Overview

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.

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9780801431265

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Reviews

This ambitious and impressive book... contains much information and many lessons. It contextualizes and illuminates the question of decriminalization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more successfully than any publications currently available about England or France. --The Committee on Gay and Lesbian History Isabel Hull's book is a very rich study, not only in detail and scope, but also in its theoretical implications--for the development of modern ideas of sexuality, for the development of civil society, and for the role of the state in regulating sexual matters of all types. It is bold, risky, often funny, elegant in its argument, beautifully written--and speaks to an audience far beyond its likely specialist readers. --from the Berkshire Prize citation 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. --Choice 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. --Times Literary Supplement 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. --Journal of Modern History

Author Information

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.

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