On Enlightenment for the Common Man
In early 1789, months before the meeting of the Estates General in Paris, Christian Daniel Erhard launched a new journal, Amalthea, with a lengthy polemic on the state of enlightenment.1 His use of the term “enlightenment” was not uncommon: enlightenment, he wrote, concerns the abolition of prevailing prejudices and errors among individuals and entire peoples.2 Erhard's article acquired a certain originality, however, when he differentiated between “true” and “false” and “unlimited” and “limited” enlightenment, in order to examine why enlightenment “collides with the self-interest, craving for power, and arrogance of certain classes.”3 He concluded that these defects were to be found within the historical Enlightenment itself. Indeed, “enlightenment is an often misused name.”4 It may substitute new errors for old; old errors may change their shape and survive in a new guise; false individuals may give their “pranks and vices the hue of the Enlightenment”; and new guardians may emerge to enslave the people.5 In one place he proclaimed, “Damned be the Enlightenment which exchanges blind trust in itself for blind trust in others.”6 In another: “The same century, for which the task of freeing human reason from all forms of the most vile tyranny appeared to be reserved, forges new chains!”1
Erhard's essay was a particularly sustained attack on false guardians of the people, instrumental reason, and the tyranny of social interests. Even the phrase “burgher tyranny” appeared in one place.8 His views, however, were only a somewhat atypical expression of critical views that had emerged in the 1780s from sustained debates over the Enlightenment and its claims.9 In this sense, Erhard's piece is a reminder that the treatment of enlightenment in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment had critical roots in the historical Enlightenment.10 It cannot be considered anachronistic or ahistorical, moreover, to adopt a critical perspective close to Erhard's—and thus to intersect with those of Horkheimer and Adorno—since such views, while certainly not those of the majority of enlighteners, were embedded in the late Enlightenment itself.
Certain aspects of this paper were delivered, at a session of the German Studies Meeting (1988) sponsored by the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and at Cornell University (1991). I would like to thank Hartmut Lehmann3 David Sabean, and colleagues and students in the Cornell History Department for their thoughtful comments. Thanks also to James Schmidt, Reinhard Blänkner, Hans Erich Bödeker, and Etienne François.
In this chapter I want to consider in greater detail a set of interrelated themes running through Erhard's essay and the debate over the question “What is enlightenment?” The first section begins with the issue of guardianship as debated in the Berlin Wednesday Society. I start here because the views of the Wednesday Society are centrál to the concerns of this volume and because they reveal with particular clarity the range of positions in the period before the French Revolution. The second section widens the discussion to the phenomenon of Volksaufklärung, or popular enlightenment, to examine how and to what extent the Enlightenment forged “new chains” for those who were to be enlightened. The final section shifts perspective to explore the phenomenon of enlightenment from below.
GUARDIANSHIP AND ENLIGHTENMENT
By the time Erhard wrote his thoughts on enlightenment, there was an established tradition of debate on the topic in the journals. Particularly influential had been the discussions within the Berlin Wednesday Society begun by Johann Karl Wilhelm Möhsen in December 1783 when he placed the question “What is enlightenment?” before his fellow members.11 The ensuing reflections led to the publication of the more famous essays on enlightenment in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, those by Johann Friedrich Zöllner, Moses Mendelssohn, and Immanuel Kant. But as Möhsen told his audience, his remarks were themselves occasioned by two other ongoing disputes: one on reform of the German language that had been revived by Frederick II in his pamphlet, De la littératur allemande (1780),12 the other concerning the right of the state to “deceive” the people, which had been the prize question of the Berlin Academy (1780). It is this latter debate, won by Rudolf Zacharias Becker (1752-1822) and Friedrich von Castillon (1708-1791), whose extended themes on the extension of enlightenment to the common man are key to my concerns here. Thus a number of strands came together to shape the question of enlightenment. In each of these, however, the question of guardianship and access to enlightenment remained central: Who was to reform whom? What were the limits of coercion? How much enlightenment was appropriate?
Möhsen was concerned in his lecture that Frederick's views on the inadequacy of the German language and educational system may indeed have provided a partial explanation for the slow advance of the Enlightenment over the course of the king's long reign.13 The slow pace of change coupled with the “backwardness” of the population also fueled the debate over “deceiving” the people. In addition, it furnished some justification for state censorship and the emergence of reform-oriented “secret societies.” The two debates together thus went to the heart of the Wednesday Society's activities: In what sense were their endeavors useful to the public, in what sense to the monarchy and the government? Did secret societies, such as the Wednesday Society, establish the only forum for the disinterested discussion and resolution of serious issues of reform? That these questions were pressing for functioning autocracies, their administrators, and the disenfranchised public is clear from the lengthy controversy over secret societies that was alive and well at the time of Möhsen's lecture. To replace monarchical-aristocratic authority with secret government by clique, even when reformers and the reading public were increasingly frustrated by the slow rate of reform, seemed to threaten both the monarchical principle and an emerging civil society. This was one reason that the Jesuit order had been banned (1773); similarly, the Illuminati were prohibited in the years immediately following Möhsen's lecture (1784-1785), and, eventually, it also led to the self-dissolution of the Wednesday Society itself (1798).14
For Möhsen, as for Erhard in his essay, the key term of enlightenment was “superstition” (Aberglaube), and the key issue remained to demystify the forms of superstition spread throughout the population. This was the link between the question “What is enlightenment?” and the endeavors of the reformers promoting popular enlightenment. Why, Möhsen asked, had so little light penetrated the dark of the countryside in the past forty years? In his own answer he did not merely focus on language and the educational system. Instead he attacked religious superstition and even Frederick II for inconsequence in the exercise of absolute authority in religious matters.15 Möhsen sought to be much more invasive in religious life by enlisting the clergy, instrumentalizing prayer, and politicizing the pulpit.
On scrutiny Möhsen's concern with enlightenment was inseparable from the special sense of calling and status felt by the reformers themselves.16 Many of the society's members asserted a right of privileged access to sensitive knowledge and thus to the differential exercise of power itself.17 Participation in the debate over enlightenment, moreover, forced intellectual choices on the participants. They were required to identify with the state arid its agents or to express an unwillingness thereto. They were also required to accept or reject the existence of an unbridgeable cultural distance between the state, its agents, and the unenlightened, unenfranchised “people.”
