Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815

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.

An unusually creative and important book, its argument is built on research remarkable in breadth and depth and its implications radiate from the focus on sexuality to a great variety of related themes.... Sexuality, State, and Civil Society invites skepticism about itself precisely because its author brings such a powerful historical imagination to her subject. It is a book to be welcomed, appreciated, and pondered., Hull analyzes the evolving bureaucratic understanding of heterosexuality during the transition from absolutist moral regulation of sexual practices for the public good to the formation of a bourgeois civil society of privacy and property.... She offers a remarkable look at the sexual dimension of the liberal social contract and at those whose sexual liberty was assured thereby., With great intellectual energy and resourcefulness, Hull has placed a new set of issues on our scholarly agenda. After reading Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815, no one will view this period in quite the same way again.

Isabel V. Hull is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Cornell University. She is also the author of The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888-1918.