Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 / / Isabel V. Hull.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Hull, Isabel V.,
• MitwirkendeR: Hull, Isabel V.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (488 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviation -- Introduction -- 1. The Church, Traditional Society, and the Regulation of Sex -- 2. THE REGULATORY NETWORKS OF THE SECULAR COMMUNITY 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: Feuer bach's Reformed Criminal Code in Bavaria -- 10. Public and Private: The Code Napoleon in Baden -- 11. The Sexual Foundations of the Nineteenth Century -- Bibliography -- Index