H-German Forum on "New Perspectives on Eighteenth- Century History"

H-German H-German Forum on "New Perspectives on Eighteenth- Century History"

Page published by Chris Fojtik on Wednesday, February 15, 2017

[Editor's Note: September 20, 2010 marks the start of a new forum here on H-German with the publication of the introductory essay as well as the first of five solicited contributions. An additional essay will follow each day this week. We invite members to contribute to the discussion once all of the initial contributions have been posted. The editors would like to reiterate our thanks to all the contributors, especially the chief organizer, Mary Lindeman. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge their great patience and forebearance in the lengthy delay -- the fault of the editors, not the contributors -- in awaiting final publication of this project.]

Introduction - H-German Forum on "New Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century History"

This Forum showcases new approaches to, and introduces new historical research on, the German eighteenth century. But does "eighteenth-century Germany" as a field or an analytic concept even exist? Helmut Puff, in a feisty opening to his contribution on sexuality, casts doubts on the analytical or even heuristic validity of such. Certainly, no well-developed sense of /dix-huitièmisme/ exists among central European historians as a scholarly identity in the same way that historians of France or English literary scholars possess. The feeble representation of German historians in the membership and at the meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) testifies to how seldom even those working within the "long" eighteenth century (are there no short centuries?), say, from 1650-1815, have identified themselves principally as "scholars of the eighteenth century." For many years it was hard for those who did research within those chronological boundaries to find an intellectual home, let alone a job. When I entered the job market in 1980, few scholars in the United States worked on or wrote about the German eighteenth century with the possible exception of those who focused on Friedrich II and "the rise of Prussia." (German scholars had admittedly always given more attention to the period.) Even the /Aufklärung/ was not particularly well served. There were a good handful of major scholars in the field, of course, including Mack Walker, James Allen Vann, and, later, Anthony LaVopa (a student of Walker's), but the field was not, to say the least, heavily populated in comparison with the many scholars working on the twentieth century or the Reformation. I remember distinctly, and I am sure that Jamie Melton (here represented) will agree, that presenting one's credentials with a dissertation focusing mainly on the eighteenth century was a somewhat discouraging task. "But you can also teach the Third Reich, right?" Or, on the other side, "You'll do a course on the Reformation and Luther, won't you?" For early modern jobs, departments wanted principally (albeit not exclusively) Reformation scholars or the now-extinct animal, a "Ren/Ref" historian. Still, there were scholarly advantages to be reaped here as well: the field was pretty much "open." Then there was the additional problem of where did one present papers or go to network. At the time Sixteenth-Century Studies was more "sixteenth" than it has since become and still very much linked to Reformation history. The German Studies Association annual meeting might find room for an eighteenth-century panel (but there were few of those) and a stray eighteenth-century panelist might have found a home with other orphans (such as the truly disinherited scholars of the early nineteenth century) in a session titled "Varia."

Fortunately, this situation has changed almost all out of recognition. While historians of the German eighteenth century still avoid ASECS, over the past few years the number of studies on the eighteenth century, or those that see the eighteenth century as crucial to telling the larger story of German history (such as Christopher Clark) is great and growing. The German Studies Association now presents a full and intellectually stimulating set of early modern panels (which are, in addition, often cross- or inter-disciplinary) in which the eighteenth century is more than well represented. Moreover, the number of PhDs in eighteenth-century history (or for whom the eighteenth century plays an important part) has grown significantly. Numerous "Achtenzehnjahrhunderter" now hold jobs and tenured positions at many colleges and universities and we seem, at last, to "get some respect." Certainly, therefore, the moment seems appropriate to assess the work being done in the eighteenth century and, in particular, on the various "new perspectives" that have been gained and promoted over the last twenty years or so.

The following five contributions showcase relatively new methods and topics (comparative history, anthropological perspectives, queer studies and the like) as well as revisions in the writing of more "traditional" histories, such as the political history of Prussia. The topics treated here--on Germany and the Atlantic world, gender and sexualities, Prussia, religion, and race and colonialism--hardly reflect the true richness of work now being done and many important themes and historical interventions are not represented. Desiderata were sometimes left unfulfilled because it was not possible--at the time--to obtain a commitment from an appropriate scholar. There is also nothing here specifically on the Holy Roman Empire because a new volume of essays,The Holy Roman Empire, Reassessed (edited by Jason P. Coy, Benjamin Marschke, and David Sabean) is about to appear (Berghahn, 2010). Nor are there any contributions specifically on regional history (with the exception of "the exception": Prussia); /Landesgeschichte/; the "new" diplomatic history; court culture; the interaction between art, music, and literature with history; urban history; and a slew of other subjects. Obviously, these topics are all very important and one can hope that they may become part of another Forum in the future.

As the editor, or rather the compiler, of this Forum, I have not sought to impose any particular structure on the individual contributors, but rather left them alone to follow their own instincts and give, quite literally, their own "perspectives." The result has been, happily, a good deal of similarity in some ways, but with enough difference to reflect intellectual diversity. Each contribution is in part a survey of new work, in part authorial impression, and in part a "wish list" of things that still need to be accomplished. Thus, they combine, I believe, some of the virtues of a historiographic essay with less rigidly structured personal views. All the contributors integrate their own research but, rather then taking this opportunity to mount a bully-pulpit, they use it to show how scholars are currently thinking about particular subjects and approaches. The contributions therefore neatly fulfill one of my hopes for the Forum as a whole: to bring together personal reflections from people actually working in these fields, in which they grapple with the real historiographical, theoretical, and methodological problems they and others face. Some overlap exists, but hardly too much. Sexuality and religion play an important role, as does a sense of broader European or even transnational/global histories in questioning where the German experience fits in, a reevaluation of the uses of, and problems presented by more traditional models and how these might be fruitfully revisited as well as revised. The Enlightenment or Aufklärung still looms large, if in a rather different guise than that of intellectual history per se.

