Defining Dignity: A German Quest, 1770–1830

Abstract

This dissertation examines German conceptions of human dignity in the period 1770 through 1830. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, German philosophers, writers, and lawyers grappled with new questions concerning the status of individuals in society. Their attempts to establish dignity as an inviolable status of the individual revealed a distinctive tension in German thought: the abstract pursuit of universal humanity beyond the existing social order, while simultaneously contending with the fragmented political reality of the German lands, where social stratification persisted. Though gradually evolving into an egalitarian and universal concept, dignity retained remnants of status and elevated rank. The principal aim of my thesis is to investigate this ambiguity by exploring both well-trodden and less-travelled paths in the cultural history of ideas. Looking at the ways in which the concept was debated in political, legal, but also literary texts, I explore new ways of understanding the evolution of dignity in German thought at a time of accelerated social and political change. Human dignity is by definition a universal concept and by no means unique, of course, to the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. However, in the German debates about and literary representations of dignity, the gap between the intellectual and the socio-political sphere is particularly evident. Previous scholarship on the genealogy of dignity has focused almost exclusively on legal, philosophical and political texts. My thesis, by contrast, includes works of fiction because it is in these texts that dignity was given a new, more concrete and palpable meaning. It is in these works that abstract Enlightenment ideals clashed with the ‘fragile state of the world’ (Kleist), that is, the messy reality of social relations, in which individuals strive to find their place. The sixty years of German intellectual and cultural history under discussion here constitute the origins of a concept whose legal and political meaning continues to shift and change. It is my contention that we can learn much about the current controversies around dignity, not just in Germany, by investigating the fraught beginnings of the idea around 1800.