With varying degrees of self-awareness, this latter point is amply made in the written comments (Voten) to Möhsen's paper. Ernst Friedrich Klein and Carl Gottlieb Svarez, for instance, accepted official censorship because of inequities between the politically and socially constituted estates and the bureaucratic monarchical state. Klein accepted the state's right to prevent the “people” from reading matters otherwise acceptable in a philosophical treatise.18 Friedrich Gedike saw enlightenment as reflecting the particular consciousness of educated burghers: “The actual point where the Enlightenment must begin is with the middle estate [Mittelstand] as the center of the nation; from there the rays of enlightenment will spread only gradually outward to the two extremes, the higher and the lower estates.”19 Moses Mendelssohn and Christian Wilhelm von Dohm were the two members who most emphatically repudiated guardianship in any form. Just as Becker had argued in his prize essay that deception was always inappropriate, they, too, rejected that enlightenment had ever been damaging to the advancement of humanity. Both asked that historical examples be gathered to show where truth and enlightenment had not led to the happiness of humankind.20 “Surely one will not be able to cite a single case,” wrote Dohm, “where the momentary evil of the crisis (or even the unrest that ensues with the overthrow of despotism and superstition) is not transformed into a greater good.”21
The exchanges within the Wednesday Society over censorship and guardianship establish the epistemological and ideological field in which the movement for popular education or Volksaufklärung must be placed. The charge of the Enlightenment was to eliminate superstition by transforming belief and the conditions under which it thrived. Yet the extensive program of material and moral improvement for the common man cannot be separated from the special status assumed by reformers. This status was partly confirmed and maintained by a populace, viewed as ignorant and recalcitrant, who, perhaps more than being emancipated from the conditions of servitude, needed to be educated and infused with “new” ideas from above. The discussions within the Wednesday Society already point to the pattern of the Volksaufklärung itself: it functioned to sustain the social distance, even as it developed a particular reform program charged with eliminating its preconditions. The language of démystification and emancipation, of “above” and “below,” of guardianship and control, simultaneously propelled and undermined the entire endeavor.
THE CULTURAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN “HIGH” ENLIGHTENMENT AND “POPULAR” ENLIGHTENMENT
There was no movement in France similar in scale or intention to the German Volksaufklärung.22 Hundreds of articles, brochures, and books were printed from the 1750s onward—all of which bear witness to the widespread rediscovery of the common man. The older humanistic Hausvater literature, an established genre from the Renaissance onward, now became more specialized. There was an extended campaign to extend literacy through the establishment of rural schools. Special guidebooks, calendars, almanacs, hymnals, and even novels were composed for the lower orders. Massive efforts were made to transform values: reformers propagated the importance of a rationalized work ethic, thrift, and self-discipline. The churches sought to introduce a more “rational” religious practice: Newtonian science meant that life and death were subject to new laws of interpretation; modern ethical views meant that the blood and gore of pietistic song needed to be elevated to a more abstract plane. Medical doctors and administrators attempted to transform public health and to introduce a better diet. And, of course, there was a flood of stereotypical advice on improving rural agriculture. These ranged from the introduction of beekeeping and new crops (clover, potatoes) to rational husbandry of the forests, the elimination of wastelands, and the enclosure of commons.23 These efforts to systematize daily life, demystify the world of the supernatural, and increase productivity were thus part and parcel of the expansion of the Enlightenment after midcentury. But popular enlightenment also flowed from the general concern for heightened agricultural productivity in the wake of the Seven Years War and the great dearth of the early 1770s.24 It also followed from the growing book culture and improved printing techniques that made it possible to sell books cheaply to the lower orders. It stemmed, in addition, from Protestant and Catholic concerns for literacy and Christian improvement that were part of the educational movement of these years.25
Certain historians have argued that so much was written by reformers in these years that generalization, especially about motive and intention, is almost impossible.26 Nonetheless, I do not see how one can argue but that the Volksaufklärung was largely an apolitical movement with substantial political implications. Consider the term “Volksaufklärung.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, use of the terms gemeiner Mann (common man) and Volk (the people) had marked the revival of a political language of participation. But in the wake of the Peasants War, the religious wars, and especially the Thirty Years War, subject or Untertan gradually became synonymous with “common man.” Increasingly, historians argue, the phrase “gemeiner Mann” was connected with social and political inferiority.27 When employed in depoliticized contexts, “gemeiner Mann” essentially distinguished between the cultivated classes, the gesittete Ständen, and the rest of the population. Even in this depoliticized sense, the language of “common” and “cultivated” was weighted asymmetrically toward the cultivated classes.28 The term “gemeiner Mann,” connected with the notion of a people, or Volk, included the artisanate and the petit bourgeoisie Kleinbürgertum), but in a society overwhelmingly agrarian it largely referred to the peasantry (Bauer, Bauernstand, Bauerntum). In this sense Volksaufklärung meant enlightenment of the peasantry. Like “gemeiner Mann,” “Volk” “was not able to acquire a genuine political quality after 1648.” It was used in an “unmistakenly pejorative tone” to refer to the common people, who were increasingly perceived as an “object of pedagogy.”29
The reformers of the people used the term “enlighten” in this apolitical, pedagogical sense. The Volksaufklärung had very little to do, for instance, with the revival of natural rights or estatist political language. Unless we return to Michael Gaismair and the Tyrol at the time of the Peasants War, I know of no drafts of future constitutions before the French Revolution where the peasantry was integrated into the political nation. In most cases the notion of “citizen” was urban and estatist, as were the constitutions.30 The exceptional treatise on peasant emancipation, such as the early work by Georg Christian Oeder (1769), sought to separate emancipation from political participation.31 Even Justus Moser, who sought to adapt the Lock- ean language of the joint stock company to create a constitutional fiction of gentry participation, stopped before peasant leaseholders.32 In my view the recent literature on “communalism” and “republicanism,” the first projected forward in time from the late medieval period and the second projected backward from the nineteenth century, assumes continuities concerning participation that simply do not exist for the period of the later Enlightenment.33 The literature of the Volksauflclärung reveals the fragmentary nature of the political idea of “commons” and “village.” Even where writers made distinctions between wealthy hereditary leaseholders, cottagers, and the propertyless, the peasantry remained in its “estate, without freedom of movement, and weighted down with all the duties proclaimed by law and tradition to its seigneurs and the state.”34 We can argue, consequently, that the Volksaufklärung was apolitical in its contours but politically instrumental in its function, since writers focused simultaneously on the improvement and control of the rural population.35
As far as I can discover, the word Volksaujklärung also implied a limited enlightenment wherever it was used.36 Typical was Johann Ludwig Ewald's framework in his On Popular Enlightenment: Its Limits and Advantages (1790). In this work popular enlightenment was defined in terms of its boundaries: “It is necessary for all men to understand certain matters; certain only for a particular estate, a particular class of men.” What are the limits of a “purposeful enlightenment for the people?” he asked. Enlightenment must halt before an “expanded enlightenment” that leads to a “pretentious erudition” (Vielwisserei)', an enlightenment that leads to brooding and doubt; an enlightenment that leads to political doubt and questioning of the rights of the sovereign and his subject; an enlightenment that leads to too much cultural refinement.37
Where the general Enlightenment spoke of human perfectibility, the writers of the popular Enlightenment spoke, in Ewald's terms, of enlightenment according to one's station. In one author's plans for a rural school (1798), for example, children were to be taught religion, writing, arithmetic, civics (vaterländische Gesetzkunde), physical geography, and natural history with technology. However, as in Ewald's work, there were clear educational limits.
