Frank Furedi

The Invention of Individual Freedom

The ideas set out by Martin Luther sparked a reformation in the idea of authority itself.

The servant finds the dying Wether in a scene from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Jan Evert Grave, 1787. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

The Media’s First Moral Panic

Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s. It set a trend for manufactured outrage that is with us still.