Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815

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Cornell University Press, 1997 - History - 467 pages

This long-awaited work reconstructs the ways in which the meanings and uses of sex changed during that important moment of political and social configuration viewed as the birth of modernity. Isabel V. Hull analyzes the shift in the "sexual system" which occurred in German-speaking Central Europe when the absolutist state relinquished its monopoly on public life and presided over the formation of an independent civil society. Hull defines a society's sexual system as the patterned way in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through institutions. She shows that as the absolutist state encouraged an independent sphere of public activity, it gave up its theoretically unlimited right to regulate sexual behavior and invested this right in the active citizens of the new civil society. Among the questions posed by this political and social transformation are, When does sexual behavior merit society's regulation? What kinds of behaviors and groups prompt intervention? What interpretive framework does the public apply to sexual behavior? Hull persuades us that a culture's sexual system can be understood only in relation to the particularities of state, law, and society, and that when state and society are examined through the sexual lens, much conventional wisdom is cast in doubt.

 

Contents

The Absolutist States and the Regulation of Sex
53
Rethinking Regulation 17401800
107
BAVARIA 1781
123
CASES OF BADEN AND BAVARIA
130
The Cameralist Theory of Civil Society
155
The Practitioners of Civil Society
199
The Sexual SelfImage of Civil Society
229
Thought Experiments
257
Feuerbachs Reformed Criminal Code
333
PRINCIPLES
342
INTERVENTION INTO SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
359
MARRIAGE
369
RELEVANCE OF SEXUAL BEHAVIOR
401
The Sexual Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
407
Bibliography
413
Copyright

of Rights
299

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About the author (1997)

Isabel V. Hull is John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of Absolute Destruction and Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815, both from Cornell.