What may still be missing here is more sense of what, if anything, makes the eighteenth century unique and a valid period or historical concept worth preserving. Moreover, perhaps we all need to pay more attention to breaks, shifts, and ruptures within the eighteenth century; Puff, for instance, notices a "double fracture." Are there developments that split the eighteenth century, that perhaps make its first half better allocated to the "long" seventeenth century and its second half to a "long" nineteenth century? Or are there two eighteenth centuries, split somewhere, not necessarily in the middle? Or do, as I suspect is true, different subjects require different eighteenth-century periodizations? Finally, and despite the care with which both Jamie Melton and Vera Lind take to carry us out of German-speaking lands and even off the European continent, we still lack much work on how German experiences and events fit into broader European and world perspectives.

Mary Lindeman, Forum Organizer

September 22, 2010 - New Perspectives on the History of Eighteenth-Century Prussia

This initial essay points to several new perspectives and indicates some gaps in the history and historiography of eighteenth-century Prussia. Of course this contribution is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the history of eighteenth-century Prussia, but merely a collection of my thoughts on the state of the field. As is often pointed out, no other state influenced the history of Germany as much as did Prussia. Moreover, the eighteenth-century is central to Prussian history and historiography, because this was the period when "Prussian-ness" developed. Whether for better or for worse, eighteenth-century Prussia shaped subsequent German history (and even current German society).[1]

New Perspectives on Old Problems It should come as no surprise that some of the "new perspectives" at hand look at issues that are not really new at all: the "janus face" of Prussia; Frederick II; and the Prussian state and bureaucracy. These issues in the history of eighteenth-century Prussia have been the subject of analysis and debate since the beginnings of the modern discipline of history in the nineteenth century and continue to excite interest. First, discussions of the "janus face" of Prussia never go out of style. Paradigmatically, the generally negative aspects of eighteenth-century "Prussian-ness" are things like militarism, autocracy, blind obedience, ready submission, etc. These are balanced (or not, goes the debate) by the Prussian "virtues" (Tugenden) of cultural production and appreciation, scholarly achievement, efficiency, incorruptibility, social stability, etc.

Over the last century analyses have wavered on whether the positives associated with Prussia and Germany's "special path" (Sonderweg) have outweighed the negatives, or vice versa. Unfortunately, most "new perspectives" on eighteenth-century Prussia have usually been swayed far more by current events and the political alignments of the historians involved than by new historical research in the field. Generally, before World War I the military and economic successes of Prussia and the Kaisserreich made it clear that Prussia's virtues vastly outweighed any excesses. The same could still be argued after Germany's defeat in World War I, but it was virtually impossible to do so in the aftermath of World War II. On the contrary, the Allies' oft-cited dissolution and condemnation of Prussia ("which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany") neatly

In the midst of all of this debate over Prussia's merits and demerits, what has been largely lacking has been much questioning (let alone primary research) of how accurately these supposed "Prussian" characteristics describe eighteenth-century Prussia. On the contrary, debate and polemic have inevitably led historians to over-simplification and hyperbole, and discouraged nuanced and complicated portrayals and understandings. Happily, most recently this trend has been reversed, and there is more and more primary research on eighteenth-century Prussia (see below). Epitomizing this trend is the new handbook on the history of Prussia, Christopher Clark'sIron Kingdom.[2] The book deals with eighteenth-century Prussia comprehensively (it is proportioned evenly across its timeframe, 1600-1947, so the turn of the nineteenth century is well past the halfway mark). Clark not only avoids polemics and neither condemns nor exonerates "Prussian-ness," but also draws upon the scholarship of the last decades to present a state-of-the-art overview of the history of eighteenth-century Prussia.

Interpretations of Frederick II and his reign have similarly been a long recurring theme in the history of eighteenth-century Prussia. More than any other figure, Frederick "the Great" epitomizes eighteenth-century "Prussian-ness," and judgments of both have followed the much the same pattern over the last century or more. Most recently Frederick has been the subject of two quite different books: Johannes Kunisch's comprehensive new biography of Frederick and Peter-Michael Hahn's historiographic work on subsequent eras' (mis-) understandings and (false) memories of Frederick II and his reign.[3] Clearly the point here is that we need not argue over whether Frederick "the Great" should be known as "the Not So Great," but rather that we might better refer to Frederick II as "the Complicated," or "the Unique."[4] What is perhaps still lacking here is a study of Frederick II's role as the original master narrator of Prussian history (see below). Descriptions and re-evaluations of the Prussian state and bureaucracy also date back to the nineteenth century. Following the general trend in European history, Prussian "absolutism" has been shown to be hardly absolute at all. Even in the absence of any legal or constitutional limits, the ability of any eighteenth-century Prussian ruler to impose his will was quite limited by social and cultural norms, poor communications, and recalcitrant passive resistance. Relatively new are the serious revisions of the history of the eighteenth-century Prussian "bureaucracy." Rudolf Vierhaus was the first the point out that there was no "civil service" or "bureaucracy" in any sense of the word in eighteenth-century Prussia; Bürokratie and Beamten are misnomers imposed on the eighteenth century by late nineteenth-century historians.[5] Since then the work of Wolfgang Neugebauer has made it clear that the legendary eighteenth-century Prussian "bureaucracy" was more of a paperwork cottage industry than anything recognizable as a modern articulated bureaucracy.[6]

Despite these significant revisions, the Prussian "state" still dominates the history of eighteenth-

The periodization of eighteenth-century Prussian history remains much the same as ever, and the breaking points are almost invariably the successions of 1713, 1740, and 1786. Even the most recent social and cultural histories hold to this framework. Of course, the wildly differing personalities and policies of the eighteenth-century rulers of Prussia make these demarcations seem obvious, but this organization is nonetheless problematic. First, it reflects an old-fashioned, top-down, state- centered, great-man-focused way to write history. Furthermore, it leads to synchronic and one- dimensional depictions of rulers and their reigns. This not only under emphasizes the consistency of circumstances and phenomena and the continuity of relationships and developments that bridged the reigns of Prussia's eighteenth-century rulers, but also glosses over how dynamic rulers were and how much their personalities and policies changed during their reigns.

