation \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 1835, Johannes Ebel and Georg Heinrich Diestel were tried for having started a cult. Worse: It was a cult that encouraged scandalous sexual behavior in women, including the daughters of prestigious Prussian families--causing the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion. The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Königsberg for half a decade and ruin the lives and careers of its defendants, despite their eventual legal exoneration. The historical moment it encapsulates--a Europe reeling from the triumph and horror of a new industrial, imperial era, struggling to decide which principles will reign in the aftermath of Enlightenment reason--is a fable for our present time of political, social, and existential disquiet. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe great Cambridge historian Christopher Clark--known for \u003ci\u003eThe Sleepwalkers\u003c\/i\u003e, his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War--came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his mind ever since. In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Königsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant had recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity's understanding of itself--but where the distinction between reason and fanaticism was now up for grabs. \u003ci\u003eA Scandal in K\u003ci\u003eö\u003c\/i\u003enigsberg\u003c\/i\u003e is a European history in exquisite miniature--and a peerless lesson in the theological and philosophical debates that animated the Western world at one of its great moments of transformation. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eRich and provocative, \u003ci\u003eA Scandal in K\u003ci\u003eö\u003c\/i\u003enigsberg\u003c\/i\u003e articulates an unsettling antecedent for our most fiercely litigated contemporary questions of sexual identity, freedom of thought, and who gets to decide what constitutes the truth.","brand":"Penguin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49990883410113,"sku":"9798217060948","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0781\/5512\/0833\/files\/9798217060948.jpg?v=1771438054","url":"https:\/\/www.porchlightbooks.com\/products\/scandal-in-knigsberg-christopher-clark-9798217060948","provider":"Porchlight Book Company","version":"1.0","type":"link"}