This book focuses on "poor students," young men in eighteenth-century Germany who owed their studies to charity, who formed a substantial minority within the theology faculties, and who entered careers in the clergy, the academic schools, and the universities. Professor La Vopa shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience central to the lives of many celebrated intellectuals as well as many of the elite.

In this biographical study of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte from his birth in 1762 to the crisis in his university career in 1799, Professor La Vopa uses Fichte's life and thought to deepen our understanding of German society, culture, and politics in the age of the French Revolution. This is the first biography to explain thoroughly how Fichte's philosophy relates to his life experiences as reconstructed from the abundant material in his published and unpublished writings and papers. The approach is primarily historical, but should be of interest to philosophers.

In analyzing the social and professional struggles of Prussian elementary schoolteachers from the time of Frederick the Great to the end of 1848, La Vopa focuses on the first generation of trained teachers and their emancipation movement in the Revolution of 1848. This case history explores the subjective experience of social mobility, the emergence of corporate solidarity, and the relationship between professional aspirations and ideological commitment.

Originally published in 1980.

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