Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: culture and power during the long eighteenth century
- 2 When culture meets power: the Prussian coronation of 1701
- 3 Military culture in the Reich, c. 1680–1806
- 4 Diplomatic culture in old regime Europe
- 5 Early eighteenth-century Britain as a confessional state
- 6 ‘Ministers of Europe’: British strategic culture, 1714–1760
- 7 Confessional power and the power of confession: concealing and revealing the faith in Alpine Salzburg, 1730–1734
- 8 The transformation of the Aufklärung: from the idea of power to the power of ideas
- 9 Culture and Bürgerlichkeit in eighteenth-century Germany
- 10 The politics of language and the languages of politics: Latin and the vernaculars in eighteenth-century Hungary
- 11 ‘Silence, respect obedience’: political culture in Louis XV's France
- 12 Joseph II, petitions and the public sphere
- 13 The court nobility and the origins of the French Revolution
- 14 The French Revolution and the abolition of nobility
- 15 Foreign policy and political culture in later eighteenth-century France
- 16 Power and patronage in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte
- 17 Between Louis and Ludwig: from the culture of French power to the power of German culture, c. 1789–1848
- Index
8 - The transformation of the Aufklärung: from the idea of power to the power of ideas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: culture and power during the long eighteenth century
- 2 When culture meets power: the Prussian coronation of 1701
- 3 Military culture in the Reich, c. 1680–1806
- 4 Diplomatic culture in old regime Europe
- 5 Early eighteenth-century Britain as a confessional state
- 6 ‘Ministers of Europe’: British strategic culture, 1714–1760
- 7 Confessional power and the power of confession: concealing and revealing the faith in Alpine Salzburg, 1730–1734
- 8 The transformation of the Aufklärung: from the idea of power to the power of ideas
- 9 Culture and Bürgerlichkeit in eighteenth-century Germany
- 10 The politics of language and the languages of politics: Latin and the vernaculars in eighteenth-century Hungary
- 11 ‘Silence, respect obedience’: political culture in Louis XV's France
- 12 Joseph II, petitions and the public sphere
- 13 The court nobility and the origins of the French Revolution
- 14 The French Revolution and the abolition of nobility
- 15 Foreign policy and political culture in later eighteenth-century France
- 16 Power and patronage in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito and Die Zauberflöte
- 17 Between Louis and Ludwig: from the culture of French power to the power of German culture, c. 1789–1848
- Index
Summary
The German Aufklärung has been an enduring theme in Tim Blanning's œuvre. His first book on reform and revolution in Mainz published in 1974 made a significant contribution to the debate on Enlightened Absolutism. In the German states, he argued, Enlightened ideas were not only accommodated within traditional structures, they positively reinforced those structures. Indeed, if Enlightened Absolutism existed anywhere at all, he suggested, then it was in the Holy Roman Empire.
In contrast to the French Enlightenment, the German Aufklärung was not characterised by any inherent antagonism to the demands of the state. Enlightened ideas gained their distinctive force in Germany from the fact that there was no distinction between intellectuals and administrators. Many were both at the same time and were able to employ their ideas in the service of beneficial reforms. The measure of the impact of these ideas was that the German masses declined the opportunity to overturn the old order after 1789. ‘Traditional notions of religion, duty and obedience continued to dominate public life’; just as they had been accommodated to the ideals of the Enlightenment, so they now ‘adjusted to changing circumstances, without their essence being diluted’.
Blanning's latest work on the power of culture and the culture of power reverts to this theme. In a comparative sweep that embraces Britain and France as well as Germany, he again underlines the particularity of the German case.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century , pp. 158 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007