By arguing for an earlier development of the research university, this book questions previous accounts that have seen the state or the corporation as the main drivers of the making of research. Whereas other accounts see a turn toward useful knowledge as a corrective to the overly bookish or pedantic knowledge of professors, academics themselves reformed scholarly approaches both in opposition to their academic forebears and to the entanglement of knowledge with use. Both theory and practice could be a bias. This book highlights the research university as a place to cultivate and protect critical thinking from political and economic pressure. Even proponents of useful knowledge adopted academic techniques because by improving the quality of knowledge they made it more useful. The early modern development of dynamic epistemic superstructures suggests approaches to interdisciplinarity and continuing knowledge change today. The book encourages academics to participate in knowledge reforms from a position of epistemic humility and a self-critical search for biases. It proposes how curation of knowledge still represents a viable approach, but one that could be reformulated to address the biases of the past.

The chapter explores the state-building process that the Bavarian-led monarchy put into effect in Greece from 1832 onwards by agreement with the guarantor powers of Greek independence (Britain, France and Russia). By concentrating on the structures of power and the ideas that informed their formation – the Polizeiwissenschaft, the theory or technology of the police state and the administrative techniques of cameralism – the chapter situates the Greek case within a Europe-wide process of ‘Enlightened reforms’ from above. In so doing, it argues for the need to expand the chronological boundaries of reforms from above, as well as the legacy of the Enlightenment, and to move them well into the nineteenth century. The chapter explores the role in this process of the young, Western-educated jurists who flocked to the nascent state. By contextualising their thought, it aims to understand what their initial, even if still unsystematic, liberal interventions consisted of, how they facilitated the appearance of the ‘intellectual’, and the role they played in the formation of a language of opposition in the lead-up to the pronunciamento of 1843 and the convocation of the First National Assembly.

Having found a way to justify a world of state-machines, German lawyers thought about how to manage those machines so as to produce "happiness", which would eventually be understood to include the freedom of the nation and its members. At the University of Göttingen from 1734 onwards ius naturae et gentium eventually produced four specialised idioms: empirical state-science, economics, philosophy and modern law of nations, each opening a distinct way to address an increasingly international world. Among legal professionals, the view of the law of nations as the formalisation of European diplomacy became generally accepted. But the most influential aspect of the German debates concerned the role of the state in realising freedom in conditions of political modernity. Individual rights were to be reconciled with the flourishing of the nation; the state was to adopt its historically appropriate position in relationship to expanding bourgeois civil society. The search for a new vocabulary to address such features of modernity persuaded international lawyers finally to settle on “civilisation”, as will be briefly noted in the Epilogue.