Grace, Talent, and Merit
Grace, Talent, and Merit
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Poor students experienced a kind of upward mobility that was not uncommon in old-regime Europe. They were also objects of controversy. and as such they reveal the many dimensions of the issue of opening careers to talent. At stake were socially and politically sensitive questions about the relative importance of nature and nurture, of natural talent and 'birth', in realizing human potential; about the proper reconciliation of collective imperatives and individual freedom, of hierarchical stability and progress; about how national systems of education should be structured; about the kind and degree of upward mobility the society and the culture needed and could tolerate. This 1988 book shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience for men whose importance is still celebrated today, as well as for members of the educated elite who were and have remained obscure.
Product details
April 2011Adobe eBook Reader
9780511873805
0 pages
0kg
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
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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.
