Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figure
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Discipline, Community, and the Sixteenth-Century Origins of Modern Poor Relief
- 2 The Rise and Fall of the Workhouse: Poor Relief in the Age of Absolutism
- 3 Pauperism, Moral Reform, and Visions of Civil Society, 1800–1870
- 4 The State, the Market, and the Organization of Poor Relief, 1830–1870
- 5 The Assistantial Double Helix: Poor Relief, Social Insurance, and the Political Economy of Poor Law Reform
- 6 New Voices: Citizenship, Social Reform, and the Origins of Modern Social Work in Imperial Germany
- 7 The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Origins of Modern Social Welfare
- 8 From Fault to Risk: Changing Strategies of Assistance to the Jobless in Imperial Germany
- 9 Youth Welfare and the Political Alchemy of Juvenile Justice
- 10 The Social Evolution of Poor Relief, the Crisis of Voluntarism, and the Limits of Progressive Social Reform
- 11 Family, Welfare, and (Dis)order on the Home Front
- 12 Wartime Youth Welfare and the Progressive Refiguring of the Social Contract
- Conclusion: The End of Poor Relief and the Invention of Welfare
- Sources and Abbreviations
- Index
- References
3 - Pauperism, Moral Reform, and Visions of Civil Society, 1800–1870
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figure
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Discipline, Community, and the Sixteenth-Century Origins of Modern Poor Relief
- 2 The Rise and Fall of the Workhouse: Poor Relief in the Age of Absolutism
- 3 Pauperism, Moral Reform, and Visions of Civil Society, 1800–1870
- 4 The State, the Market, and the Organization of Poor Relief, 1830–1870
- 5 The Assistantial Double Helix: Poor Relief, Social Insurance, and the Political Economy of Poor Law Reform
- 6 New Voices: Citizenship, Social Reform, and the Origins of Modern Social Work in Imperial Germany
- 7 The Social Perspective on Poverty and the Origins of Modern Social Welfare
- 8 From Fault to Risk: Changing Strategies of Assistance to the Jobless in Imperial Germany
- 9 Youth Welfare and the Political Alchemy of Juvenile Justice
- 10 The Social Evolution of Poor Relief, the Crisis of Voluntarism, and the Limits of Progressive Social Reform
- 11 Family, Welfare, and (Dis)order on the Home Front
- 12 Wartime Youth Welfare and the Progressive Refiguring of the Social Contract
- Conclusion: The End of Poor Relief and the Invention of Welfare
- Sources and Abbreviations
- Index
- References
Summary
Voluntary Associations and the Problem of Social Governance
Writing with measured hyperbole, Thomas Nipperdey began his history of Germany from 1800 to 1866 with the assertion that “in the beginning was Napoleon.” What followed from this Napoleonic big bang was a three-dimensional process that, according to Nipperdey, defined the course and dynamic of German history across the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century: the formation of territorial, bureaucratic states, and, within the political spaces created by this process, the evolution of a market economy and a modern bourgeois civil society. Poor relief and charity were deeply implicated in these processes both as their object and as their agent.
For its early theorists, civil society represented the optimistic potential of modernity. It was a sphere of individuation, self-fashioning, and social progress that was hollowing out the older corporate order and transforming it from within through the emergence of voluntary associations, the market economy, and a bourgeois public sphere, all of which embodied – or so the early liberals believed – the immanent capacity of civil society to organize and regulate itself without the need for traditional authorities. If this picture captures the diverse ways in which the idea of civil society embodied the promise of modernity and the personality principle, we also need to bear in mind that individuation and decorporatization also set in motion an equally dynamic process of social disorganization whose direction was regarded by many in far less sanguine terms.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008