I would be very much misunderstood if one were to believe I intended to acquaint the peasant systematically with the full extent of these sciences. That is neither possible nor useful. The slumbering mental capacities of these crude natural men could not comprehend such matters, and even if one were to do everything to awaken them, such learning would be neither intelligible nor useful to them. Of all these subjects the countryman should only become unsystematically acquainted with those matters that will correct his ideas, give him some knowledge of his country, its constitution and related matters, as well as lead to the improvement of his situation and his domestic environment. For this reason only a small and relatively insignificant part of such sciences is useful.38
Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796), leader of the “radical” Illuminati and propagator of good taste, stated matters even more directly in his Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788).
That one now gradually attempts to motivate the peasant to abandon many of his inherited prejudices in the methods of planting and indeed in the management of his household, that one hopes through purposeful schooling to destroy foolish fancies, stupid superstitions, the belief in ghosts, witches and similar matters, and that one now teaches the peasant to read, write, and calculate well—all this is indeed commendable and useful. But to give them all sorts of books, stories, and fables, to accustom them to transporting themselves into a world of ideas, to open their eyes to their own impoverished condition which cannot be improved, to make them discontented with their lot through too much enlightenment, to transform them into philosophers who blather about the uneven division of earthly goods—that is truly worthless.39
The literature on Volksaufklärung thus supports Rudolf Schenda's provocative second thesis in People without Books: “The bourgeois Enlightenment did not formulate a common, interterritorial, and progressive theory with respect to reading and learning. It tended in individual cases to compromise with the states and was in agreement with their restrictions on education.”40 If we clarify Schenda's point somewhat, it is that the movement of enlightenment for the common man sacrificed universal enlightenment in favor of a theory of modernization that would not disrupt the social order of estates. This was typical of the literature on agricultural improvement, rural educational reform, and the utopias of peasant and village life.41
An exception to this account of the popular Enlightenment may have been the popular works on medicine and public health. Of course, the medical reform movement was linked to technological rationalization.42 But besides articles making particular recommendations—for instance, smallpox inoculation or the proper hygiene for burying the dead—there are numerous works that are strikingly sympathetic toward rural life and protective of peasant laborers. Pivotal in this regard were the views of the Swiss doctor Simon André Tissot and his Avis au peuple sur sa santé (Lausanne, 1761), a work that went through numerous editions in the later eighteenth century.43 Tissot was particularly clear that “the most common cause of illness among the peasantry” was “lengthy and excessive labor.”44 Works such as Tissot's, in other words, established a causality about disease and illness that led directly to an analysis of causes beyond the control of the peasant population. Equally significant were the so-called medical topographies, medical histories of cities that sought to locate and explain disease and mortality rates at the microlevel.45 These works do not belong in the narrow sense to the popular medical Enlightenment. But they, too, analyzed disease in terms of poverty, overwork, and malnutrition and thereby made recommendations that questioned the legitimacy of the old regime.46
Crucial to the Volksaufklärung, then, was the link between knowledge and social interest. The social history of doctors in this period remains largely to be written, but it may be that critically inclined medical doctors such as Tissot were able to retain a far greater independence from the state than were other administrators and officials. Two areas are worthy of more detailed comment in this regard: one concerns the alliance between the state and the Volksaufklärung, the other concerns the ambivalent social position of the popular enlighteners themselves.
It is significant to see how readily princes and their administrators could be enlisted in the cause of popular enlightenment. There are a number of examples where princes, imperial cities, and village communes bought and disseminated books to their communities. Frederick II of Prussia distributed a brochure on the use of clover, and the Hanoverian government gave away some twenty-five thousand copies of the new catechism (1790); but the most notable case resulted from Rudolf Zacharias Becker's campaign to acquire subscriptions for the free distribution of his Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute, his fictitious account of peasant enlightenment in the imaginary village of Mildheim.47 We have encountered Becker in Möhsen's lecture as the co-winner with Friedrich von Castillon of the prize essay from the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Thereafter Becker gave himself over to the cause of popular enlightenment. Between 1784 and 1788, when Becker first published the Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein, he was able to gather more than 30,000 prepaid subscriptions. By 1799, sales had risen to more than 150,000 copies; by 1813, Becker estimated that more than a million copies, including pirated editions, had been distributed. Reconstruction of the subscription lists shows the extent to which the established authorities purchased quantities of the book for free or low-cost distribution. We can see that no peasants, a handful of artisans, and only one reading society subscribed. In contrast, princes, administrators, rural pastors, and Masonic lodges played a significant role.48 It has been argued that Becker's Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein became the most widely distributed secular book in the period: there may have been one copy for every ten households. The problem is that the peasantry most likely did not read it; rather it became part of the intellectual life of the literate classes.49
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the case in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel of Pastor Hermann Bräß's newspaper for the peasantry, Die Rothe Zeitung, printed from 1786 to 1797 and so named because the phrase “für die lieben Landleute” was printed in bold red type. Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand gave free mailing privileges to the newspaper and exempted it from the censor. Pastor Bräß was also able to enlist numerous sponsors from the ducal administration, but we should note that thirty-eight of the fifty-one sponsors came from the rural pastorate. The recent study of this newspaper is able to draw conclusions similar to the work on Becker. It shows that this peasant newspaper never succeeded in its purpose but became increasingly linked to urban, enlightened readers. As the newspaper focused more exclusively on highly literate readers and landholding peasants, the tone and the topics changed, and it became more and more directly a political newspaper. After the paper reported student unrest in Helmstedt in March 1791, the ducal authorities intervened and the paper began to be censored.50
State and administration appear to have been interested in controlling and co-opting the popular Enlightenment from the beginning, because it was largely an invention of state officials—administrators, university professors, local justices of the peace, and rural pastors.51 The rural pastorate, in particular, had long played an ambivalent role in the life of the countryside. Since the Middle Ages the Church had been an instrument of social discipline, and the efforts to control belief through religious schooling and the pulpit had not actually lessened since the sixteenth century.52 Since the Reformation, in addition, the pastorate, both urban and rural, had become increasingly a homogeneous and closed caste. Recent studies have shown that more than half of the Protestant pastorate was recruited from among its own; that intermarriage was high; that the rest overwhelmingly came from among the urban elite; and that almost none came from the countryside. The lower Catholic priesthood, although celibate, also displayed a similar tendency to control positions through the extended family; but it recruited in far greater numbers from the peasantry and handicraftsmen.53
Rural pastors, and priests to a lesser degree, too, thus lived at an extended social distance from their rural parishioners.54 They remained agents of the state even when filled with Christian commitment. The Church books, which registered marriages, baptisms, and deaths, were also used to organize the payment of the head tax.55 They controlled access to the sacraments, they manipulated opinion through their sermons, and they had the power to cause dissent to be punished. In this way they legitimated the forms of knowledge that could be tolerated within the rural community.56 Möhsen had understood this matter well in his remarks to the Wednesday Society.