New Perspectives on New Problems Since World War II, several new problems in the history of eighteenth-century Prussia were broached in response to changes in the broader discipline and attempts to explain the origins of twentieth- century German history: for example, the social history of Prussia, the history of the Enlightenment, and the history of Pietism. The social history of eighteenth-century Prussia sought out the social origins and impacts of "Prussian-ness." Hans Rosenberg, in particular, applied (a then-ubiquitous) Marxist analysis to explain social relations and absolutism. Briefly: the Hohenzollern monarchy aided the Junker nobility in suppressing the Burger middle class and re-enserfing the peasants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in return the nobility cast their lot with the monarchy, both by surrendering their traditional rights and by joining the monarchy as state officials and military officers.[8] This master narrative of social development (or lack thereof) in early modern Prussia became doctrine, to the extent that it formed the basis of many comparative works. Therefore, for decades the role of the social historian of Prussia was to explain Prussia's exceptionalism, not to investigate whether this exceptional master narrative was an accurate picture of eighteenth-century Prussia. Most recently the works of William W. Hagen have fundamentally re-thought the social history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Prussia. He has overturned Rosenberg's thesis regarding the compromise of the monarchy and nobility at the expense of the commoners, and he instead describes a process whereby the nobility were socially and economically marginalized, with the acquiescence and even in keeping with the intentions of the monarchy.[9] Moreover, Hagen has also exploded the Prussian legends of oppressive Junkers and submissive serfs. The Prussians whom Hagen describes in his micro-historical village-scale study, Ordinary Prussians, were just that: ordinary, in that there was little exceptional in comparison to Western Europe.[10] Hagen's work has established a new paradigm for understanding the social history of eighteenth-century Prussia, but there is undoubtedly a great deal work to be done in this area.

The Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment, has also recently been subject to closer study and serious revision. "Enlightened absolutism" may not quite be synonymous with "Enlightenment in Prussia," but it is virtually impossible to mention either enlightened absolutism or its poster child, Frederick II, without discussing the other. Like "Prussian-ness" and Frederick II, "enlightened absolutism" (aufgeklärter Absolutismus) in eighteenth-century Prussia has been compared to the "normative" western European phenomenon (the Enlightenment in France and Britain), found wanting, and indirectly blamed for the subsequent path of Prussian and German history. Recent work on the European Enlightenment and the Prussian Auklärung by Jonathan Sheehan, James Van Horn Melton, and Michael J. Sauter offer more nuanced understandings.[11] If, as they suggest, we understand the Enlightenment and the Aufklärung not as an ideology (democracy, secularism, egalitarianism, etc.) but rather as a set of discursive and communicative principles (rationality, transparency, sociability, etc.) then the "janus face" of the Aufklärung in Prussia is much more easily reconciled with the (also quite ambivalent) Enlightenment elsewhere in Europe.

Pietism was intertwined with the development of "Prussian-ness" in the early eighteenth century just as enlightened absolutism was in the late eighteenth century, so it is virtually inconceivable to discuss either early eighteenth-century Prussia or Halle Pietism without referencing and considering the other. However, Pietism has received far less critical attention in the last several decades than has absolutism or the enlightenment. The foundational works of Carl Hinrichs and Klaus Deppermann, which appeared in the early 1960s, still dominate the history of Pietism in Prussia.[12] Hinrichs and Deppermann's purpose was largely to "rehabilitate" Pietism by showing that it was activist and modernizing in political and economic terms and a major positive influence on the rise of Prussia. An alliance of Pietism and the "bourgeois- puritanical" Frederick William I instilled the legendary "Prussian virtues" like discipline, obedience, work ethic, etc., in the population of the Hohenzollern lands. Hinrichs and Deppermann were undeniably successful, and their works established a new master narrative regarding religion and the state in eighteenth-century Prussia. Deppermann and Hinrichs' studies remain today the authoritative works on Pietism and "Prussian-ness," and they are cited by virtually every scholar addressing the relationship between Halle Pietism and the Prussian state.

However, this dominance is a problem. Although eighteenth-century Prussian absolutism and the Enlightenment have been thoroughly questioned, vociferously debated, and ultimately fundamentally reassessed in the last several decades, there has been no similar questioning of Pietism. Moreover, while the relationship of religion to society and politics and culture has been deeply probed in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, relatively little such work has been done on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Pietism.[13] So, after a half century there has been virtually no revision of thePreußentum und Pietismus thesis.[14] It is certainly not true, as one expert claims: "There can be little hope for new discoveries in the materials surrounding the problem."[15] On the contrary, Hinrichs and Deppermann's works are flawed and incomplete, and the archival sources for studying Pietism (and thereby, Prussia) are rich and easily accessible (at least since the 1990s).

