Dissertation Information for Michael Johannes SauterNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Visions of the Enlightenment: The Edict on Religion of 1788 and political reaction in eighteenth-century Prussia Abstract: This dissertation reassesses two dichotomies on which current work on the late eighteenth century is founded: Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment and State/Public. It attacks these dichotomies by using the supposedly strongest evidence in their favor, Prussia's Edict on Religion of 1788. This edict controlled what preachers could say at the pulpit, and has been used to mark "the end of the Enlightenment" in Prussia. By looking carefully at the edict, its author, and the public opponents of both, this dissertation shows how the political and intellectual boundaries that historians have imposed dissolve in the vagaries of historical practice. The dissertation begins with the edict's author, Johann Christoph Woellner, and shows how he was a product of the same enlightened institutions from which the accredited members of the Enlightenment hailed, and that neither he nor the edict was unenlightened. Next, it moves to the legal and public battle over the edict, and explores how traditional approaches have no predictive value for understanding people's actual reactions to the edict. People across the political spectrum in Prussia and Germany took a variety of positions for a host of different reasons. In fact, no clear consensus ever emerged, and the general educated public remained evenly split over the issue. This enlightened public's ambivalence was due, the dissertation further argues, to the ambiguous position intellectuals occupied in the German cultural context. The people on the Enlightenment's cutting edge were also usually state civil servants. This meant that they were part of an elite public and the state. The tensions inherent in this dual position played themselves out in debates about what actions were socially acceptable. This dissertation concludes that no matter what their political differences, the edict's proponents and opponents were all members of the same elite club. Products of religiously inspired university curricula and state civil servants, most members of the German elite believed they were part of an honorable elite, separate from the great mass of people. These people were the state and the German public sphere. There was, thus, no Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment split, because there was no clear opposition between state and public. |
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