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

by Anthony J. La Vopa

Overview

This book focuses on "poor students", young men in eighteenth-century Germany who owed their studies to charity, who formed a substantial minority within the theology faculties, and who entered careers in the clergy, the academic schools, and the universities. Professor La Vopa shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience central to the lives of many celebrated intellectuals as well as many of the elite.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521350419
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/26/1988
Pages:	422
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.06(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...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

From the Publisher