Reforming the Moral Subject

Reforming the Moral Subject explores a movement known as "ethics reform" that flourished in Central Europe between 1890 and 1930. Tracie Matysik examines the works of German-speaking intellectuals and activists-moral philosophers, sociologists, legal theorists, pedagogy specialists, psychoanalysts, sexual liberationists, and others-who discovered in the language of ethics a means to revitalize the public sphere. Ethics reformers used the academic field of moral philosophy to contest public- and state-sponsored rhetoric that they thought equated "morality" with national loyalty, religious tradition, and repressive sexual mores. They founded organizations and periodicals, circulated brochures, and hosted lectures and conferences, all aimed at rethinking ethics for a secular modernity. Arising in a context sharply influenced by materialism, Darwinism, and the advent of sexology, ethics debates gradually focused not surprisingly on the role of sexuality in definitions of ethics and of the moral subject. Intellectuals and activists came to agree that sexuality was central to the formation of the moral subject. Some viewed the moral subject as that individual who had learned to suppress sexual drives, while others saw sexual drives and sexual autonomy as the source of moral energy and sentiment. The association of sexuality with a wide and variegated discussion of ethics made the sexualized moral subject an open concept that could not be fully regulated, confined, or conflated with national identities. Matysik's compelling intellectual and cultural history of ethics and moral subjectivity reframes the nature of German liberalism and intellectual activism from the end of the nineteenth century until the interwar period.

"Reforming the Moral Subject is a beautiful, immensely imaginative book—this is the new intellectual history at its best. In our jaded and anxious early twenty-first-century moment, when many wonder how the past could possibly still provoke or help us, Tracie Matysik's richly nuanced analysis demonstrates just how much we can learn from those who, a hundred years ago, grappled with human ambivalence over the dilemmas of love, desire, freedom, loss, and violence, and developed innovative theories and concepts of ethics and of the reconcilability of sexual self-determination and social reponsibility in the midst of pitched battles between religious moralists and secularists.", "Tracie Matysik is stunningly creative in her analysis of the formation of the female moral subject at the turn of the last century. Matysik tightly weaves an elegant account of connections among ethics discourses, the field of sexuality, subjectivity, and citizenship, along with important explorations of religion, science, the racial imagination of the late nineteenth century, and psychoanalysis. Reforming the Moral Subject is grounded in extraordinarily close and careful readings of texts and the positions they express.", "Tracie Matysik's historical and critical reconstruction of the complex relations between sexuality and collective identity formation in the public discussions of the Ethics Reform movement brilliantly illuminates the emergence of a discursive space in which modern discussions of the formation of moral subjectivity became possible. Reforming the Moral Subject is a stunning achievement: it practices intellectual history as a critical history of the process and conditions of thinking, uncovers the complex theoretical reflections embedded in the interactions of public debate, and provides an historical perspective for current discussions concerning subjectivity, identity formation and ethical agency."

Tracie Matysik is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.