Ernst Troeltsch received an invitation to deliver lectures on his life’s work in London, Edinburgh, and Oxford in March 1923 as one of the first German scholars to visit Britain after the First World War; however he died shortly before he could make the trip. The texts of the five lectures, published posthumously, carry Troeltsch’s idea of a European cultural synthesis, following from his studies on Historicism and its problems (KGA 16). As part of the complete critical edition, this volume presents the original German lectures together with their English translations for the first time. The publication of the English book version in the year of Troeltsch’s death provided the motivation for the German edition, in which the texts are reproduced in a different order (and slightly abridged in one passage). The history of the German and English dual publication gives an insight into the difficulties of German-British cultural transfer in the period following the First World War.
