A comprehensive study of writing in its connection to bureaucracy, citizenship and the state in Germany, this text stitches together micro- and macro-level analysis to reconstruct the civic culture of the German southwest in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasions.
"A superbly crafted major intervention into the hotly contested issue of German civil society - its origins, formation, and fate. McNeely turns the tables on deconstructive approaches to formalism in writing and shows how writing was thoroughly implicated in state power and corporate culture."-David Sabean, author of Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870
"This work's use of archival evidence to overhaul grand theory puts it in a league of its own. McNeely crafts a startlingly original argument about the inventions of citizenship and of modern political culture. It will be required if unsettling reading for anyone pondering the legacies of Tocqueville, Habermas, or Foucault."-Richard Biernacki, author of The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914
