The most vigorous expansion of the German empire occurs, by contrast, in the Middle Ages. From this time on, the German Reich diminishes slowly buy steadily. Even before the Thirty Years War and more so after it, German territories are hemmed in on all sides, and strong pressure is exerted on almost all the external frontiers. Correspondingly, the struggles within Germany between the various social groups competing for the limited opportunities and for survival, and therefore the tendencies toward distinctions and mutual exclusiveness, were generally more intense than in the expanding Western countries. As much as the fragmentation of the German territory into a multiplicity of sovereign states, it was this extreme isolation of large parts of the nobility from the German middle class t... (查看原文)
Courtesy, compliance, fine manners, on the one hand, sound education and preference of virtue to honor, on the other: German literature in the second half of the eighteenth century is full of such antitheses. (查看原文)
However, precisely this underdevelopment of the broader, professional bourgeois classes is one of the reasons why the struggle of the middle-class vanguard, the bourgeois intelligentsia, against the courtly upper class is waged almost entirely outside the political sphere, and why the attack is directed predominantly against the conduct of the upper class, against general human characteristics like "superficiality," "outward politeness," "insincerity," and so on. (查看原文)
The French writers imply that the false civilization ought to be replaced by a genuine one. They do not oppose to the homme civilise a radically different model, as did the German bourgeois intelligentsia with the term gebildeter Mensch (educated man) and with the idea of the "personality" (查看原文)
The term civilisation was, at the monment of its formation, a clear reflection of these reformist ideas. If in this term the idea of the homme civilise leads to a concept designating the manners and conditions of existing society as a whole, it is first and foremost an expression of insights derived from opposition, from social criticism. (查看原文)