This pastorate, itself in the process of being transformed into desacralized agents of a rationalizing state, was crucial, then, in the efforts to reform the common man.57 A chief aim of the Volksaufklärung was to replace the popular tales, myths, and so-called superstitions of the rural population with useful knowledge about the world, with rational prayer, and with Christian discipline. In his Development of Modern Conscience, Heinz Kittsteiner has examined relations between ministers and their rural parishioners by studying sermon literature, visitation reports, manuals of piety and penance, and autobiographical writings in order to place the views of enlightened ministers within the sweep of efforts since the Reformation to control and reshape the beliefs of the rural population.58 The scope of his work allows him to show that the Volksaufklärung was only one significant episode in this lengthier historical pattern of clerical control and cultural superiority over rural parishioners.
ENLIGHTENMENT FROM BELOW?
The systematic efforts by Enlightenment reformers to reshape the values of the lower classes is not an unfamiliar cultural phenomenon. Antonio Gramsci, Albert Memmi, and Jürgen Habermas are prominent among those authors who have explored a variety of historical situations in which elites have sought to control or replace systems of thought among those orders placed in a state of social, political, economic, and cultural dependence.59 The various studies of North/South and church/state relations in Italy, Tunisia under colonial rule, and German modernization have given us a rich theoretical language dealing with cultural hegemony, intellectual colonization, and the colonization of life worlds. In recent years, in addition, the historian Gerhard Oestreich had sought to study the early modern absolute state from the perspective of “social discipline.” Jean Delumeau has also used the phrase “inner mission” to discuss the role of the Church in shaping and controlling cultural life.60 Such examples remind us that the Volksaufklärung must be situated within both premodern patterns of cultural control and later movements of secular modernization.
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was intimately tied to the prolonged transition (1500-1900) to print culture. The spread of literacy did not simply empower the individual; it remained a double-edged sword. As a cultural process, it became attached to the needs of the early modern state for administrators, lawyers, political economists, accountants, and scribes who could systematize social and institutional life. These agents of the state also used their specialized knowledge to gain access to the social system and enrich themselves. Education and literacy thus created new elites who grafted themselves onto the inherited corporate system. This process long preceded the emergence of the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment intensified the efforts at systemization, even as it sought to make universal claims for the individual by emancipating him and the state from the arbitrary, charismatic patterns of authority.
These points require us to consider the extent to which the historical Enlightenment was an emancipatory movement and whether and to what degree such emancipation was unleashed by these agents of rationalizing states. This was the classic problem that shaped Tocqueville's late work. The literature on popular enlightenment supports the view that the Enlightenment sought within a long generation systematically to remake the value systems of rural Germany. The matter of system is significant, because these writers also genuinely sought to improve public health and diet and to widen intellectual horizons within peasant society. Yet popular enlighteners were hegemonic in their efforts to rework the structure of belief. At the same time, their writings, with rare exceptions, were committed to the differential access to human self-development and unequal entry into a reconstructed political society.
Arguing that the Volksaufklärung was a form of “inner mission” (Delumeau) or a “colonization of life worlds” (Habermas) creates, nonetheless, only a modest theoretical distance from the language and intentions of the proponents of Volksaufklärung. Notions of a popular or traditional culture that is the object of assault presuppose a theory of elites; they assume and require a view of cultural diffusion; they find it difficult to comprehend that complex, rational, and systematic views could be generated from “below”; they find it difficult to explain change; and they ignore cultural strategies of adaptation, transmutation, and resistance. Still it remains difficult to change the perspective from “above” to “below,” for one, because the analytical strategy often shifts from an individualizing perspective to a collective one. Becker is a publicist on peasant enlightenment whose individual ideas can be traced and seen as representative of a particular group of reformers. Peasant culture in the early modern period is often viewed as a chorus from which an individual peasant intellectual emanated as sport or idiot savant. For this reason, among others, the entire subject matter of the popular Enlightenment is fraught with difficulties concerning the reception of ideas, definitions of peasant “common sense,” and the structure of rural belief.
How were the knowledge, values, and claims of the Enlightenment embedded within the culture of rural life? The response rests in our understanding of the interaction between oral and written traditions in the later eighteenth century.61 Estimates of literacy vary depending on the observations of contemporaries, statistical evidence of the ability to sign one's name, and the study of testaments and wills. There were clear differences between men and women, rich and poor, town and country, Protestant and Catholic areas, and the north/south and east/west divides.62 But surprisingly, a leveling of sorts had begun to occur in the regions of western and northern Germany. The newer studies have allowed historians to alter substantially the older view of overwhelming rural illiteracy: except for the areas of seigneurial latifundia (Großgrundbesitz:) east of the line from Stralsund to Dresden, rural literacy—conceived as an elementary familiarity with printed matters—appears to have been 70 percent or more in the later eighteenth century.63 In fact, elementary literacy was relatively further advanced in Germany than in France.64 We must remember that the beginnings of a rural literacy program had been established during the Reformation and that the struggle for the hearts and minds of commoners had generated a massive pamphlet and broadsheet campaign that must have penetrated the countryside. The Thirty Years War brought with it yet another wave of printed propaganda. In addition, the confessional stalemate, sealed in 1648, proved to be a most decisive factor for the three state religions. It created competition among the confessions that caused the levels of schooling in contiguous areas to increase dramatically.65 We must also not overlook both that decentralization in Germany and the somewhat fluid continuum between city, town, and countryside may have contributed to sustaining a higher functional literacy in the countryside. A recent investigation of reading societies in the parish of Menslage in northwestern Lower Saxony has shown that around 1800, except for servants, the “entire spectrum of the rural population” was involved.66 Other local studies have been able to show that literacy and the possession of books were substantial among leaseholders and cottagers in Braunschweig, among artisans in the cities along the Rhine, and among weavers in the small protoindustrial weaving villages in the Swabian Alb.67
We must conclude, then, that there was a far greater general literacy in Germany in the period before the French Revolution than previously assumed and that a certain demand for reading and literature had developed within rural society. The pressure to create rural schools often came from the communities themselves, although once again we cannot separate the initiatives of local administrators and pastors from the members of the affected communities.68 Similarly, the demand for rural newspapers was not simply invented by the purveyors of the Volksaufklärung.69 There were, in addition, isolated “learned peasants” who demonstrate the spread of secular book culture into rural society. One such figure was Bernhard Mangold, the mayor (Schultheiß) of the village of Suppingen in the Swabian Alb, who had memorized the German works of Frederick II of Prussia. Other peasant intellectuals such as Isaak Maus and Ulrich Bräker also come to mind.70
