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Grace, Talent, and Merit

Grace, Talent, and Merit

Grace, Talent, and Merit

Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Author:
Anthony J. La Vopa
Published:
June 2002
Availability:
Available
Format:
Paperback
ISBN:
9780521525145

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    This book focuses on "poor students", young men in eighteenth-century Germany who owed their studies to charity, who formed a substantial minority within the theology faculties, and who entered careers in the clergy, the academic schools, and the universities. Professor La Vopa shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience central to the lives of many celebrated intellectuals as well as many of the elite.

    Reviews & endorsements

    "...Grace, Talent, and Merit is an original book which ingeniously weaves together information from a variety of sources ranging from sermons to autobiographies to private correspondence to works of philosophy. This book makes a valuable contribution to the history of education in its broadest sense." Katharine D. Kennedy, History of Education Quarterly

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    Product details

    April 2011
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9780511873805
    0 pages
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    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    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.
      Author
    • Anthony J. La Vopa