Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Cambridge University Press, 12/8/1988
EAN 9780521350419, ISBN10: 0521350417
Hardcover, 422 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm
Language: English
Poor students experienced a kind of upward mobility that was not uncommon in old-regime Europe. They were also objects of controversy. and as such they reveal the many dimensions of the issue of opening careers to talent. At stake were socially and politically sensitive questions about the relative importance of nature and nurture, of natural talent and 'birth', in realizing human potential; about the proper reconciliation of collective imperatives and individual freedom, of hierarchical stability and progress; about how national systems of education should be structured; about the kind and degree of upward mobility the society and the culture needed and could tolerate. This 1988 book shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience for men whose importance is still celebrated today, as well as for members of the educated elite who were and have remained obscure.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Poor Students
1. Realities and stereotypes
2. Initiations
3. The patronage chain
structure and ideology
4. The Hofmeister
Part II. Calling, Vocation, and Service
5. The calling
August Hermann Francke and Halle Pietism
6. Vocation
the natural self and the ethic of reason
7. Meritocracy
language and ideology
8. The egalitarian alternative
theory and practice
Part III. New Departures
9. Orthodoxies and new idioms
10. Professional ideologies
the making of a teaching corps
11. The clerical identity
12. Radical visions
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Epilogue
Bibliographical notes
Index.