This book is intended to provide both an explanation for the rapid increase of Prussian power in the early eighteenth century and an analysis of the formation of the Prussian political culture. Accounting for Prussia's ability by 1740 to compete militarily against states with far greater human and financial resources has long been considered one of the classic problems in European historiography. Perhaps an equally compelling justification for writing such a book at this time is, however, the need for a more adequate conceptualization of the broader significance of Frederician Prussia. Prussia's historical connections with the pre-eighteenth-century German past, with the particular path of development pursued in the “West,” with the “German catastrophe,” and with modernity in general – all seem to require further consideration.

The approach taken in this study is to reexamine the origins of the characteristically Prussian institutions and corporate spirit in such a way as to illuminate the nature of precisely these relationships. I shall do so by synthesizing the often told tale of Prussian state building with the story of Lutheran Pietism, a German form of ascetic Protestantism. The resulting stress on the importance of Pietism is not meant, any more than was the case with the Weber thesis, to validate some form of idealist reductionism. The intent is, rather, to bring to the fore a hitherto underestimated cultural factor, without which the Hohenzollerns' administrative initiatives could never have achieved such startling results.