Perspectives and Paths Not Yet Taken So, where might we go from here? Where are the "blank spots?" Let me mention one sorely neglected

Citation: Chris Fojtik. H-German Forum on "New Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century History". H-German. 02-17-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/pages/167285/h-german-forum-new-perspectives-eighteenth-century-history Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 6 H-German area, before turning to the general methodological and theoretical malaise in the history of eighteenth-century Prussia. First, given the significance of Prussia'sgroßter " innerer König," Frederick William I and his reign have not been studied enough (and are not well enough understood). Frederick William remains an "enigma," seemingly "self-contradictory," or even simply "bizarre." It is no wonder historians are at loss to explain "the Soldier King," because no modern scholarly biography exists. The most popular and oft-referenced work on Frederick William is Jochen Klepper's Der Vater: a historical novel![16] The most authoritative scholarly biography of Frederick William is still the highly problematic and unfinished work from Carl Hinrichs. Hinrichs had joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and the first (and only) volume of the biography, published in 1941, bears the marks of the atmosphere in which Hinrichs wrote it.[17] The work is also incomplete, because Hinrichs' first volume only addresses Frederick William's youth, and leaves off with his ascension to the throne (the second volume was never completed).[18] Finally, whereas the history of Prussia was once at the cutting edge methodologically/theoretically--indeed, one could say that the history of Prussia established the modern discipline of history in the nineteenth century--this is hardly true any more. Quite the opposite: one could say that the history of eighteenth-century Prussia has followed its own Sonderweg in being methodologically and theoretically underdeveloped in comparison with the history of its neighbors. For example, the history of Prussia seems to have dodged post-modernism almost entirely. There has been relatively little questioning or investigation (much less radical re-interpretation) of the master narrative of eighteenth-century Prussian history. This is even more problematic because of the Hohenzollerns' success in writing their own history. They commissioned Samuel von Pufendorf, and, as mentioned above, Frederick II's own works are still the starting point for any history of early modern Prussia, despite their obvious (and oft-mentioned) problematic nature. While a great deal of work has recently been done on the writing of histories and chronicles in early modern Europe,[19] there has been little exploration or analysis of the paradigmatic histories of early modern Prussia which were written in the eighteenth-century.[20] Eighteenth-century Prussia has also largely been passed over by gender analysis. Of course there are studies of eighteenth-century German masculinity and femininity that overlap the boundaries of the Hohenzollern lands, but we should recognize that there were a number of uniquely Prussian gender issues in the eighteenth-century. Most obviously, for all of their dissimilarities, Frederick William I and Frederick II both established their most exclusive "courts" as strictly masculine space by prohibiting women. Frederick William's post-baroque notions of masculinity (and his disdain for his more conventional peers as "womanly") were rather novel (and perhaps exemplary) at the time. His new masculinity was generally militaristic, scatalogical, ascetic, brutal, Russophilic, workaholic, frugal, sincere, and sexually conservative, whereas all that was courtly, cultured, opulent, decadent, ceremonious, Francophilic, intellectual, mendacious, or promiscuous was feminine. The sexual proclivities of Frederick II are now well known, but little has been done to explore the contemporary views of the same. After all, Frederick ruled at the same time as Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great, whose sexual proclivities (real or imagined) and contemporary views of the same have been the subject of much investigation and analysis. A gendered examination of the eighteenth-century Hohenzollerns would be significant not only for the history of Prussia, but also for all of Europe. Despite regular accusations that German history is too Prusso-centric, one obvious problem is the relative paucity of faculty and students researching Prussian history. One can only speculate about how different the history of eighteenth-century Prussia would be if it were still

This situation may simply be a generational issue. Researchers now at the pinnacles of their careers came of age as scholars in the USA or BRD in the 1970s and 1980s, and working on Prussia then was not only politically and geographically difficult due to the location of the archives, but also regarded as passé. Based on anecdotal evidence, the current generation of historians, now coming of age as scholars, has turned its attention back to eighteenth-century Prussia and the newly accessible archives. We can hope for new perspectives.

Benjamin Marschke, Humboldt State

Notes [1]. Carl Hinrichs, Preussen als historisches Problem, Gesammelte Abhandlungen ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1964). [2]. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006). [3]. Johannes Kunisch, Friedrich der Große: Der König und seine Zeit (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2004); and Peter-Michael Hahn, Friedrich der Große und der deutsche Nation: Geschichte als politische Argument (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007). [4]. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 183. [5]. Rudolf Vierhaus. "The Prussian Bureaucracy Reconsidered," trans. Angela Davies, in John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth, eds., Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (London: The German Historical Institute, 1999), 149-165. [6]. Wolfgang Neugebauer, "Potsdam--Berlin: Zur Behördentopographie des preußischen Absolutismus," in Bernhard R. Kroener, ed.,Potsdam: Staat, Armee, Residenz in der preußisch-deutschen Militärgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen-Verlag, 1993), 273-296; and Neugebauer, "Das preußische Kabinett in Postdam [sic]," Jahrbuch für brandenburgische Landesgeschichte 44 (1993): 69-115. [7]. Benjamin Marschke, Absolutely Pietist: Patronage, Factionalism, and State-Building in the Early Eighteenth-Century Prussian Army Chaplaincy (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005), 16-18. [8]. Hans Rosenberg,Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). [9]. William W. Hagen, "Descent of the Sonderweg: Hans Rosenberg's History of Old-Regime Prussia," Central European History 24, no. 1 (1991): 24-50; and Hagen "The Junkers' Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1763-1811," in R. J. Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 71-101; and "Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg: The Thirty Years' War, The Destabilization of Serfdom, and the Rise of Absolutism," American Historical Review 94, no. 2 (1989): 302-335.