Still, the movement by the rural population for greater literacy and assimilation of the printed word into daily life cannot normally be equated with a commitment to enlightenment. The surviving testaments show that reading and the ownership of books was predominantly an extension of a religious culture attacked by enlightened reformers for “enthusiasm” and “superstition.” Transforming religious belief was after all the primary meaning of enlightenment as expressed by Erhard, Möhsen, and Kant. The later eighteenth century saw persistent efforts by consistories to reform prayer and song through the introduction of new hymnals and breviaries. These attempts often met with equally persistent opposition from local parishes. Significantly, these parishes were just as often split vertically among rich and poor; and in their resistance to the reformer, they often sought to maintain a united front against forced change from above and outside.71
Literacy, like other aspects of the Volksaufklärung, was accepted when it was tied to the material and spiritual interests of rural society. Hence one must argue that rural culture resisted the imposition of ideas when they were presented systematically but was able to accept ideas individually. Particular ideas from the body of enlightenment thought were absorbed, in fact, when it became clear that such ideas were needed to survive in the larger world. The case of the jurist Johann Leonhard Hauschild and his defense of the Saxon peasantry in their struggle against their lords (Latin ed., 1738; German, 1771) has been used to show how natural rights arguments entered the world of the Saxon peasantry in the eighteenth century. Such ideas, however, were also consistent with long-standing efforts by the peasantry to erode the conditions of legal dependence (Leibeigenschaft). In this sense the newer form of rational argumentation was consistent with traditional perceptions of justice.72 Others have shown how German peasants from the Palatinate were readily able to adapt themselves in their German-language press to the political language of colonial America. Here, too, the concern was with understanding local property law.73 Similarly, agricultural innovations—ranging from new crops to enclosures—were also sometimes accepted in piecemeal fashion by competing groups when the advantages could be demonstrated.74
CONCLUSION
To understand the issues surrounding enlightenment from below, we cannot adopt a unilinear theory of growing literacy, religious secularization, or gradual politicization. Nor can we necessarily accept Carlo Ginzburg's belief that there was an autonomous strand of peasant materialism that continuously reproduced certain ideas over time.75 Rather we need to see that certain ideas were absorbed or were made to fit within the cultural universe of rural society. Individual ideas, innovations, or practices could be assimilated without accepting the entire systematic effort of the Volksaufklärung. The special ideological function of the popular Enlightenment in the pre revolutionary period meant that the concerns of the state and rural reformers most likely did not penetrate deeply into rural life. Instead the peasantry continued to follow that defensive strategy of resistance to the outside that Christian Garve described in his On the Character of the Peasantry and Their Relations Against Their Lords and the Government (1786).76 The reformers, including Garve, viewed such “obstinacy'' in the older topos of the stupid and the sly peasant, since it confirmed the procedural interests of the reformers to transform rural life systematically.77
In his treatise, Garve stood outside the world of the Silesian peasantry to analyze a society alien and closed to him. Early in his remarks he drew an extended comparison of the condition of the peasantry to that of another closed community, the Jews. “They all are engaged in only one form of work, and they have long been oppressed and despised.” He continued,
The Jew, as the peasant, has become wise and clever—not through teaching and books (those which they have are, with both of them, far more likely to ruin their heads than to improve them), but through their employment in their trade With both, the result of this self-acquired cleverness in a single matter and a lack of understanding in all other matters is that they imagine themselves to be more clever than they are.78
Once again we are witness to that mixture of moral concern, cultural superiority, and distrust of the Other that characterized the Volksaufklärung. Garve's function as observer and chronicler of peasant life was to make the educated classes aware of their own special status through the study and ultimate manipulation of the lower orders. Such observations occurred simultaneous with the adoption of an emancipatory language to which clear limits were set by the study of those “below” and to the margins of burgher life. The reflection on those limits, the reshaping of values within a framework of conformity and social discipline—all this became central to the literary consumption by the educated classes of the lower orders and their distress. The distrust of difference and the traditional patterns of social solidarity were matched by a willingness of reformers to integrate themselves into a rationalized social order, with themselves placed strategically as cultural mediators. It is this vision of a limited enlightenment linked to a revitalized estatist hierarchy that was transformed in the nineteenth century into the ethos of self-cultivation (Bildung) and inegalitarian liberalism.
NOTES
1. Christian Daniel Erhard, “Ideen über die Ursachen und Gefahren einer eingeschränkten und falschen Aufklärung,” Amalthea. Für Wissenschaften und Geschmack 1 (1789): pt. 1, pp. 1-48; pt. 2, pp. 1-23.
2. Ibid., 4-5.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. Ibid.; examples from p. 5, quotation from p. 10.
6. The German original: “Verdammt sey die Aufklärung, die blindes Zutrauen in sich mit dem blinden Zutrauen in andere vertauscht.” Ibid., pt. 2, p. 8.
7. The German original: “Das nämliche Jahrhundert, dem es vorbehalten schien, das Werk der Befreyung der menschlichen Vernunft von allen Arten der schändlichsten Tyranney zu vollenden, schmiedet ihm neue Fesseln!” Ibid., 29; see also Werner Schneiders, Die wahre Aufklärung (Freiburg, 1974), 133-135.
8. “Und dieserfreye und weder durch religiöse, noch bürgerliche Tyranney gehinderte Gebrach der gesunden Vernunft, ist das Wahre, das Einzige, was (ohne schon Aufklärung zu seyn) dennoch die Beförderung und Verbreitung derselben möglich macht.” Ibid., pt. 1, p. 9.
9. Much of this material has been discussed in detail in James Schmidt, “Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Question of Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 2 (1989): 269-292; Günter Birtsch, “The Berlin Wednesday Society” (translated above, pp. 235-252); and Eckhart Hellmuth, “Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 9 (1982): 315-345. I still find valuable Norbert Hinske's introduction to Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift (Darmstadt, 1973), xiii-lxix. Hinske establishes a slightly different context for the debate, pp. xxxvii-xlvi. See also Schneiders, Wahre Aufklärung. Holger Böning stresses that such critical views can already be found in the late 1760s. See his “Der ‘gemeine Mann' als Adressat aufklärerischen Gedankengutes. Ein Forschungsbericht zur Volksaufklärung,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 12, no. 1 (1988): 59.
10. This is not to deny that Adorno and Horkheimer had a peculiarly ahistorical understanding of the Enlightenment. See Hinske, ed., Was ist Aufklärung? xiii-xiv.
11. I follow the version printed in Ludwig Keller, “Die Berliner Mittwochs-Gesellschaft. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geistesentwicklung Preußens am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Monatshefte der Comenius-Gesellschaft 5 (1896): 67-94.
