Grace, Talent, and Merit
Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany

This 1988 book examines the experience of upwardly mobile young men in early modern Germany.

Anthony J. La Vopa (Author)

9780521350419, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 August 1988

422 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.79 kg

"...Grace, Talent, and Merit is an original book which ingeniously weaves together information from a variety of sources ranging from sermons to autobiographies to private correspondence to works of philosophy. This book makes a valuable contribution to the history of education in its broadest sense." Katharine D. Kennedy, History of Education Quarterly

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.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]