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Summary
Fichte became a single-minded visionary, although his visions continued to exhibit a remarkable sensitivity to the aspirations and dilemmas of his generation. It was not his “republic of scholars,” deriving its public authority from privileged insight into a priori philosophical truth, that came into being in the early nineteenth century. In neohumanistic rhetoric, something of the intellectual and moral autonomy in the face of state authority that Fichte reserved for university professors was extended to the rank-and-flle professional jurisdictions of an emerging Bildüngsburgertum. But the new rhetoric had the effect of muffling, not reducing, the discordance between this rejection of state tutelage and the simultaneous reliance on state-sponsored reform. The prestige and security of state office also promised a mode of autonomy, indispensable if the new professionals were to be spared their predecessors' crippling accountability to local society.
Latent impulses in the Lutheran tradition, and particularly in Lutheran Pietism, contributed more or less inadvertently to the new ethic of profession and to the concept of office that was inseparable from it. But this ideological symbiosis of Beruf and Amt also marks a self-conscious departure from the sacred. It was a departure with its own iron inhibitions, easily ignored if we read back into it the individualism of the marketplace, or of contemporary liberal politics, or indeed of an “achievement society” in the contemporary sense. But its secularism was nonetheless distinctly modern. In the 1690s the original nucleus of “converted” students at Halle – the ones Francke had soon taken to recalling with nostalgia – had struggled to ward off the external temptations of the world by prevailing over “inner” corruption.
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- Grace, Talent, and MeritPoor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany, pp. 386 - 398Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988