[10]. Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). [11]. Jonathan Sheehan, "Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay," American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003): 1061-1080; and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Michael Sauter, "Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,"The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 685-709. [12]. Klaus Deppermann, Der hallesche Pietismus und der preußische Staat unter Friedrich III(I.) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961). Hinrichs' articles (from before his death in 1962) are collected in Hinrichs, Preußentum und Pietismus: Der Pietismus in Brandenburg--Preußen als religiös--soziale Reformbewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971). [13]. Martin Gierl, "Im Netz der Theologen--Die Wiedergeburt der Geschichte Findet Nicht Statt: Von Pietismusforschung, protestantischer Identität und historischer Ethik 2003/2004,"Zeitschrift für Historsche Forschung 32, no. 3 (2005), 463-487. [14]. Subsequent works by Mary Fulbrook and Richard L. Gawthrop have largely reiterated and reinforced Hinrichs and Deppermann's conclusions. Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemburg, and Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Richard L. Gawthrop,Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). [15]. Mack Walker, review of Richard L. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia, in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26, no. 2 (1995): 308. [16]. Jochen Klepper, Der Vater: Der Roman des Soldatenkönigs (Stuttgart: Dt. Verl. Anst., 1937). [17]. Biographical accounts of Hinrichs which claim that he never joined the National Socialist Party are mistaken. Hinrichs joined the party as member 2637372 on May 2, 1933. See the documents regarding Hinrichs at the Berlin Document Center. [18]. Hinrichs, Friedrich Wilhelm I.,König in Preußen: Eine Biographie, Jugend und Auffstieg (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941). Hinrichs published several other articles on Frederick William: Hinrichs, "Friedrich Wilhelm I., König in Preußen," Welt als Geschichte 4 (1938): 1-31; reprinted in Hinrichs, Preussen als historisches Problem, 40-72; Hinrichs, "Das Ahnenerbe Friedrich Wilhelms I. Ein historisch-erbbiologischer Versuch," FBPG 50 (1938); reprinted in Hinrichs, Preussen als historisches Problem, 73-90; and Hinrichs "Der Regierungsantritt Friedrich Wilhelms I.," Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 5 (1956), 183-225; reprinted in Hinrichs, Preussen als historisches Problem, 91-137. [19]. For example: Thomas Fuchs,Geschichtsbewußtsein und Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung: Städtechroniken, Kirchenbücher und historische Befragungen in Hessen, 1500 bis 1800 (Marburg: Hessisches Landesamt für Geschichtliche Landeskunde, 2006). [20]. A notable exception: Brunhilde Wehinger, "Denkwürdigkeiten des Hauses Brandenburg: Friedrich der Große als Autor der Geschichte seiner Dynastie," in Günther Lottes, ed.,Von Kurfürstentum zum "Königreich der Landstriche": Brandenburg-Preußen im Zeitalter von Absolutismus und Aufklärung (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2004), 137-174. [21]. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Rudolf Schlögl, "Kommunikation und Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden: Formen des Sozialen und ihre Transformation in der Frühen Neuzeit," in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34 (2008), 155-224; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005).

Recent works by Peter-Michael Hahn and Wolfgang Neugebauer have only begun to delve into the Prussian court, a sign that Prussian history is only just now catching up with the now decades old interest in court societies: Hahn, "Pracht und Selbstinszenierung. Die Hofhaltung Friedrich Wilhelms I. von Preußen," in Der Soldatenkönig: Friedrich Wilhelm I. in seiner Zeit, edited by Friedrich Beck and Julius H. Schoeps (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2003), 69-98; and Hahn, "Hofhaltung und Kulturtransfer nach Berlin-Cölln und Potsdam bis 1740: Zur Rezeption und Imitation höfischer Stilelemente," in Jürgen Luh, ed., Preussen, Deutschland und Europa 1701 - 2001 (Groningen: Inst. voor Noord- en Osteuropese Studies, 2003), 253-279; Hahn, "Die Hofhaltung der Hohenzollern: Der Kampf um Anerkennung," in Patrick Bahners and Gerd Roellecke, eds., Preussische Stile: Ein Staat als Kunststück (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 73-89; Neugebauer, "Vom höfischen Absolutismus zum fallweisen Prunk: Kontinuitäten und Quantitäten in der Geschichte des preußischen Hofes im 18. Jahrhundert in Klaus Malettke" ed., Hofgesellschaft und Höflinge an europäischen Fürstenhöfen in der Frühen Neuzeit (15.-18. Jh.) (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001), 113-124; and Neugebauer, "Hof und Politisches System in Brandenburg-Preussen: Das 18. Jahrhundert," Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 46 (2000), 139-169. Ronald Asch, "Staatsbildung und adlige Führungsschichten in der Frühen Neuzeit: Auf dem Weg zur Auflösung der ständischen Identität des Adels?" Geschichte u. Gesellschaft 33, no. 3 (2007): 375-397; and Asch, "Ständische Stellung und Selbstverständnis des Adels im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert," in Asch, ed., Der europäische Adel im Ancien Régime: Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600-1789) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 3-45. Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Power Elites and State Building. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

September 24, 2010

Until recently, the question of secularization loomed over most discussions of religion in eighteenth- century Germany. This was primarily a secularization of mind and society, but its roots were traced to the declining role of religion in justifications for political authority. The peace treaties of 1648 are rightly said to have put an end to the first era of confessional politics, with attention shifting to the solidification of governance and administration within boundaries set by the Peace of Westphalia. Rulers and magistrates increasingly justified their authority by appealing to natural law and utilitarian justifications rather that confessional ones. That the whole process was topped off with the dramatic and abrupt transfer of wealth, land, and jurisdiction under the aegis of the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 only served to confirm the view that the eighteenth century's principal story was one of the waning of religion. In many ways, the Secularization of 1803--even if only Catholic Germany was directly affected--has stood in synechdotally for a long-term, even natural process in German and European history, capping a century and a half of rational development. While this secularizing narrative is often unstated, it has long been at the core of a modernizing narrative that puts a putative waning of belief and traditional practice in the same box as intellectual and scientific progress.