12. See the critical edition with bibliography and commentary concerning the debate by Christoph Gutknecht and Peter Kerner, eds., Friedrich der Große, De la littératur allemande (Hamburg, 1969).
13. Keller, “Berliner Mittwochs-Gesellschaft,” 74.
14. Norbert Schindler, “Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten: Aufklärung, Geheimnis und Politik,” Freimaurer und Geheimbünde im 18. Jahrhundert in Mitteleuropa, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 288-289; Richard van Dülmen, “Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklärung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 89 (1969): 54-79; Dülmen, “Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten,” Zeitschrift für Bayrische Landesgeschichte36 (1973): 795-796. See also the essays by Peter Ludz, Manfred Agethen, and Otto Dann in Geheime Gesellschaften, ed. Peter Schulz [Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, 5:1] (Heidelberg, 1979).
15. “In der bald darauf 1780 herausgekommenen köriigl. Abhandlung bemerket man, dass der Monarch, ohnerachtet er allen Fakultäten und Wissenschaften, die Art ihres Vortrags und dessen Ordnung vorschreibt, und ohnerachtet ihm gar nicht unbekannt sein konnte, dass durch den Vortrag der Gottesgelehrten an ihre Gemeinden, und durch den Einfluss auf die Gemüter der Menschen, viele Irrtümmer ausgerottet werden, besser als durch alle Schriften, so übergeht er solches gänzlich.” In Keller, “Berliner Mittwochs-Gesellschaft,” 75.
16. Eckhart Hellmuth, “Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit. Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 9 (1982): 322-323.
17. On these issues, see Gerhard Sauder, “Verhältnismäßige Aufklärung. Zur bürgerlichen Ideologie am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul Gesellschaft 9 (1974): 107.
18. Klein wrote: “Z.B. Wenn ich eine Moral für den gemeinen Mann schreibe, so kann der Censor mein Buch nicht verwerfen, weil ich von der Pflicht, Eidschwüre zu halten, nichts gesagt habe. Wenn ich aber sagte, der Soldat werde durch den Eid zu nichts verpflichtet, wozu er nicht ohnedem als Bürger des Staates oder vermöge des eingegangenen Vertrags verbunden sei: So muss der Censor den Druck des Buches verbieten, wenn er auch selbst dieser Meinung wäre. Ganz etwas anders ist es, wenn ich diesen Satz in einer philosophischen Abhandlung vortrage. Von dergleichen Schriften kann ich voraussetzen, dass Sie nicht in die Hände der Soldaten fallen werden.” In Keller, “Berliner Mittwochs-Gesellschaft”; Vota on pp. 77-80, quotation from p. 78.
19. “Der eigentliche Punkt, von wo die Aufklärung anfangen muss, ist der Mittelstand als das Zentrum der Nation, wo die Strahlen der Aufklärung sich nur allmählich zu den beiden Extremen, den höheren und niederen Ständen hin verbreiten.” Ibid., 85.
20. Ibid., 81,86.
21. “Sicher wird man keinen Fall eitleren können, wo nicht momentanes Übel der Krisis (oder gar die mit Sturz von Despotismus und Aberglauben verbundenen Unruhen) sich in größeres Gute aufgelöset hätten.” Ibid., 86.
22. The view of Jürgen Voss, “Der gemeine Mann und die Volksaufklärung im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” in Vom Elend der Handarbeit. Probleme historischer Unterschichtenforschung, ed. Hans Mommsen and Winfried Schulze [Bochumer Historische Studien, 24] (Stuttgart, 1981), 211. Brief overview in Wolfgang Rüppert, “Volksaufklärung im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” in Deutsche Aufklärung bis zur Französischen Revolution 1680-1789 [Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 3] (Munich, 1980), 341-361; Reinhart Siegert, Aufklärung und Volkslektüre. Exemplarisch dargestellt an Rudolf Zacharias Becker und seinem ‘Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein.' Mit einer Bibliographie zum Gesamtthema (Frankfurt am Main, 1979) (cited from the original edition: Archiv fir Geschichte des Buchwesens 19 (1978): 566-1347, with extensive primary and secondary bibliography); Otto Lichtenberg, Unterhaltsame Bauernaufklärung. Ein Kapitel der Volksbildungsgeschichte (Tübingen, 1970); Holger Böning, “Das Intelligenzblatt als Medium praktischer Aufklärung,” Internationales Archiv ßir Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 12 (1987): 107-133; Kai Detlev Sievers, Volkskultur und Aufklärung im Spiegel der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Provinzialberichte (Neumünster, 1970). The most analytically critical works remain those by Reinhard Wittmann, “Der lesende Landmann. Zur Rezeption aufklärerischer Bemühungen durch die bäuerliche Bevölkerung im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Der Bauer Mittelund Osteuropas im sozio-ökonomischen Wandel des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Dan Berindei (Cologne, 1973), 142-196; and Heinz D. Kittsteiner, Die Entstehung des modernen Gewissens (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 293-411.
23. With Reinhard Siegert, Holger Böning has been constructing a multivolume bibliography of writings on the Volksaufklärung. See their Volksaufklärung. Bibliographisches Handbuch zur Popularisierung aufklärerischen Denkens im deutschen Sprachraum von den Anfangen bis 1850. To date, 1: Die Genese der Aufklärung und ihre Entwicklung bis 1780 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1990). Böning's recent essays show that the subject matter of the Volksaufklärung was certainly present from the early eighteenth century onward and was linked to early work in the humanist tradition but that the sheer number of articles grew rapidly after midcentury. See Böning, “Der Wandel des gelehrten Selbstverständnisses und die Popularisierung aufklärerisches Gedankengutes. Der Philosoph Christian Wolff und der Beginn der Volksaufklärung,” in Vom Wert der Arbeit, ed. Harro Segeberg (Tübingen, 1991), 93.
24. Christof Dipper, “Volksaufklärung und Landwirtschaft—ein wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtlicher Kommentar,” in Vom Wert der Arbeit, 145-155.
25. Helmut König, Zur Geschichte der Nationalerziehung in Deutschland im letzen Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts [Monumenta Paedagogica, 1] (Berlin, 1960), 61-69.
26. Böning, “Der ‘gemeine Mann' als Adressat,” 59, 61.
27. See, e.g., Peter Blickle, Deutsche Untertanen. Ein Widerspruch (Munich, 1981), esp. pp. 15-19, 133-136; and the critique by Norbert Schindler in the introduction to Richard van Dülmen and Norbert Schindler, Volkskultur. Zur Wiederentdeckung des vergessenen Alltags (16.-20. Jahrhundert) (Munich, 1981), 50-52, 390.
