Higher Education in Germany in the Nineteenth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID10074103
AuthorsFritz K Ringer (corresponding author)
Year1967
Volume2
Issue3
Pages123-138
Publication date1967-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200946700200307
OpenAlexW1940523230
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Perhaps because, at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, wealth has played so great a part in class differentiation in Europe, the more indirect effects of educational differences upon the status and functions of various social groups have sometimes been underestimated. In a highly industrialized society, learning does indeed rank far below wealth among the causes of social stratification. In countries which are still passing through the early stages of industrialization, however, the situation may actually be reversed, particularly where a traditional aristocracy retains some of its privileges and where membership in the administrative elite of a bureaucratic monarchy still constitutes an important route of social advancement for non-nobles. Germany is the perfect example. What might be called the 'non-entrepreneurial' or 'non-economic' upper middle class was perhaps the most important and influential social group in Germany until late in the nineteenth century. Higher officials and secondary school teachers, judges and lawyers, doctors and university professors, made up an elite of the highly educated or 'cultivated'. These people had no more in common with the new commercial and industrial classes than they had with the Junkers. Their views on politics, on technological progress, and on socio-economic change differed markedly from all those doctrines which have been thought most typical of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the Anglo-American tradition. Some of the peculiarities of modern German intellectual history would certainly seem less puzzling if they were linked with the social history and the ideology of this elite of the highly educated. The institutional history of German higher schools and universities throws much light upon the whole situation of this 'cultivated' group.1 It was of great consequence, for example, that

Aristocracy (class · Bourgeoisie · Bureaucracy · Constitutional monarchy · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Elite · German · Ideology · Industrial society · Industrialisation · Middle class · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Social class · Social history (medicine · Social mobility · Social science · Social stratification · Sociology · Upper class · Classical Studies and Philology · Historical Education and Society · History · Law · Religious Education and Schools

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