No matter how tenaciously an implicit secularization narrative persists outside the walls of eighteenth-century German studies, it is no longer tenable. Recent work on religion in the period has

We do not need to dispense with the term secularization altogether, although its considerable baggage should be handled with care. Because the question of secularization is not bound to go away any time soon, historians might as well turn their efforts toward redeploying it. We might even be able to re-colonize the modernizing discourse from which it initially entered early modern studies. In other words, there is no need to deny that something did indeed change with regard to many aspects of religious life and thought in the eighteenth century. Without a doubt skepticism and unbelief increased and the institutional churches suffered a loss in authority and support from many sides. As David Sorkin writes in his recent Religious Enlightenment, "[t]he year 1648 marked the end of the confessional state ideal, but not the era's religious formations."[2] New work on religion in the eighteenth century has turned away from earlier schematic accounts and taken religious thought and institutions on their own terms. The result is both a new view of the vitality and depth of the religious history of the period, but more significantly a new appreciation for the religious roots of much of modern culture and politics.

This is not to say that a one-sided obsession with the march of secularism has been replaced with an equally distorted emphasis on the religious origins of modernity. Rather, an earlier dichotomy has been set aside in favor of a fuller appreciation of the place of religion in social and intellectual history. It is also necessary to examine the ways in which "religion" can be found in a wide variety of discourses, practices, and institutions that constitute the other topics of this forum, from sexuality and science to politics and intellectual culture. This is not to say that "religion" is a master category in which all others are subsumed. But it does require us to recognize that many Germans in the period saw religion, in Moses Mendelssohn's terms, as one of the "pillars of social life," the rethinking of which constituted a vital part of a wide range of cultural and political activity.[3] Moreover, we should continually reflect on how exactly we are defining "religion," and be aware that the boundaries we assume to exist between the religious and the secular might have been drawn very differently in the period we study.

The backdrop for much of the discussion of religion and modernity is the Weberian supposition behind a secularizing, modernizing narrative that sees Protestantism as the motor of modernity. Given the intense attention that the Weber thesis has received over the course of a century, it is surprising to find that reactions to it can still elicit strikingly new ideas and perspective. One of these is to be found in Peter Hersche's magisterialMuße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter,[4] which is nothing less than an attempt to present a comprehensive (and surprisingly readable for its great length) account of European Catholic culture and society from Council of Trent to the French

Revolution. Striking in Hersche's account is that it opens not with a traditional refutation of Catholic backwardness, but rather an acceptance of it.[5] Hersche "accepts" the notion of Catholic backwardness in that he does not seek to show that Catholic culture and society was, contrary to its subsequent image, actually as rational and sober its Protestant counterpart supposedly was. Rather, the title of his work, loosely translated as "leisure and waste," suggests that Catholic baroque culture, with its processions, ostentatious charity and sensual religious devotion, was purposively different from the supposedly ascetic nature of Protestant culture on which Max Weber so famously focused.

While much of Hersche's book is not about Germany, one central concern to German history is at the forefront of the book, namely the relationship of nation and confession. The rise of national cultures is also the story of the decline (or reconfiguration) of transnational confessional cultures in the early modern period. As for eighteenth-century Germany, Hersche makes the case that reform efforts in Catholic culture drew from three broad strands, all directed at reforming baroque Catholicism in its various guises. These strands consisted of a "reprise" of Trent commencing with the pontificate of Innocent XI (1676-1689), Jansenist-inspired reforms, and finally the efforts of both secular and ecclesiastical writers and policymakers to mobilize Enlightened themes of criticism and reform with the help of the absolutist state.[6] The great value of Hersche's study for students of eighteenth-century German religion is the way in which it shifts our perspective, not only away from progress narratives (which, admittedly, had already been done by others), but also in showing the centrality of ecclesiastical life--construed in its broadest terms--far into the eighteenth century. Moreover, by showing that "reform" could proceed from widely different agendas and worldviews, and could be prosecuted by a variety of agents, Hersche's work exemplifies the need to continually question teleological accounts of secularization.

Hersche's attempt to provide a comprehensive account of Catholic culture from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries implies that only later did national-confessional cultures assume more importance. For him, the cohesion and restrained classicism of the Gallican Church was the exception, not the rule. Scholarship in the last generation has done much to dismantle older narratives that projected forms of the nation back into history. The weakening hold of the secularization thesis has also enabled us to see how the nexus of confessional culture, the state, and ecclesiastical establishments in the Old Regime played a formative role in elaboration new ideas of the nation. For Germany, this evolution is particularly problematic given the official recognition of the three confessions in the Empire after 1648.