28. I do not want to exaggerate the uniqueness of the German case, since, for instance, a similar pejorative meaning for the words popular and common also exists in English. See Schindler, “Spuren in die Geschichte der ‘anderen' Zivilisation. Probleme und Perspektiven einer historischen Volkskulturforschung,” Volkskultur, 23-26.
29. Bernd Schönemann, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner et. al. (Stuttgart, 1992), 7:314-315.
30. Jörn Garber, “Politisch-soziale Partizipationstheorien im Übergang vom Ancien regime zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1750-1800),” in Probleme politischer Partizipation im Modernisierungsprozeß, ed. Peter Steinbach (Stuttgart, 1982), 27-28; Horst Dippel, ed., Die Anfänge des Konstitutionalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 21-22.
31. See the chapter entitled “Möglichkeit der Zergliederung der Haupthöfe ohne Verlust der Gutsherren an Herrlichkeiten und Sicherheit fürs künftige,” in Georg Christian Oeder, Bedenken über die Frage: Wie dem Bauernstande Freyheit und Eigenthum in den Ländern, wo ihm bey des fehlt, verschaffet werden könne (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1769), 46-51. On this general problem, see Jonathan Knudsen, Justus Moser and the German Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1986), 132-133, 136-138.
32. Knudsen, Moser, 159-161.
33. From the perspective of the medieval experience, see Peter Blickle, “Der Kommunalismus als Gestaltungsprinzip zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne,” in Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften, ed. Nicolai Bernard and Q^uirinus Reichen (Bern, 1982), 98-100; and his “Kommunalismus und Republikanismus in Oberdeutschland,” Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Helmut G. Koenigs-berger (Munich, 1988), esp. p. 74. It is characteristic that no examples from the eighteenth century appear in these articles, except for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract. From the perspective of the nineteenth century, see Rainer Koch, “Staat oder Gemeinde? Zu einem politischen Zielkonflikt in der bürgerlichen Bewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 236 (1983): 80-85. See the critique in the spirit of my comments by Paul Nolte, “Der südwestdeutsche Frühliberalismus in der Kontinuität der Frühen Neuzeit,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43 (1992): 744-745. Even Nolte cites almost no examples from the eighteenth century.
34. Werner Conze, “Bauer, Bauernstand, Bauerntum,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:414.
35. Siegert, Aufklärung und Volkslektüre, cols. 586-587.
36. See the numerous examples in Sauder, “Verhältnismäßige Aufklärung,” 109-126; also Dieter Narr, “Fragen der Volksbildung in der späteren Aufklärung,” Studien zur Spätaufklärung im deutschen Südwesten [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg, Series ?, vol. 93] (Stuttgart, 1979), 194-195.
37. Johann Ludwig Ewald, Uber Volksaufklärung; Ihre Gränzen und Vortheile (Berlin, 1790), quotation from p. 14, examples from pp. 18-22. For other examples, see Schneiders, Wahre Aufklärung, 70-80, 133-137.
38. Th. Heinsius, Ideen und Vorschläge zu der höchstnötigen Verbesserrung des Landschulwesens in der Mark Brandenburg (Leipzig, 1798), as quoted in König, Nationalerziehung, 64.
39. Adolf Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen (Essen, 1987), 387; see also Wittmann, “Der lesende Landmann,” 158.
40. Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe 1770-1910 (Munich, 1977), 87.
41. Clemens Zimmermann, “Entwicklungshemmnisse im bäuerlichen Milieu: die Individualisierung der Allmenden und Gemeinheiten um 1780, Landwirtschaft und industrielle Entwicklung, ed. Toni Pierenkemper (Stuttgart, 1989), 102; Werner Troß-bach, Bauern 1648-1806 [Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 19] (Munich, 1993), 44-50; Udo Köster, “Modelle der bäuerlichen Arbeit in Texten der Volksaufklärung (1780-1798),” in Wert der Arbeit, 116.
42. These reservations are made with hesitation: see Ute Frevert, Krankheit als politisches Problem 1770-1880: Soziale Unterschichten in Preußen zwischen medizinischer Polizei und staatlicher Sozialversicherung [Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 62] (Göttingen, 1984), 46-59.
43. Holger Böning, “Medizinische Volksaufklärung und Öffentlichkeit,” Internationales Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 15 (1990): 1-92; to this point, pp. 8, 23-29.
44. Quoted in Böning, “Medizinische Volksaufklärung,” 25.
45. The numerous medical topographies are collected in the Göttingen University library under Med. pract. 3722. See, e.g., Johann Ludwig Formey, Versuch einer medicinischen Topographie von Berlin (Berlin, 1796).
46. Frevert, Krankheit als politisches Problem, 84-85, 100-108.
47. See Reinhard Siegert's reprint with afterword of the first edition from 1788: Rudolf Zacharias Becker, Noth- und Hülfs- Büchlein für Bauersleute oder lehrreiche Freudenund Trauer- Geschichte des Dorfes Mildheim (Dortmund, 1980). Also valuable is Siegert's Aufklärung und Volkslektüre.
48. Siegert, Aufklärung und Volkslektüre, cols. 683-684, 715-717, 1108-1112.
49. Ibid., cols. 1109 and 1015, respectively.
50. Christiane Josch, Die ‘Rothe Zeitung' (1786/87-1797). Ein Organ der späten Aufklärung fur die Landbevölkerung im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, unpublished Staatsexam (Göttingen, 1988), 3-7, 78-80.
51. See, e.g., Holger Böning, “Intelligenzblatt als Medium,” 107-133, esp. pp. 126-127.
52. See the discussion of Speyer in Etienne François, “Buch, Konfession und städtische Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Das Beispiel Speyers,” in Mentalitäten und Lebensverhältnisse. Beispiele aus der Sozialgeschichte der Neuzeit (Göttingen, 1982), 38; and James Van Horn Melton, “From Image to Word: Cultural Reform and the Rise of Literate Culture in Eighteenth-Century Austria,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 95, 97-102.
53. Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Die Geistlichen vor der Revolution,” in Deutschland und Frankreich im Z^talter der Französischen Revolution, ed. Helmut Berding, Etienne François, and Hans-Peter Ullmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 216-244, esp. 220-221.
54. The rural pastorate, however, did continue to remain dependent on their parishes for a portion of their salary in kind—as meat, produce, and firewood. Thus a certain amount of negotiation with the community was clearly necessary, for they often lived in relative poverty themselves. Martin Hasselhorn, Der altwürttembergische Pfarrstand im 18. Jahrhundert [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg, Ser. ?, vol. 6] (Stuttgart, 1958), 3-23; Schorn-Schütte, “Die Geistlichen vor der Revolution,” 226-230.
55. Gerd Spittler, “Abstraktes Wissen als Herschaftsbasis. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte bürokratischer Herrschaft im Bauernstaat Preußen.” Kölner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 32 (1980): 597, 602n.30.
