科举与民治

1905年朝廷停科举,旨在为学堂让路,造就新学新知的人才.其时朝野的关注和认知都交集于此,又都止乎此.但由清末到民初,共和推倒了帝制,而与之俱来的则是民初的代议政治有民治之名而无民治之实,以及这种名实相悖造成政象的四面颠蹶直接促成另一种关注,使当时人不得不由古今中西之比探寻民治的本义.而后是已经停置的科举制度又被引来论说古今之政体,并因之移到了那代人的重新认知之中.于是有西方人说的"科举制乃与民主精神深相契合"和中国人说的科举制度"尤为民治".十多年之前深被非议的科举制度遂随后来的眼光之变而内涵大变,褒贬大变.借助于这种民初不同于清末的眼光和认知,一千三百多年间,科举制度以其自下而上的"怀牒自投"和自上而下的"以试为选"维持了一个文官政府的过程,便因之而由一千三百年间自下而上的社会流动和自上而下的政府开放,显示出前现代的选官制度里所内含的与现代"民主精神"可以对应的一面.     

Protestantism,nation and diaspora in Imperial Germany

This article examines the close connection between Protestantism and nationalism in Imperial Germany within a transnational context. In the years before 1914, the Prussian State Church in particular strengthened the legal and organisational framework for an increasing number of diaspora congregations to become attached. These acted as an important vehicle to embed the nationalist rhetoric produced within the Reich into emigrants' notions of belonging. Whilst previous scholarship has noted this connection in general, the article sheds more detailed light on the mechanics and structure, but also on the limits, of this process. Feedback processes from periphery to centre, in turn, had an impact on German national identity construction as that of a nation that was not confined to state borders. Applying a constructionist theoretical framework, the contested question of whether the heterogeneity of Germans abroad allows for the application of the diaspora concept is answered affirmatively.     

Cultivating the cosmos: spaceflight thought in Imperial Germany

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919–1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.     

"An object of vulgar curiosity": legitimizing medical hypnosis in Imperial Germany

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion from that of stage hypnotists, magnetic healers, and occultists. While the epistemological, professional, and legal boundaries that medical hypnotists erected helped both exclude lay practitioners from this field and sanitize the medical use of hypnosis, the esoteric interests, and sensational public experiments of some of these researchers, which mimicked the theatricality and occult interests of their lay competitors, blurred the distinctions that these professionals were attempting to draw between their "legitimate" medical use of hypnosis and the "illegitimate" lay and occult use of it.