My own work argues that certain German Catholic thinkers indeed tried to articulate a specific sense of the German Catholic church (nonetheless still in communion with Rome) as part of a process of conceptual separation from a broader early modern Catholic world. In my book,Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism, I argue that German Catholic intellectuals rethought the church, envisioning a church that would solidify the link between religion, civilization and morality. While they sought autonomy from Rome, they also defended Catholicism from a rising narrative of Protestant progress. Their Catholic Enlightenment aimed for a middle position between popular baroque religious practices and the anti-clericalism and materialism emanating from other stains of the European Enlightenment. It would seem worth asking whether something similar was not at play among German Protestants, as they, too, sought to re-situate themselves within a larger "Protestant world."[7] This is not at all a plea to return

A somewhat different act of perspective-shifting with regard to the question of religion and modernization is accomplished by Ulrike Gleixner, albeit in the much better-tilled field of Pietism. In her study of Pietism and the bourgeoisie in Württemberg, Gleixner asks whether "the bourgeois transformation from premodernity to modernity in fact can even be considered under the concept of secularization, or whether indeed this transformation for a portion of the bourgeoisie cannot be characterized as a process of re-Christianization."[9] She sees the pious movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries operating as a "parallel process" alongside secularization and dechristianization. "Religion is not a relict of tradition, but is constitutive of modernity. Pietism is the last great Protestant attempt to re-organize the totality of life under Christian claims."[10] While this insight is not entirely new, her work presents a wider perspective in its methods and sources. What differs is her recovery of the household and the role of the family and community as central contexts for Pietism and the formation of the bourgeoisie. Gleixner notes how household practices--singing, reading the bible and devotional works as well as the exchange of pious letters and regular meetings--formed a new common culture. "Insofar as piety and relationships were bound together, the pious secured and widened their group formation." From these practices and attitudes emerged a common "habitus" that shows how new modes of sociability did not always lead in a secular direction in the eighteenth century.[11] Moreover, Gleixner seeks to rescue an important dimension of Pietism in the role that women played not only in the family and community, but also in intellectual labors as well.[12] The later elevation of heroic male academic Pietism in the history and self-perception of the movement diminished the central role of women and the household.[13] Finally, Gleixner emphasizes that recovering the religious element in the formation of bourgeois world-views allows us to see this process as a complex interaction between secular and religious cultures that can never be wholly separated from one another.[14]

The subject of the formation of a Catholic bourgeois outlook was explored over a decade ago by Rudolf Schlögl. Although his book Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung [15] stakes its claims on the study of only three cities, his general point about the consequences of massive shift in "lay piety" away from the expressive devotionalism of baroque Catholicism strikes home.[16] Whereas Hersche focuses on the broad cultural shift away from baroque Catholicism along three different reforming fronts, Schlögl, employing techniques pioneered by the Annales school, aims to show how changes in piety can be traced though such things as reading habits and wills. This shift in piety-- which we should not too quickly characterize as an abandonment of belief or even of Catholicism--provides the backdrop for understanding the Catholic reform movement in Germany. Educated German Catholics rethought the church, its practices, and institutions in an effort to adapt it to new times. They worked with the absolutist state on their side, but as the eighteenth century progressed any sense of co-operation and harmony with the hierarchical church vanished. At the same time, the vitality of popular baroque Catholicism persisted in Germany, and would tide the religion over well into the nineteenth century until the twin problems of industrialization and Protestant political hegemony forced Catholic

Interestingly, as Shmuel Feiner has written, a similar process of differentiation within the intellectual and religious elite can be seen in the Haskalah. Although not a German movement per se, its core activities were in the German-speaking lands in the eighteenth century, even if the Jewish Enlightenment's cultural and intellectual sphere extended widely into Poland-Lithuania.[17] While the structure and dynamic of the Jewish Enlightenment obviously differed significantly from the process of Enlightenment within the Catholic church, Feiner argues that a group of (self-appointed) /maskilim/ consciously challenged the intellectual and educational monopoly of the rabbis. The reaction to their assertions of authority set the stages for the subsequent Jewish /Kulturkampf/ between conservative and liberal forces within Judaism.

While I have so far focused on developments with confessions, we cannot ignore that one of the defining features of German religious history under the Old Regime was its plurality, not only at the imperial level, but also, of course, within biconfessional cities. In an earlier work, Etienne François showed how an "invisible boundary" persisted in bi-confessional Augsburg, whereby Catholic and Lutheran individuals, while living in the same city, nonetheless drew sharp confessional and cultural boundaries around themselves.[18] In a recent essay, Duane Corpis has extended this type of analysis to argue that confessional authorities sought to monopolize urban space to maintain social and confessional difference, even while individuals could try to escape these strictures through conversion.[19] That conversion was as much a religious as a social strategy well into the eighteenth century reminds us that all was not rosy then. Dismantling the secularization thesis as a story of progress does not mean that just because the Westphalian treaties delegitimized religious justifications for territorial warfare in the Empire after 1648 religious conflict evaporated. Instead, we need to expand our horizons, and also re-examine older periodizations and moments of rupture.

This sort of re-examination has been done on a European-wide scale by Benjamin Kaplan, who argues that toleration as a social practice long preceded its articulation as an Enlightenment-era policy and program (such as Joseph II's 1781 Edict of Toleration). He emphasizes that persecution and intolerance lasted well into the eighteenth century, if not longer in certain communities and regions.[20] The most dramatic of these in the German-speaking lands was of course the expulsion of Protestants from Salzburg in 1731. W. R. Ward in fact has argued for the significance of continued and even renewed Habsburg oppression in central and eastern Europe for the origins of the Protestant evangelical awakening.[21] The story of toleration as an actual achievement of the Enlightenment (as opposed to a polemical program) Kaplan ties to the myth of secularization. "The secularization story suggests that religious fervor and commitment are fundamentally incompatible with toleration, and that the latter will flourish only if the former fades." Moreover, "the secularization story encourages us to associate religion in general with certain intolerant forms of religion. Equating religion with a destructive fanaticism, it tempts us to fear and condemn religion in general."[22] Such observations invite us to look again at the ways in which the pervasiveness and vitality of religion in eighteenth-century Germany could serve as a site for common practice and co- operation, but also as a sore spot that fed off of other conflicts. For example, the alliance of Catholic Austria and France during the Seven Years' War occasioned efforts by some Protestant propagandists

The discussion of toleration, the Enlightenment, and the secularization narrative brings us to intellectual history, where questions of religion have received prominent treatment of late. This is the focus of several recent books, including Jonathan Sheehan'sThe Enlightenment Bible and David Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment. Sheehan conceives of secularization not "as the disappearance of religion" but instead as "its transformation and reconstruction."[23] His religious Enlightenment concentrates on practices and methods used by scholars to "rescue" the bible from rationalists and enthusiasts alike. According to Sheehan, the Enlightenment is not defined by its doctrinal content, but by its techniques, practices, and media. He shows how English theologians and scholars laid the groundwork for the flourishing of subsequent German biblical scholarship. Whereas the eventual outcome of biblical scholars' efforts may have been a secularized "cultural bible," at the outset of this process a variety of profoundly pious concerns motivated these thinkers.