56. Heide Wunder, “Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in der ländlichen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Sozialer und kultureller Wandel in der ländlichen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ernst Hinrichs and Günter Wiegelmann [Wolfenbüttler Forschungen, vol. 19] (Wolfenbüttel, 1982), 43-63, esp. pp. 56-59.
57. See the valuable argument, with examples of resistance, in Schorn-Schütte, “Die Geistlichen vor der Revolution,” 231-234.
58. Kittsteiner, Entstehung des modernen Gewissens, esp. pp. 293-331.
59. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, vol. 1 (New York, 1992); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Henry Greenfeld (Boston, 1965); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 2:489-547.
60. Gerhard Oestreich, “Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus,” Vierteljahrsschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 55 (1959): 329-347. In English, see his Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982). On this problem, see Winfried Schulze, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff ‘Sozialdisziplinierung in der frühen Neuzeit,’” Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung 14 (1987): 265-302; Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (XlVe-XVIIIe siècles): Un cité assiégée (Paris, 1978); the same author's Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York, 1990). Cf. Kittsteiner, Entstehung modernen des Gewissen, 293-295.
61. See the reflections by Rudolf Schenda, “Alphabetisierung und Literarisierungsprozesse in Westeuropen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Sozialer und kultureller Wandel, 1-21.
62. Etienne François, “Regionale Unterschiede der Lese- und Schreibfähigkeit in Deutschland im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch fur Regionalgeschichte und Landeskunde 17 (1990): 154-156, 164, 169; the same author's “Alphabetisierung und Lesefähigkeit in Frankreich und Deutschland um 1800,” in Deutschland und Frankreich, 408-409.
63. François, “Regionale Unterschiede der Lese- und Schreibfahigkeit,” 156-158, with literature, pp. 160-162; Troßbach, Bauern, 44-47. See the discussion of Schenda's conclusions in Siegert, Aufklärung und Volkslektüre, cols. 591-598; Wittman, “Der lesende Landmann,” 145-149.
64. The reasoned argument of François, “Alphabetisierung und Lesefähigkeit in Frankreich und Deutschland,” 416-417.
65. This point has been argued persuasively by Etienne François in numerous essays. Most recently in François, “Alphabetisierung und Lesefähigkeit,” 417.
66. Karl-Heinz Ziessow, Ländliche Lesekultur im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Das Kirchspiel Menslage und seine Lesegesellschaften, 2 vols. (Cloppenburg, 1988), 1:88-89.
67. Mechthild Wiswe, “Bücherbesitz und Leseinteresse Braunschweiger Bauern im 18. Jahrhundert,” Zuschriftßr Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 23 (1975): 214; Hans Medick, “Ein Volk ‘mit' Büchern. Buchbesitz und Buchkultur auf dem Lande am Ende der Frühen Neuzeit: Laichingen 1748-1820,” Aufklärung 6 (1991): 59-94; Etienne François, “Die Volksbildung am Mittelrhein im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 3 (1977): 277-304, and his “Buch, Konfession und städtische Gesellschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Das Beispiel Speyers,” in Mentalitäten und Lebensverhältnisse. Beispiele aus der Sozialgeschichte der Neuzeit (Göttingen, 1982), 34-54.
68. Wolfgang Neugebauer, Absolutistischer Staat und Schulwirklichkeit in Brandenburg-Preußen [Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, vol. 62] (Berlin, 1985), 632-634.
69. Holger Böning, “Zeitungen für das ‘Volk.' Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung periodischer Schriften für einfache Leser und zur Politisierung der deutschen Öffentlichkeit nach der Französischen Revolution, in Französische Revolution und deutsche Öffentlichkeit. Wandlungen in Presse und Alltagskultur am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Holger Böning (Munich, 1992), 466-526, esp. pp. 467-468.
70. Medick, “Buchkultur,” 52; Holger Böning, “Gelehrte Bauern in der deutschen Aufklärung,” Buchhandelsgeschichte (1987): 259-285; Reinhart Siegert, “Isaak Maus, der ‘Bauersmann in Badenheim.' Ein bäuerlicher Intellektueller der Goethezeit und sein soziales Umfeld,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 10 (1985): 23-93; Ulrich Bräker, Der arme Mann im Tockenburg (1789; reprint Munich, 1965).
71. Of this literature, Hartmut Lehmann, “Der politische Widerstand gegen die Einführung des neuen Gesangbuches von 1791 in Württemberg. Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Kirchen- und Sozialgeschichte,” Blätterfür württembergische Kirchengeschichte 66/67 (1966-1967): 247-293; Heinrich Schmidt, “'Aufgeklärte' Gesang-buch-Reform und ländliche Gemeinde,” in Sozialer und kultureller Wandel, 85-115, esp. pp. 98-103.
72. Johann Leonhard Hauschild, Juristische Abhandlungen von Bauern und deren Frondiensteni, auch der in Rechten gegründeten Vermuthung ihrer natürlichen Freyheit…(Dresden, 1771). Hauschild argued, however, that such rights were part of an original freedom: see pp. 3-16, 30-44. See also Peter Blickle, “Von der Leibeigenschaft in die Freiheit,” 25-40, and Winfried Schultze, “Der bäuerliche Widerstand und die ‘Rechte der Menschheit,” 54-56, both in Grund- und Freiheitsrechte im Wandel von Gesellschaft und Geschichte, vol. 1, ed. Günter Birtsch [Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Grund- und Freiheitsrechte, 1] (Göttingen, 1981).
73. Bernard Bailyn, “From Protestant Peasants to Jewish Intellectuals: The Germans in the Peopling of America,” Annual Lecture Señes 1, German Historical Institute, Washington (Oxford, 1988), 6-7.
74. Zimmermann, “Entwicklungshemmnisse im bäuerlichen Milieu,” 106, 111–12.
75. Garlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980), xix, 112, 154-155.
76. Christian Garve, Über den Charakter der Bauern und ihr Verhältniß gegen die Gutsherrn und gegen die Regierung (Breslau, 1786); reprinted in Popularphilosophische Schriften, ed. Kurt Wölfel, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1974), 2:799-1026. On this problem, see Jan Peters, “Eigensinn und Widerstand im Alltag. Abwehrverhalten ostelbischer Bauern unter Refeudalisierungsdruck,” Jahrbuch fur Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1991-1992): 85-103; Spittler, “Abstraktes Wissen,” 586-589.
77. Heide Wunder, “Der dumme und der schlaue Bauer,” in Mentalität und Alltag im Spätmittelalter, ed. Cord Meckseper and Elisabeth Schraut (Göttingen, 1985), 34-52.
78. I quote from the translation by Robert Berdahl, “Christian Garve on the German Peasantry,” Peasant Studies 8 (1979): 90. The German original is in Garve, Popularphilosophische Schriften 2:808-809.