From Honour to Bildung. Rethinking the Body in Making German Civil Society, 1750–1850

Abstract

With his concept of neuständische Gesellschaft, Reinhard Blänkner suggests that education or, rather, Bildung, becomes the practice that defines one's social status in the German lands between 1750 and 1850. I build on this argument by pursuing two separate but closely intertwined ideas: first, that Bildung stems from and, at the same time, displaces an older foundation of social status, honour; and second, that in this displacement the practices of the body played a pivotal role in shaping civil society. I start with some observations on civil society ( Zivilgesellschaft) in the middle of the 18th century. Then I examine an important civil society project centred on a set of pedagogical reforms and experiments known as the Philanthropismus during the last decades of the 18th century. The rising critique of the Philanthropismus and the development of a counter-discourse of Bildung in the first decades of the 19th century is the theme of the following section. In the last sections of the article, I delve into the proliferation of the Bildung discourse in bodily practices, especially in social dancing, in the first half of the 19th century. The article ends with some general observations on the meaning of honour, Bildung, and the body in the making of Zivilgesellschaft. This article is not a detailed study or even a set of case studies but an attempt at rethinking the understanding and conceptualization of the time-period between 1750 and 1850 in the German lands.