Compulsory schooling is widely held to be a creation of modern industrial society. Yet already in the eighteenth century, Prussian and Austrian rulers attempted to introduce universal education in societies that were overwhelmingly rural and 'premodern'. Focusing on the reigns of Frederick the Great[...]
James Melton’s lucid and accessible study examines the rise of ‘the public’ in eighteenth-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this is the first book-length, critical reassessment of what Habermas termed the Ã[...]