Sorkin's religious Enlightenment, on the other hand, is not a story of religion marginalizing itself, but of a transformation of faith itself. "Contrary to the secular narrative," Sorkin argues, "the Enlightenment was not only compatible with religious belief, but conducive to it. The Enlightenment made possible new iterations of faith. With the Enlightenment's advent, religion lost neither its place nor its authority in European society and culture."[24] Sorkin argues that religious Enlighteners across Europe "searched for a middle way of reasonable belief ... embraced toleration," engaged intensively in the public sphere, and actively sought (and often won) support from the state.[25] The result was nothing short of a modernized faith that "may have had more influential adherents and exerted more power in its day than either the moderate or the radical version of the Enlightenment."[26] Three of his six chapters are devoted to the German speaking territories, with discussions of Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten, Moses Mendelssohn and Valentin Eybel. The remaining chapters aptly demonstrate the overlap in methods, theories, and interests across Europe. His story ends rather abruptly--with Antoine Lamourette's execution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. This means that the book is more a work of recovery of a lost religious Enlightenment rather than a strong argument for its continuities. But as such, he case for a broad-based and robust religious Enlightenment is strong. While Sorkin's book is surely not the final word on the long-running dispute over the possibility of a religious Enlightenment, it does seem that the dust seems to have settled a bit. One may still debate about the sources of Europe's intellectual ferment in the eighteenth century and conclude, with Jonathan Israel, that for all the vitality of later "moderate" and religious Enlightenments, the radical materialist and egalitarian Enlightenment came first. But it would be difficult to argue today that Enlightenment and religion were always at odds.

Renewed attention to religion in the eighteenth century reaches even to the most rarified regions of German intellectual history. In his ambitious Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Ian Hunter reconstructs an alternate history of the civil philosophy of Christian Thomasius and Samuel von Pufendorf, insisting that it not be dialectically subsumed into a later Kantian synthesis. Hunter argues that the confessional situation of post-Westphalian (Protestant) Germany led jurists to "desacralize" political thought and the law not, he insists, because they aimed to do away with religion entirely, but because they sought to segregate it to a private

While some of Hunter's key philosophical interpretations have been challenged,[30] the prominence of his book nonetheless indicates the ways in which a newfound discovery of the vitality, diversity, and intensity of religious concerns in eighteenth-century Germany has made itself known in a variety of scholarly contexts. Given that recent scholarship on the eighteenth century shows the gradual decline of a grand secularization narrative, it is to be hoped that new vistas on the history of the era will be discovered. What these means for any possible overarching treatment of "religion" in eighteenth-century Germany is an open question. Given that religious conflict and religious diversity has been central to German history since the dawn of the early modern era, these new perspectives on the continued vitality and significance of religion in the eighteenth century presents historians of all stripes and specializations with new ways of revisiting the early modern/modern divide.

Michael Printy, Wesleyan University

Notes

[1]. For the phrase, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22.

[2]. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 117.

[3]. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or, on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Alan Arkush (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 33.

[4]. Peter Hersche,Muße und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kulture im Barockzeitalter 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). The best account of German Catholic baroque culture and religion in English is Marc Forster,Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

[5]. Hersche, Muße 1:27.

[6]. Hersche, Muße 2: 952. Hersche dealt extensively with Jansenism in his Der Spätjansenismus in Österreich (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1977).

[7]. The fruitfulness of such an approach is attested by J. G. A. Pocock's analysis of the "Arminian Enlightenment" in the larger Protestant world inBarbarism and Religion: Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50-71. Along different lines, recent work by W. R. Ward shows the pan-European, even global,

[8]. See for example Philip Gorski, "The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism," American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 5 (2000): 1428-1468.

[9]. Ulrike Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005), 13.

[10]. Gleixner, 393. "The last" may be somewhat overstated.

[11]. Ibid., 397.

[12]. Ibid., 399.

[13]. Ibid., 400.

[14]. Ibid., 405.

[15]. Rudolf Schlögl, Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung: Die Katholische Stadt--Köln, Aachen, Münster--1700-1840 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995).

[16]. I explore the problem of the "search for a bourgeois Catholicism" inEnlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125-143.

[17]. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also David Sorkin's chapter on Mendelssohn inThe Religious Enlightenment.

[18]. Etienne François,Die Unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648-1806 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1991).

[19]. Duane J. Corpis, "Space and urban religious life in Augsburg, 1648-1750," inSacred Space in Early Modern Europe, eds., Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 302-325.

[20]. See Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

[21]. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[22]. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 357-358.

[23]. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), xi.

[24]. Sorkin, 3.

[25]. Ibid., 11.

[26]. Ibid., 21.

[27]. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi. Along similar, if much more modest, lines, Thomas Ahnert emphasizes Thomasius's religious commitments inReligion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment. Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.)

[28]. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments, 373.

[29]. Ian Hunter, "Kant's Religion and Prussian Religious Policy," Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 1 (2005), 1-27.

[30]. For example, by George di Giovanni,Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).