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Re-Imagining Democracy 1750–1850: Government, Participation, and
Welfare in German Territories, workshop organized by the His to -
risches Seminar of the University of Munich, the University of
Oxford, and the German Historical Institute London, and held at the
Centre for Advanced Studies in Munich, 9–10 Jan. 2009.
This meeting of British and German historians working on the period
between 1750 and 1850 was organized against the background of
an Oxford-based project, ‘Re-Imagining Democracy 1750–1850’, convened
by Mark Philp (Politics Faculty, Oxford) and Joanna Innes
(History Faculty, Oxford). The aim of the project is to explore central
aspects of how the history of modern democracy in its formative
period can be conceived of and written by scholars operating in the
early twenty-first century. Set up in a fairly informal way, the project
relies on the cooperation of historians whose expertise lies in various
national contexts. One of the aims, therefore, is to build a network of
researchers in Europe and North and South America (and possibly
more widely) who are interested in meeting for workshops and conferences
to exchange ideas about this central theme, and to collaborate
on publications. Over the past few years several workshops have
taken place within the wider context of the project, dealing with topics
such as ‘Politicization’, ‘Authority and Obedience’, and ‘Dem oc -
racy and Revolution, the King’s View’, and including British, French,
and American historians.
The Munich workshop was intended to enable an exchange of
ideas between the different historiographies in Britain and Germany.
After a welcome and introductory remarks by Andreas Gestrich
(GHIL), Eckhart Hellmuth (Munich), and Joanna Innes (Oxford) the
proceedings were divided into five sessions, each dealing with a particular
aspect of the wider topic. In accordance with the open and discursive
format of the project, each session consisted of short introductory
papers by German historians followed by comments by the
British participants and then a general discussion. The first session
(‘Democracy’) with papers by Annette Meyer (Munich) and Eckhart
Hellmuth (Munich) and comments by Mark Philp (Oxford) and
Philip Schofield (UCL), approached the general theme from the viewpoint
of the history of concepts and ideas. Various strands of scientific
thinking in late eighteenth-century Germany (such as Policey wis -
senschaft or natural history) which form crucial vantage points for
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