Ueber die Eide’

Marcus Twellmann’s book offers a cultural-studies approach to oaths in eighteenth-century Prussia. Citing Foucault, Derrida and Agamben, Twellmann studies the oath as it emerged from the confessional state, where it certified correct belief for churches wedded to elaborate formulations of doctrine (the Augsburg Confession, 1530; the Book of Concord, 1580), into the absolutist enlightened state, where it served as a form of ‘discipline’. Oaths emerged as an aspect of the Reformation’s discipline that aimed to replace ‘magic’ with ‘religion’. An oath imposed God’s order; perjury was a sin. The Prussian state used religiously sanctioned oaths to gain access to the individual’s conscience and instil fear. The state thereby interposed itself between the oath-taker and God. Twellmann concentrates on the late Enlightenment critique of oaths and their institutional nexus—state, state church, military, civil service. He first charts shifting philosophical attitudes towards ceremonies such as oaths. Following Luther, who depreciated ceremony’s value without dismissing it, Wolffian philosophers affirmed the value of ceremonies in so far as they served reason. At the end of the century Kant radically advocated the abolition of ceremony as antithetical to a religion of reason: seeing Judaism as the origin of Christian ceremony, which he understood as a ‘fetish’ reminiscent of primitive religions, Kant aimed to purify Christianity of it

Ceremony · Christianity · Conscience · Judaism · Oath · Political science · State (computer science · Theology · Value (mathematics · German Literature and Culture Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies