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any engagement with the topic were discussed, as were trends in
German historiography over the last few decades subsumed under
the heading ‘politicization’, which could prove useful for a comparative
approach to the study of democracy.
The second session was devoted to the ideal and reality of late
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century ‘Reform States’.
Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann (Greifswald) and Walter Demel (Munich)
introduced key features of the Prussian reforms and the reforms in
the states of the Confederation of the Rhine, while Stefan Ehrenpreis
(Munich) presented new research on ‘Reich Patriotism’, the allegiance
shown by contemporaries to the Holy Roman Empire. All
three papers raised questions about differences in political conceptions
of society in Britain and Germany, but also about striking similarities
between the British and German ages of reform as expressed
by the two commentators, Richard Sheldon (Bristol) and Miles Taylor
(IHR), and further pursued in the ensuing discussion.
The following morning opened with a session loosely entitled
‘Public Life’. Two papers on what was going on at the local level
were given in the first part of the session: Johannes Dillinger (Oxford
Brookes) examined the role of the territorial estates and explained
why the republican potential of the estates was not developed in the
early modern period; and Stefan Brakensiek (Duisburg) advanced a
sophisticated argument which illustrated how widespread non-democratic
forms of participation in the German territories were. He
argued that this tradition of local self-government at the prince’s
command (‘beauf tragte Selbstverwaltung’) was swept away in the
early nineteenth century by the introduction of the rational French
model of local government. This was followed up by Katrina
Navickas (Edinburgh) and Ultan Gillen (QMUL), whose comments
stressed the wide array of participatory politics on offer to contemporaries
and the fact that democratic and participatory practices did
not have to be synonymous. The session was brought to a conclusion
by a re-evaluation of one of the leading figures of early nineteenthcentury
German politics, Metternich. Wolfram Siemann (Munich)
questioned the prevailing image of Metternich as an anti-constitutionalist
and showed him to be much more sympathetic to the representative
principle than previously thought which, as Joanna Innes
commented, brought him rather closer to Edmund Burke.
Different ways of ‘Theorizing Society’ were at the heart of the next
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