Leibniz was probably the last universal scholar in modern times who made original and
innovative achievements in all the essential fields of knowledge of his time: as a
reform-oriented lawyer a multilateral thinking diplomat as a mathematician of infinitesimal
calculus as the inventor of a calculating machine and in the mining of horizontal wind power
as an organizer of science and as one of the first historians who strived for source-critical
methodical objectivity. However this baroque diversity can only be understood from the center
of a monadological philosophy which wants to establish the unity of scientific worldview and
metaphysical concept of the world. It is distorted in the classical reception because only
Leibniz the Theodicy was known. The topicality of Leibniz today consists in re-exposing the
original basic idea of unity in diversity and asking how it can be made fruitful for
philosophical and political thought in the 21st century.This book is a translation of the
original German 1st edition Leibniz und die Folgen by Jörg Zimmer published by J.B. Metzler
imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH part of Springer Nature in 2018. The translation was done with
the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A
subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content so that the book will read
stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously
to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies
to support the authors.
