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

by Hull, Isabel V.

• ISBN13: 9780801482533
• ISBN10: 0801482534
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction	p. 1
The Church, Traditional Society, and the Regulation of Sex	p. 9
The Absolutist States and the Regulation of Sex	p. 53
Rethinking Regulation, 1740-1800	p. 107
The Cameralist Theory of Civil Society	p. 155
The Practitioners of Civil Society	p. 199
The Sexual Self-Image of Civil Society	p. 229
Thought Experiments	p. 257
Pre-Napoleonic Liberals and the Sexual Determination of Rights	p. 299
Morality and Law: Feuerbach's Reformed Criminal Code in Bavaria	p. 333
Public and Private: The Code Napoleon in Baden	p. 371
The Sexual Foundations of the Nineteenth Century	p. 407
Bibliography	p. 413
Index	p. 447
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