Sexuality, state, and civil society in Germany, 1700-1815.

Hull, Isabel V., 1949-

Published by Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996

About this Item

very good green cloth. HULL, ISABEL V. Sexuality, state, and civil society in Germany, 1700-1815. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, xiii, 467pp., . This long-awaited work reconstructs the ways in which the meanings and uses of sex changed during that important moment of political and social configuration viewed as the birth of modernity. Isabel V. Hull analyzes the shift in the "sexual system" which occurred in German-speaking Central Europe when the absolutist state relinquished its monopoly on public life and presided over the formation of an independent civil society. Hull defines a society's sexual system as the patterned way in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through institutions. She shows that as the absolutist state encouraged an independent sphere of public activity, it gave up its theoretically unlimited right to regulate sexual behavior and invested this right in the active citizens of the new civil society. Among the questions posed by this political and social transformation are, When does sexual behavior merit society's regulation? What kinds of behaviors and groups prompt intervention? What interpretive framework does the public apply to sexual behavior? Hull persuades us that a culture's sexual system can be understood only in relation to the particularities of state, law, and society, and that when state and society are examined through the sexual lens, much conventional wisdom is cast in doubt. - CONTENTS: 1. The Church, Traditional Society, and the Regulation of Sex -- 2. The Absolutist States and the Regulation of Sex -- 3. Rethinking Regulation, 1740-1800 -- 4. The Cameralist Theory of Civil Society -- 5. The Practitioners of Civil Society -- 6. The Sexual Self-Image of Civil Society -- 7. Thought Experiments -- 8. Pre-Napoleonic Liberals and the Sexual Determination of Rights -- 9. Morality and Law: Feuerbach's Reformed Criminal Code in Bavaria -- 10. Public and Private: The Code Napoleon in Baden -- 11. The Sexual Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 9780801431265 ISBN 0801431263. Seller Inventory # 91930

Bibliographic Details

Title: Sexuality, state, and civil society in ...

Publisher: Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996

Binding: Hardcover