Grace, Talent, and Merit
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
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.
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.